Rocky Mountain News - Speak Out
29 January, 1990
At the precise moment when freedom is being asserted in Eastern Europe, essentially independent of American intervention, the President has chosen to quash it in China for reasons that can only be described as political expediency. Through his veto of the Pelosi legislation, designed to extend the stay of about 40,000 Chinese students in this country, the President is condemning these people to an uncertain, perhaps tragic fate. Unless the Congress undoes this insidious act, it may parallel the despicable betrayal of literally millions of Russian soldiers and civilians at the close of the Second World War by the United States and Britain.
This latter episode may well be one of the most pernicious and least known chapters of American and English history, and yet the enactment is so fresh that many of the participants and some of the survivors still live. It is a shattering but indisputable fact that Britain and the U.S. actually went out of their way to appease the communist dictator, Stalin. Why? The British Foreign Office at the time stated that they "hoped that by obliging the Soviets in this manner (we) would generate good will in the relations between the countries."
Almost thirty years were to pass before the documentation of this betrayal was to come to light. In 1977 Nikolai Tolstoy, English descendent of the Russian novelist, unearthed the history ("Secret Betrayal 1944-1947") of the largely successful efforts of the two great western powers to repatriate over two million Russians to their Motherland to face inevitable torture, death and slave labor. One would expect that such revelations of western complicity in one of the most evil and unnecessary tragedies of modern times would have shaken the respective governments to the core and brought the guilty to account. No such thing happened. The revealed record of British and American transactions in dealing with the repatriation of Russian prisoners had no lasting impact. Indeed hardly anyone now even recalls the incident. Then as now the most devastating exposure of malfeasance at the highest levels of government had little claim on public interest or attention.
It may be of small comfort to Americans that their own government played the reluctant role of the follower rather than the instigator. Nonetheless, the earliest pronouncement on this issue came from the British War Office stating that they would agree only "to return only those Russians who were willing to do so." These sentiments, however, were soon overruled by the more dominant figures of the Foreign Office who enthusiastically grasped the initiative in acceding to Stalin's demands. The U.S. State Department, though initially cool to the idea eventually consented to the use, "if necessary", of American bayonets to force compliance.
The citizens of both countries may take pride in the fact that their military representatives of the era, officers and men alike, found their inescapable orders repugnant in the extreme. Soldiers chosen to implement the policies of their civilian superiors resisted with every means available to them. Delay was the standard tactic. Outright refusal at some personal risk was not uncommon.
How is it then that repatriating prisoners of war to their native land, usually a time of great rejoicing, could be construed as an act of betrayal? Moreover, once it was clear to all that repatriation was tantamount to death, how is it that the western leaders showed so little compassion for the plight of Russian prisoners? How is it that even after the euphoria of victory over Hitler had faded into the grim prospect of World War III, that we continued to feed victims into the arms of a former ally, now implacable foe and ruthless enemy? Finally, on what legal basis did we, the western allies, choose to abrogate the right granted to prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention of 1929 "not to look behind the uniform"? This beneficent treaty, broadly accepted internationally was steadfastly rejected by the Soviet government.
To answer the first question one needs to recall the history of Bolshevism, essentially from 1917 to the death of Stalin in 1953. It may well be that the Soviet government's protracted and savage war against its own people from the moment of its birth is unprecedented in human history. The Bolsheviks wrested power from the revolutionary provisional Kerensky government and immediately installed a forty-year reign of terror equalled in ferocity only by the concurrent 12 years of Nazism. Now, it seems beyond comprehension that Stalin's massacres, which exceeded Hitler's by millions, could have gone unnoticed by the West for so long. We were soothed and cajoled by wartime propaganda into believing our Soviet ally fostered an almost Utopian socialist state. However, what actually lay behind that cunning subterfuge was well known to Russian soldiers and civilians, inside and beyond the borders of the USSR.
Despite the appalling brutalities inflicted on captive Russians by Hitler, we
now know that thousands of these people turned coat on their native land and
served with the Wehrmacht. Their sole intention was to see Bolshevism destroyed.
This is a case where the unmitigated savagery of the Soviet government created
its own traitors. It is also well known that virtually no Russian in German
uniform fought, or could be forced to fight against America or Britain.
