Books

A personally sensitive matter

Christopher Booker

Victims of Yalta Nikolai Tolstoy (Hodder and Stoughton E9.95) In 1931 Winston Churchill was the chief speaker at a meeting in the Albert Hall `to protest against the brutalities practised in Soviet prison camps'. Commenting on the attitude of the then British Government, he said that, if it seemed to be 'apologising for these villainies in Russia', it was because the British were 'for the moment —let us frankly admit — passing tinder a cloud of weakness and confusion'. In a rousing peroration, quoting Gladstone, he claimed that Stalin's tyranny 'Scarcely finds an equal in the dark and melancholy catalogue of human crime'.

Little can Churchill have foreseen that, only fourteen years later, he would be sitting knee-to-knee with that same Stalin at Yalta, wearing a Cossack fur hat, arranging for his own government to play a more determinedly active part than any other in Europe in forcibly herding back into Soviet prison camps some five and a half million Russian prisoners (many of whom faced torture and death); or that possibly on his own direct orders, British soldiers in a valley in Austria would bc clubbing old men, women and children into trucks as part of the final extermination of the 'Cossack Nation' at the hands of the NKVD.

It is some three years since Nicholas Bethell first opened British eyes to what Solzhenitsyn, in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, had called 'truly the last secret' of the second world war: the astonishingly disreputable part played by Britain, between 1944 and 1947, in the enforced repatriation of millions of prisoners whom Stalin,* right from the start of the war, had declared as 'traitors' to the Soviet Union, and who all, regardless of their guilt or innocence in collaboration with the Nazis, faced the certainty of appalling vengeance on their return.

Like I suspect many readers, I was as shocked by Bethell's The Last Secret as by any book I have ever read. Inevitably, by the sheer enormity of the subject he was revealing to Western eyes, he raised many more questions than he was able in the space of one short book to answer. Clearly at least one further, major book was called for, setting Bethell's revelations in a wider context, and attempting to describe the whole unimaginable tragedy of those ten million Russians who, between 1941 and 1945, fell into German hands — less than a half of whom were eventually to survive the combination of Nazi and Soviet persecution.

Unexpectedly soon, that is the book which Count Nikolai Tolstoy has now produced — and it is a measure of his achievement that, even though many of the most sensational episodes are now familiar, its impact is as great as that of its predecessor. The broad outline of Tolstoy's narrative (studded throughout with haunting personal details and vignettes) falls into three parts. After an initial setting of the European scene between 1941 and 1944, the first part is dominated, once again, by the reaction of the Allied (and particularly British) governments to the news, shortly after D-day, that Russian prisoners were being picked up in France by the hundred, imploring their captors not to let them be returned to Russia. The previous December the American government had suggested that forcible repatriation of such prisoners might be contrary to the Geneva Convention (and prejudicial to the safety of Allied prisoners in Germany). But right from the start, the British Foreign Office under Anthony Eden took a strikingly different view. Sweeping aside humanitarian objections from his fellow Cabinet members, Eden and his officials seemed peculiarly adamant that all Russians should be handed back as a matter of the highest priority — 'attempting' in Tolstoy's words 'to meet Soviet 'desires even before they were expressed'. In Moscow, in October 1944, Eden (who had met Stalin back in 1935, and later recorded how he had been struck by the Soviet dictator's 'natural good manners', and had felt for him 'a sympathy which I have never been able entirely to analyse') went out of his way to promise Molotov and Stalin that the British would return all prisoners, by any means necessary.

Although much of this story, up to May 1945, is familiar, Tolstoy does underline in even greater detail than Bethell the extreme ruthlessness of the Foreign Office mafia, Thomas Brimelow, John ('they seem to us to deserve no sympathy') Galsworthy, Christopher Warner, Patrick Dean ('undoubtedly he will be executed' he blithely minuted of one prisoner whose return he was recommending. Even Donald Maclean makes an entry, objecting to the provision of comforts to Russian prisoners on the ground that even sending food parcels to British POWs had become 'farcical'. Inspired by Eden's notorious dictum 'we cannot afford to be sentimental about this', these men seemed determined to ignore, reject or twist almost every scrap of evidence which began to mount in the winter of 1944-5 as to the hideously cruel reception being accorded to the returning Russians.

In fact the most remarkable new revelation here is the extent to which the

Foreign Office apparently connived during this period at a deliberate misapplication of British law (the Allied Forces Act 1940) to allow SMERSH or NKVD units to operate freely in England, in imposing their author' ity not just on members of the Soviet armed forces but, quite illegally, on civilian pris'

oners as well. As both Galsworthy and Brimelow minuted, it was vital to keel)

these operations secret because any attempt to defend them in a British court would almost certainly have failed.

Britain's determination to enforce repatriation (even at the price of suicide attempt5

on Liverpool docks) contrasted strangely throughout with the much more liberal attitudes of the Americans (when George Orwell visited an American prison camp near Munich in May 1945 he found the Americans sorting out their Russian pris oners by the simple question `Do you want to go back to Russia or not?'). But the harrowing climax of the story, forming the middle third of Tolstoy's book, is a much more detailed account than hitherto of the events in Austria in May 1945.

