'A very remarkable secret indeed'
On 28 May 1945, British V Corps in Austria handed over to the Russians some 2,000 Cossack officers, including a number of legendary White Russian generals, such as the seventy-six-year-old Peter Krasnov and General Andrei Shkura. Many of these officers were shot by the NKVD Immediately. The more prominent, such as Krasnov and Shkura, were taken in triumph to the Lubianka in Moscow, and executed in 1947.
As Count Nikolai Tolstoy makes clear in his new book Victims of Yalta, not only had few of these men played any military part in World War Two; 1,436 of them —two thirds — were White Russian emigres, most of whom had lived outside Russia since 1920. Many held non-Russian Passports. In other words, they were in no sense 'Soviet nationals' under any of the agreed definitions, and the British had no right either in law or morality to hand them over. It seems evident from Count Tolstoy's meticulous researches that the decision to send back these men, whom the Russians prized so highly, to almost certain death, was taken politically at a very high level in the British Government.
On 13 May Harold Macmillan, as Minister-Resident in the Mediterranean, flew specially to Klagenftirt to discuss the Cossacks' future with V Corps' Commander, General Sir Charles Keightley. On 14 May, Keightley wrote to Field-Marshal Alexander: 'On advice Macmillan have today suggested to Soviet Tolbukhin's HQ that Cossacks should be handed over at once. Explained that I had no Power to. do this without your authority'.
The request put Alexander personally in a highly invidious position. He was an old friend of Krasnov. They had fought together in 1919. Krasnov held the British Military Cross (Shkura had been made a Companion of the Bath by George V) and had already written him a private letter appealing on the Cossacks' behalf.
On 17 May Alexander telegraphed the Combined Chiefs of Staff for instructions. We know the Chiefs of Staff discussed the matter, inconclusively, on 18 May, and that on 20 May Churchill wrote to lsmay 'could I have a further report on the 45,000 Cossacks, of whom General Eisenhower speaks in his SCAF.399 . . . did they fight against us?' On 21 May, V Corps took the decision to hand over the Cossacks, and two days later began negotiations with the Russians for the handover.
Who gave the final order which sent the Cossacks to their fate? Tolstoy quotes Geoffrey McDermott, then a junior Foreign Office official: My best guess is that F-M Alexander had been told, orally perhaps, by someone very important, such as Winston. . . '. Who else might have been involved? Eden? Macmillan (whose memoirs seem to indicate that he knew White Russians — i.e. 'non-Soviet nationals' — were involved)?
Not the least curious thing to have emerged from Count Tolstoy's researches is the extent to which papers relating to this episode seem mysteriously to have disappeared (e.g. crucial items in regimental War Diaries). But much more important would seem to be the strange fate of a wartime file 383.7-14.1 relating to the 'Forcible Repatriation of Displaced Citizens' in the Mediterranean Command at the relevant time.
After a twenty-year battle by an American scholar to get the American copy of this file released, the National Archives and Record Service in Washington confirmed in 1974 that the continued suppression of the file was due to British, not US objections, because it was 'personally sensitive'. In the same year the Ministry of Defence in London revealed to Tolstoy that all three volumes of the British copy of the file 'were physically destroyed in 1968 or 1969 as not being worthy of permanent preservation'.
As Tolstoy suggests, File 383.7-14.1 must 'hold some very remarkable secret indeed'. It seems highly probable that this relates to what, from a British point of view, may be arguably looked on as, legally and morally, the most wicked episode of the entire Second World War. Whose reputation is being protected? If a very dark shadow indeed is not to continue to hang over the reputations of three British Prime Ministers, the contents of File 383.7-14.1 must be made public.
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