Yalta: how to right the wrong

Nicholas Bethell

Thirty-three years ago a woman now living in London was subjected by British authority to two years of extreme distress. Born in Russia, eighteen years old and pregnant, she was brought to England in mid-1944, when her husband was captured in western France. He had been coerced into a German-officered para-military unit, she worked in the cookhouse. She was detained (quite illegally, because she was in no way subject to the military discipline of the Allied Forces Act, 1940), her son was born, the Yalta agreement was signed and preparations were made to return the family to Russia where, the Foreign Office assumed, both parents would probably be executed. Almost all the Russian men and women brought here from France were, in fact, bundled off without noise or ceremony to Stalin's labour camps and firing squads.

She was one of the few lucky ones. Her case was given a hearing. She was, after all, the mother of a British subject by birth. A member of the Quaker movement befriended her and arranged an interview for her at the Foreign Office. Thomas Brimelow was the official who received her: 'She fell on her knees, placed her forehead on the ground in the traditional Russian manner and implored my assistance in saving her and her husband from deportation. I told her that I could not give her any explicit assurances as no decision regarding the fate of herself and her child had yet been taken.'

Exceptionally, they were allowed to stay in Britain, not for any humanitarian reason, but because Anthony Eden and his colleagues were afraid of a row in Parliament and the press. She got her husband back at the end of 1946 and lived happily with him until his death last year. Her thirtythree-year-old son is a schoolteacher in the Midlands. She survived, but anyone who knows her can see how deeply and permanently her emotions have been marked by those two years of lonely uncertainty.

In May 1945 about 1,400 Cossack officers, old émigrés who had lived more than twenty years in Germany or Yugoslavia and had never been under Soviet rule, were duped into a cage by British lies and delivered to the Red Army. It was alleged that they were traitors an absurdity which provokes Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper's comment, 'They were traitors in the sense in which the Huguenots who fought for William of Orange were traitors to Louis XIV'. The question who exactly ordered this violation of the Yalta agreement has been the subject of some speculation in the Spectator and it remains unanswered, even after the opening a few days ago of 'missing file' 383.7-14.1. In the mid-1950s, after

Adenauer's interventions and Khrushchev's amnesties, the survivors, about seventy men, were allowed to leave for the West. They all had foreign documents and should never have been in the Soviet Union in the first place.

They had spent ten years in the labour camps, with all that that implies. Their teeth rotted away, their skin the yellow-grey col our that marks most of Stalin's ex-prisoners, they were men in their thirties and forties who looked twenty years older. Twenty years later most of them had died as a result of the ruin wrought upon their health, but in June 1974 I met twenty of them at their anniversary memorial service in Lienz in Austria. They looked older than the oldest man I have ever met.

Solzhenitsyn could quote many more examples. This is why he told us in 1976 that our whole nation had committed a sin and wrote, after seeing the BBC film on the subject, 'This film recreates in some degree the sharp pain of our Russian suffering the sufferings of millions of people betrayed and handed over to a certain death by the

British administration of the time. Some of these people perished in front of my eyes.' He would agree with Monday's eloquent Times leader that something should be done.

The Times made several valid points. The House of Commons and ministers were mis

led by officials. There should therefore be an inquiry and the officials involved should no longer feel inhibited about stating their side of the case. But if that inquiry con cludes that a catastrophically unjust decision was taken and this for the Moment seems to be the view of public opinion the question will arise, what happens next? If a wrong was done, what can be done to undo it? Not very much. Most of the victims are dead. But we can still do something. Solzhenitsyn, a religious man, has suggested an answer in religious terms repentance and expiation. Perhaps it is more practical to put the matter in legal terms. Britain can make a full apology and pay punitive damages.

The Government knows the name of the lady referred to in my first paragraph. Without waiting for her request -she would not make it, she is grateful to this country they can pay her a substantial sum out of public funds. They can then acquire through the local authority a plot of land at New

lands Corner, near Guildford, the site of the camp through which confirmed Soviet citizens passed on their way to ships in Hull and Liverpool. A memorial can be erected to commemorate those Russians who committed suicide at Newlands Corner or on the quayside, as well as those who perished in the Soviet Union.

I can trace fourteen of the illegally deported Cossack officers who are still alive, eleven in Munich and three in Paris. They too can be compensated out of public funds. It must be remembered that they were not defeated by British forces in battle, they surrendered voluntarily a few days before the war ended. Then in the mêlée of their forcible delivery all their property, including important jewellery and the contents of the community bank, was acquired by British forces. Compensation would cover not only the trivial matter of this material loss, but also the ten years in Soviet camps, with due regard to the conditions of this imprisonment, and would be scaled up to reach the measure of an appropriate token for the sufferings and deaths of the others.

The Cossack diaspora owns a small cemetery just outside Lienz, where about thirty of those who were killed or committed suicide while being loaded into trains are buried. After some difficulty, including Soviet protests to the Austrian government, they have got permission to build a chapel on this spot. They say that Chancellor Bruno Kreisky intervened in their favour after the Lienz local authorities had several times refused them. They are collecting and appealing for money to build the chapel. No large sum is involved. They mention a figure of $7,000. The British nation may well decide that it is its duty to pay this sum in full.

And what about an apology? How can a nation apologise for the death of a million people? Every German knows that this takes time. It is unfair, I believe, to compare Britain's offence with that of Nazi Germany, but I would prefer not to dwell on such a peculiarly odious comparison. Instead I recall the great good which Germany derived in December 1970 when Willi Brandt went down on his knees in

silence before the memorial on the site of the Warsaw ghetto. Who could do such a thing in Britain's name? Where? How? I do not know the answer to this excruciating problem. But I sense a growing feeling that someone in this country will have to, and soon, before this long-buried ghost from the past creates a sense of national uneasiness.

A uberon Waugh is away and will resume his column next week.