When the British V Corps under Sit Charles Keightley (later Eden's com,mander at Suez) arrived in Austria from Italy it took responsibility for some 50,000 Cossacks, Caucasian tribesmen and other Russian formations, ranging from a Tsarist division ,(the Schutzkorps) which had remained in existence in Yugoslavia ever since the end of the Russian Civil War, to the XV Cossack Cavalry Corps, under the command of the German General Von Pannwitz. But by far the largest group, was an entire Cossack community, the Kazachl Stan, 24,000 strong, which had escaped with the Germans in 1942, complete with families, priests, covered wagons and dromedaries. This essentially non-military survival of the historic 'Cossack Nation' had since been joined by a large number of old emigres, including several legendary heroes of the Russian Civil War such as Generals Krasnov and Shkura, both of whom had been decorated by the British in 1919 and had lived ,since then in Western Europe.

In fact, of the 2000 officers in this group, no fewer than 1436 were not 'Soviet nationals' — and therefore in no sense should legally have been returned to Russia, as V Corps well knew).

The terrible and tragic events surrounding the forcible handover of these people to the NKVD on 28 May and 1 June have been described by Bethel]. But Tolstoy has been able to go into much greater detail about two particular aspects of this affair, which should weigh more heavily on Britain's conscience than Dresden. Firstly he has been able to show how other units (particularly 6th Armoured Division under General Murray) behaved in a much more humane way to Von Panrw, itz's Cossacks and other nearby groups (allowing many of them to escape). And secondly, in a chapter entitled 'An Unsolved Mystery', he tries to

disentangle what appears to have been a top secret and deliberate plan (reaching right LIP to the highest levels of the British Government) to hand over to the Russians some 3000 people quite illegally. It seems Clear that the Russians were amazed at their luck in persuading the British to surrender these famous Civil War commanders (in Particular Krasnov and Shkura, both of . whom were later taken for triumphant exhibition in the Lubianka, before being executed). In view of the importance of some of the senior British figures centrally involved, it may seem unsurprising that the only surviving official record which might cast conclusive light on this disgraceful episode is a file in Washington which is still suppressed at the insistence of the British Government, because it is 'personally sensitive' (the British files were mysteriously destroyed by the Ministry of Defence in 1968-9).

The final third of Tolstoy's immense canvas vastly extends our knowledge of the rest of the story, up to the point when, in 1947, forcible repatriation ceased. It conjures up a haunting picture of what amounted, in various parts of Europe in 1945, to nothing less than the last act of the Russian Civil War — the surrender of all the strange, heterogenous Russian units which had gathered under the nominal command of General Vlasov, the six-foot five-inch 'de Gaulle of Russia', one of the ablest of the Red Army generals, who had been betrayed in 1942 by Stalin's folly, and whose own final, heroic gesture in May 1945 was the saving of the beautiful city of Prague from Otherwise certain destruction by the SS. For the first time, Tolstoy methodically compares the British attitude to enforced

repatriation with those of each of the other Western countries involved. Not one took anything like so rigid and inhuman a line as Britain. Belgium, Norway, Holland, the United States (despite one or two isolated atrocities) were all much tougher in rejecting Soviet pressures — as even was France, despite the presence for a while outside Paris of a notorious NKVD-run camp, under a huge floodlit portrait of Stalin.

In the end two general questions remain. Why were the Soviets quite so determined to force their people back? The most Plausible explanation, it seems, was that Stalin was terrified of allowing millions of Potential recruits for a future possible counter-revolution to remain in the West. And why were the British so uniquely weak? Laughably, if not tragically, it seems that the Foreign Office was simply determined to placate Stalin at any cost, to ensure Soviet friendship in the post-war Years.

Perhaps the most appropriate footnote to this whole unspeakable episode was pro vided by the country whose record was better than any. On 2 May 194:■, the frontier guards of tiny Lichtenstein were astonished to see a military column approaching under the Imperial Tricolour of the Tsar, a Tsarist General at its head, and with former Red Army soldiers cheerfully pushing a car containing the Heir to the Throne of All the Russians, the Grand Duke Vladimir Cyrillovich. Despite the usual NKVD pressure (and the fact that he himself had large estates in Czechoslovakia), Prince Franz Josef II and his handful of subjects stoutly supported the right of any of their guests to refust, repatriation, and eventually paid for them to emigrate to Argentina. Today the Prince has no regrets: 'if you talk toughly to the Soviets, they are quite happy. That, after all, is the language they understand'. Had the British Foreign Office had the courage to perceive that truth a year earlier, we might have avoided perhaps the most dishonourable episode in our history — and one which, with its revelation of spinelessness and a complete lack of moral principle, has in some curious way. I believe, continued to cast its unco nsc.ous shadow over this country throughout the post-war era.

Although one's primary reaction to this stupendous book is an almost unbearable shame for British behaviour in 1944-5, one cannot help recognising the way in which so much of what was revealed as craven and despicable in the. British at that time has become only too characteristic of the way we have comported ourselves since. We see in this story a mirror which provokes self-examinatiOn — both collective and individual — of a most profound and uncomfortable kind.