Thousands of Cossacks captured by the allies volunteered to fight against Japan.
They were denied that privilege.
Peaceably and trustingly they placed their lives in the hands of English and
American soldiers. Cossack officers reared in the honorable traditions of the
Imperial Army were pathetically easy to deceive. However, unknown to these men
or their captors, their fate had already been sealed by the secret pact at Yalta
in the Crimea. In February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin convened to
decide how to divide up Europe after the war. It has been charged that
concessions made in secret to Stalin at that meeting gave the Russians dominion
over Eastern Europe and parts of Mongolia and Manchuria. It is also clear that
the allies made unwritten promises to return all captive Russians irrespective
of their wishes to return or not.
The way to Yalta was paved by Churchill and Eden who visited Moscow in October 1944. There Eden pledged without reservation and without coercion to fulfil Stalin's demands for the return of Russian citizens. As the direct result of this monstrous duplicity the following scene repeated itself on many stages: On the eve of betrayal Russian prisoners often attempted suicide even to the extent of pleading to be shot on the spot rather than be returned to the Soviets. Faced with this incontrovertible proof that death was preferable to repatriation, English or American troops were still required forcibly to herd the prisoners onto eastbound trucks and cattlecars.
Addressing the second question, why did the Western allies show so little
concern for the repatriates? To this date no satisfactory answer has been
forthcoming. The formal Yalta document contained not one word concerning
forcible repatriation. The argument advanced at the time was that English and
American prisoners in the hands of the Red Army would be imperilled by the
violation of even 'implicit' provisions of the Yalta treaty. Weak, though it
was, since no threats of this kind had ever been promulgated and since so few
men fell into this category, this argument carried absolutely no force once all
western prisoners had been safely returned. And yet we continued the dreadful
practice of forced repatriation.
These victims included not only Cossacks and Vlasov troops in German uniform but
also genuine Red Army prisoners in German custody. It even included multitudes
of Russian civilians swept up by invading German armies in 1941 and 1942 and
later used as slave labor inside the greater Reich. All were traitors in the
eyes of the NKVD, even Red Army units that had been temporarily surrounded by
the Wehrmacht in the course of battle. Their great crime? Simply stated, they
had witnessed the western world, even though the vision may have been through
barbed wire. Any contact with the west had irreparably infected them with
nonsocialist ideology. They had to be "re-educated" or else destroyed.
Stringent repatriation was thus done in the spirit of Yalta and of appeasement. Our political leaders could not bear to dishonor the tacit pledges made to Stalin. Yet suppose that forcible repatriation had actually been spelled out in writing, what would it have meant? Subsequent history has shown us Stalin's supreme contempt for international treaties of any kind.
Even so, the Soviets were desperately anxious that the people of western
nations should not learn that such understandings existed. When confronted by
recalcitrant English or American officers insisting that they put their demands
into writing, the Soviet opposite consistently refused and usually withdrew the
request.
It is the grossest of ironies that at the same moment that SS officers were
being tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, we, the powers in
judgement, were actively dispatching millions of other human beings to
circumstances of unimaginable privation and often death, basically no different
from the treatment of the Jews under Hitler. The principal argument used by the
prosecution of the War Crimes Commission was that the responsibility of the
defendant did not rest upon "the existence of the order, but whether a
moral choice was in fact possible". Were we less culpable than they?
What possible bearing does this dark history have upon today's parallels? Is
the present communist regime in China basically different from that of Stalin's?
If we were to force the Chinese students in our country to return home today
would their lives be in any less jeopardy than Russian prisoners in 1945? Is
there any compelling reason, any reason at all, why we should now kowtow to Deng
Xiaoping as we did to Stalin forty-five years ago? What would we or the
oppressed people of China gain if we, in the words of Anthony Lewis, were to
"bend a knee to tyranny"?
If the President Bush's veto carries, we shall have repeated the same perfidious
error in the space of one generation. Should not the first experience have been
sufficient demonstration that condescending to communist dictators is both
tragically inhumane and unnecessary? No doubt if the Congress fails to override
the President in this matter, today's hardline communists will smile while our
friends around the world will marvel at our astonishing hypocrisy.
Howard A. Garcia