The Russian officer and politician Count Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov (1782-1856) was Governor General of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire from 1823 to 1844, which also included the Crimean peninsula that belonged to Ukraine (Russia by referendum in 1815). He was one of the richest men in the Russian Empire and the owner of vast estates, advocated liberal ideas and modernised southern Russia and the South Caucasus.
Between 1828 and 1847, he had Alupka Palace built on the coast near Yalta in the style of the Indian maharajas at enormous financial expense. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) lived in this castle during the famous Yalta Conference in February 1945, which included meetings with the USSR politician Josef Stalin (1879-1953) and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1965). Roosevelt (1882-1945) took place in the former Tsarist summer palace Livadia.
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