For many years I have been a friend of the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies, a sturdy enemy of collectivism based in deepest Westminster. they did fine work in mobilising anti-communist analysis and economic thought during the Cold War and thereafter.

This week they hosted a fine presentation and discussion led by Count Nikolai Tolstoy on the story which never dies, namely the ghastly circumstances surrounding the way British troops under the influence of Harold Macmillan handed over thousands of Russians, Yugoslavs and others to their doom through Stalin/Tito mass murdering.

For background see my posting from October last year and the link there to my RFE piece too.

Nikolai Tolstoy gave a powerful and moving account of his own long efforts to follow this story, which has taken him through a fearsome battle in the English libel courts and then the European Court of Human Rights through to the heart of the Soviet archives in Moscow (that name helped get him in!). Many of his suspicions about the actions and motives of key British and American officers involved had been confirmed in deeply buried Soviet secret documents.

Perhaps his key point at CRCE was to trample on two basic justifications for what happened:

  • "you don’t understand the confused circumstances of the times, with millions of refugees swarming over Europe"
  • "if we had not handed back these people to the communists, we might not have got back our own POWs"

As Nikolai Tolstoy said, those arguments were never made to him by any of the many people of all ranks who actually had been there and witnessed the cruelty involved in sending back the Cossacks and Yugoslavs and other people whose status had not been covered by the Yalta accords. Nor were those arguments prominent in the masses of British military records and diaries he had studied.

On the contrary, it was clear at the time to the British forces doing the dirty work on orders that something deeply dishonourable if not evil was being done, and that considerable deception and lies had been used by Macmillan and others to try to cover their tracks.

Years later some of the soldiers involved were still having nightmares about the shame of what they had seen and done. All except Macmilland the other officer involved (Brigadier Toby Law, later Lord Aldington) had been ready to speak freely about what had happened and their own roles in it. See here for Lord Aldington’s obituary which gives his side of this complex story – some of the points made in that obituary in his favour were specifically refuted by Ct Tolstoy at the CRCE meeting.

Ct Tolstoy described how all sorts of detailed and credible evidence demolishing the Low/Macmillan versions had been disallowed for spurious reasons at the later English libel hearings. The usual court transcripts giving the exchanges on these and other points had not been produced due to inexplicable ‘technical failures’. Other blatant abuses of process had occurred to limit public knowledge of what was being said. **

As chair of the evening I opened by quoting from this New Statesman article by Tolstoy from April 2000, which has a grim FCO angle:

By chance, I had recently raised with the Foreign Office the barbaric treatment of thousands of Russian and Yugoslav prisoners of war and refugees in southern Austria in 1945, suggesting that the British government should now make some public gesture of regret, and recompense the few surviving victims.

The FO responded by assuring me that no such event had ever occurred and that, even if it had, it was authorised by the Yalta Agreement.

I passed copies of this correspondence to Zoe Polanska who, as a 16-year-old girl, had been among those flung by British troops into cattle trucks for despatch to the Gulag. Her war had been spent in Auschwitz and Dachau, and she wrote to the "Human Rights Department" of the FO to explain that she had been there, and to ask how anyone could assert that cruelties on such a scale had not occurred.

Polanska received a patronising reply, explaining that she was mistaken and implying that she had imagined the affair. Anyone who doubts the arrogance and inhumanity of our diplomatic representatives may consult this correspondence on my website: www.uvsc.edu/tolstoy  

Alas that link no longer works, but if Ct Tolstoy sends me one which does I’ll put up a copy of this disgraceful document on this site in the hope of bringing eternal shame on its creator.

Why rake around in all this old history yet again?

Because it’s not all that old. The CRCE meeting welcomed two heroic people who had been there at the time, one an English field worker and the other a Slovenian woman who somehow had managed to escape the worst.

It’s all about the Perfect Crime:

The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it. 

Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it – but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about ‘moving on’. 

And those Perfect Criminals are still at it. See a move in Slovenia to get a communist WW2 hero’s face on a Euro coin. That might just about be tolerable if the post-communist Left in Slovenia worked hard and in good faith to unearth all the victims of communist murders. But, of course, they don’t and won’t.

It’s a real privilege to play a walk-on part in the meetings at CRCE and elsewhere which keep the small flame of Truth flickering brightly. 

**  Correction. Ct Tolstoy has pointed out that the passage above confused the strange processes at the various legal hearings:

… a transcript of the 1989 trial was kept. An interesting point, however, is that Judge Davies prevented the jury from refreshing their minds on a long and complex hearing – throughout their 3-day deliberations they were forbidden to consult the transcript!
 
The ‘accidental’ deletion of a transcript occurred at the subsequent perjury hearing held in secret on 4-6 October 1994.  Again, at the High Court appeal against this judgment held on 23 July 1996, the judges’ adverse judgment was recorded – but not a word of the actual appeal!