The Livadia estate had passed through many hands, once granted to the Greek naval hero Lambros Katsonis and later held by the Polish Potocki family, before it became an imperial summer residence in the 1860s. The architect Ippolito Monighetti raised a large palace, a small palace, and a church there. Tsar Alexander II favored the estate, and his son Alexander III lived and died in the smaller palace. When Nicholas II inherited it, he had the grand palace torn down and replaced with something finer. Around 1909 he engaged Nikolay Krasnov, Yalta's most fashionable architect, who had designed the grand ducal residences at nearby Koreiz. The imperial family discussed the plans intently, deciding that all four facades should look different, and after just seventeen months the new palace was inaugurated on 11 September 1911.

The result was one of the most elegant buildings on the coast, built of white Crimean limestone in the Neo-Renaissance style. Its features read like a tour of the Mediterranean: an arched portico of Carrara marble, a spacious Arabic patio and a separate Italian one, a Florentine tower, ornate Bramantesque windows, and bays set with jasper vases. A gallery links the palace to a neo-Byzantine church of the Exaltation of the Cross. Inside are 116 rooms in a medley of styles, a Pompeian vestibule, an English billiard room, a Neo-baroque dining room, and a study of maple wood in the Jacob style that Nicholas II especially admired. For the imperial family, it was less a seat of power than a beloved seaside home.

That home did not survive the revolution intact. After the February Revolution of 1917, the tsar's mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, fled to Livadia with other members of the imperial family. She was eventually rescued from Crimea by the British warship HMS Marlborough, sent by her nephew, King George V, a rare escape in a family that would mostly meet a far darker end. The palace itself was nationalized. By a decree signed by Vladimir Lenin in December 1920, it was turned to the treatment of workers, opening as a peasant sanatorium that specialized in fighting tuberculosis. The tsar's summer paradise had become, quite deliberately, a place of healing for the very class whose revolution had ended his reign.

Livadia's most famous hour came in February 1945. With the Second World War drawing toward its close, the palace hosted the Yalta Conference, the meeting where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin negotiated the shape of the postwar order. Roosevelt and the American delegation were lodged in the palace itself, while the Soviets stayed at the nearby Yusupov Palace and the British at the Vorontsov Palace some eight kilometers away. The decisions taken in these rooms would help define the map of Europe for decades. Today Livadia is a museum, its recovered furnishings on display, drawing visitors fascinated above all by the events of 1945, a palace that witnessed both the last golden summers of a dynasty and the birth of a new world order.