Hypocrisy and the ghost of British betrayal

By Edward Lucas

Date: 09/06/05

Imagine that a gang of thugs in your neighbourhood abducted and raped your grandmother 60 years ago, stole and ruined your family property, terrorised your family and somehow got away with it due to some failure in the law.

Imagine that the gang's grandchildren - who claim to be respectable citizens - now want to have normal neighbourly relations. Fine, you might think - except that their version of events is different. It wasn't rape, but marriage, they say. The property was legally transferred. And everyone got along fine. So there's nothing to apologise for.

That's pretty much how the Balts and Poles feel about Russia's attitude to history. And for the British, these kinds of arguments can seem rather enjoyable. It is quite satisfying to sit with East Europeans, agreeing that the Germans have really done quite well (although of course they will never quite redeem themselves); the Austrians were worse than the Germans and never de-Nazified properly, so we can tut-tut about that. As for the Russians, they really are outrageous, with their falsified, one-sided view of history. They don't acknowledge properly the murder of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn; they haven't really renounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; they even feel nostalgic about Stalin and ignore their own gulags. No wonder their democracy is skin-deep and everyone hates them.

But just to puncture the smugness, there is another side to British history which is particularly on my mind at this time of year. That is the dreadful events of 1945-47, when British and other allied forces returned hundreds of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs to their death at the hands of the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists. These people had surrended to the British and American forces because they knew what fate awaited them if they fell into the hands of Stalin and Tito. Admittedly they included Soviet forces who had switched sides and fought for the Nazis, in some cases with exceptional brutality and enthusiasm. In any event, they deserved war crimes trials and some of them, no doubt, the death penalty. But others had committed no atrocities. Some anti-Communist Yugoslavs had actually been on our side in the war - at least until we cut off supplies and backed their Communist adversaries in Yugoslavia's civil war.

British officials insisted - and sometime still insist - that they had honoured to the letter the agreements made with Stalin at Yalta and elsewhere. Conditions were chaotic in 1945, with half the continent starving, tens of thousands of British prisoners-of-war still in Soviet hands and Stalin extremely popular in both the UK and America. But the story is still a dreadful one. British soldiers and officials continued repatriating Russians and Yugoslavs even when it was clear they were being murdered on arrival. They - we if you are British - continued even when these people were killing themselves and their families rather than be deported. We included people such as Russians born outside the USSR, who were clearly not "Soviet citizens" and therefore not covered by the agreement.

There's not much to be done about it now, apart from mourn and remember. Most of the people who suffered as a result of Britain's shameful behaviour are dead, so there is nobody left to rebuke us. But when Brits endorse criticism of Russia's historical amnesia, their censure carries most weight when they also recall that by this time in June 60 years ago, the first of many tens of thousands of Cossacks and other Russians, who had entrusted their lives to the UK authorities, were already dead.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

Commentary feature looking at events of 1945-47, when British and other allied forces returned hundreds of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs to their death at the hands of the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists.