I CANNOT BE SILENT

TABLE OF CONTENTS "1-3" 31 May 1908: "I Cannot be Silent" 22 May 1920: A Refugee from Russia 31 May 1945: 'An Operation of War' 31 May 1998: "I Cannot be Silent" 31 May 1908: "I Cannot be Silent"

Memorial in military cemetary in Lienz, Austria June 1945

"Russian Censorship in 1908

'You would not believe how, from the very commencement of my activity, that horrible Censor question has tormented me! I wanted to write what I felt; but at the same time, it occurred to me that what I wrote would not be permitted, and involuntarily I had to abandon the work. I abandoned, and went on abandoning, and meanwhile the years passed away ...'

(L.N. Tolstoy to his wife Sophia, 1892)

Ninety years ago Russia and the world prepared to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the monumental and difficult genius, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of the age and widely regarded as the conscience of his nation and a universal spokesman for oppressed and suffering humanity.

Rejecting proposals to commemorate the occasion by some grandiose ceremony, he suggested as the most appropriate award a term of imprisonment, an acquaintance having recently been sentenced to six months for circulating works of which Tolstoy was the author. On the eve of his jubilee his detestation of the state, in his view a needless instrument of oppression, was finally goaded into public expression by a brief article in the newspaper Russia. In his diary for 11 May 1908, Tolstoy's secretary Gusev recorded the author's horrified reaction:

'In today's issue of "Russia", at the top of the first page, in the list of previous daily events, appeared:

'Twenty executed at Kherson.

'"Look at this", said L.N. to me, reading this news aloud. "Yes, life is delightfully arranged... I am convinced that there does not exist in Russia a man so cruel as to be capable of killing twenty men. Yet here it is performed unnoticed: one person writes, another reads, this wretched executioner performs his hanging..."

Here is the complete text of this article:

Next day Gusev testified to Tolstoy's increasing anguish.

'Yesterday L.N. was in a depressed state, despondently reading in the newspapers reports of the 20 executed at Kherson. It appeared to me that never before had I seen him so benign, gentle, compassionate, humble. He seemingly wished to die. When before breakfast we strolled together in the park around the house, I spoke to him about a letter forwarded to me by V.G. Chertkov (Tolstoy's agent in England), the writer of which thanked him for help and support he had received, and spoke of the beneficial influence exerted on him by a book by Lev Nikolaevich. L.N. replied to me:

'"Yes! Now I intend to write an article, and I trust that with this feeble prattle I may accomplish something comparable".

'And he wept'.

Returning at once to the house, Tolstoy went to his study, seated himself before the dictaphone presented to him earlier in the year by the American inventor Thomas Edison, and began dictation of a heartfelt denunciation of the monstrous evil he depicted as bloodily stalking the length and breadth of his beloved country. Adopting the callous brevity of the announcement of the Kherson executions as the motif of his indictment, he passionately excoriated the apparatus of oppression which the state deployed with apparently blind unconcern for the fundamental principles of Christianity and humanity.

As ever, Tolstoy defied the Government to suppress his writing, being fully prepared to face the consequences, however unpleasant. Censorship in the closing years of Imperial Russia was imposed by means of a range of ingenious procedures, designed to evade the provisions of the Fundamental Laws of 1906, which guaranteed the basic right to freedom of expression. Nothing daunted, within three weeks Tolstoy had completed his task. On 31 May Gusev discovered the old man in a climactic state of high emotional fervour, contrasting markedly with the despondency with which he had been initially afflicted by the callously brief newspaper announcement of the executions.

'I remember with what a joyous expression on his face, scarcely restraining tears, how on that day when he began this article, he silently showed me the sheets of paper with their bold underlinings, and when I enquired:

"what's new?", he, with such an expressive and joyous expression on his face and with such tears in his eyes, silently nodded his head. As soon as L.N. began writing this piece, the depressed and pessimistic state of mind he had experienced in the first days, changed to cheerfulness and confidence. I remember how within a few days, at breakfast, to (his wife) Sonia Andreevna's declaration that it would prove impossible to achieve anything in the way of preventing these punishments, he replied in a firm and convinced voice:

"How can it be impossible? Much may be achieved".

'Three days ago he said to me:
'"I want to have it published immediately: I want you to take it away promptly. Then will be what will be, but I have accepted full responsibility"'.

After being typed by his daughter Alexandra, Tolstoy's booklet was sent to England and other Western European countries for publication, in order to evade the censorship imposed by the Russian Government. Entitled I Cannot be Silent (Concerning the death sentences): its forty-five pages comprise a passionate denunciation of killings authorised by the state, and expressed the author's wholehearted contempt for the censorship which sought to prevent its expression.

As on previous occasions, the authorities proved powerless to prevent widespread circulation of I Cannot be Silent in Russia. Again the authorities proved 'willing to wound and yet afraid to strike'. Repressive measures were undertaken against anyone involved in its publication - save the indignant author. Newspapers which published extracts were subjected to severe fines, and an editor in Sevastopol was arrested. Despite these harsh measures, widespread coverage by the remarkably robust Russian press ensured public awareness of Tolstoy's stance. In August an illegal publisher in Tula defiantly printed the text in full.

However what primarily ensured I Cannot be Silent its influence in Russia was the inability of the government to prevent publication abroad. It was to England that Tolstoy looked primarily as a safe haven from which he could launch his assaults on official abuses in Russia.

In 1892, for example, the Daily Telegraph published his indictment of the alleged failure of the Russian authorities to alleviate the appalling effects of the famine which ravaged much of Southern Russia, and in the following year The Times published his exposure of the persecution of Doukhobors. So highly did Tolstoy regard the English tradition of freedom of publication, that in the same year he despatched the manuscripts of all his banned works to England for safe custody. In 1898 he arranged for publication there of his own newspaper the Free Word, which like Herzen's celebrated The Bell (Kolokol) employed the security of England to subject the Russian Government to excoriating scrutiny.

Tolstoy's attitude towards England was decidedly ambivalent. As early as 1854 he expressed admiration for the high moral and physical standard of English prisoners he encountered at the siege of Sevastopol. In 1861 his sole brief visit to England impressed on him a correspondingly high estimate of the freedom and independence of English education. Having taught himself to read and later speak English fluently, he repeatedly voiced the view that 'Charles Dickens is the greatest novel writer of the 19th century'. Trollope was another admired favourite, as was Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

When particularly provoked by the oppressive policies of his government, Tolstoy toyed on occasion with the idea of migrating to England. In 1872, outraged by a police search of his house for forbidden literature, he declared to his aunt:

'I shall sell all I have in Russia and go to England, where every man's person is respected'.

Again in 1898, at the time of establishing The New Word in England, he wrote to his exiled editor Chertkov:

'Of course I want to see you, and in my desultory dreams I journey to England and live in Essex with all my friends, and cultivate my kitchen-garden'.

In view of Tolstoy's overriding love of his home Yasnaya Polyana, such declarations cannot be taken very seriously. In any case, his anglophilia was far from undiscriminating. His reading of Dickens led him to regard the British parliamentary system as corrupt beyond redemption, an excessively mordant condemnation of a system whose venality and irresponsibility Dickens himself was concerned to reform, not destroy.

However Tolstoy's penetrating perception of human nature enabled him to depict with devastating verisimilitude a familiar type of self-satisfied Englishman, representatives of which he encountered in a Swiss hotel in July 1857. There Tolstoy became involved in a minor but revealing confrontation, which he portrayed in thinly fictionalised form in his short story Lucerne.

Strolling one evening by the beautiful lake, a Russian traveller, Prince Nekhlyudov, comes upon a ragged little Tyrolean street-singer, who to the accompaniment of his guitar sings a plaintive chant with great charm and skill. A crowd of well-dressed tourists gathered around, but when the poor singer concludes his song and hopefully holds out his hat, the immaculately-dressed group turned contemptuously on their heels and entered their hotel. Infuriated, Nekhlyudov followed the singer and insisted that he join him at dinner in the hotel. Contemptuously brushing aside the protests of the embarrassed doorman, the Prince entered the dining-hall and loudly demanded dinner and a bottle of wine for himself and his frightened guest. The undisguised incredulity and disgust expressed by the assembled Englishmen and their wives at this affront to their propriety provoked Nekhlyudov's ire almost beyond control. Nor was he gratified by the fact that they were patently restrained from open expression of resentment by their realization that the offender was a nobleman.

"How could these educated, humane people, at a universal level propounding everything that is upright and humane, not nurture a humanitarian heartfelt feeling for a private good deed?" he reflected angrily. "How could these people, with their Chambers, Meetings, and Societies, passionately involving themselves in the state of celibate Chinamen in India, in the spread of Christianity and education in Africa, in devizing forms of government for the improvement of all humanity, not discover within their souls a simple fundamental sympathy of man for man? Are they incapable of this feeling, substituting for it that complacency and ambition which motivates these people in their Chambers, Meetings and Societies? Is it possible that the spread of rational, egotistical organizations among people considering themselves civilised, extinguish and contradict the necessity for instinctive and loving bonds? And is this really that equality, for which has been spilt so much innocent blood, and so many crimes perpetrated? Are they really people who, like children, can be content with the mere sound of the word equality?

"Equality before the law? But does the whole life of man take place within the sphere of law? Only a thousandth part of it depends on law, the remaining part occurs outside, in the sphere of social customs and conceptions... Civilization - a blessing; barbarism - wicked; freedom - a blessing; slavery - wicked. It's this fanciful perception that destroys the instinctive, blessedly primeval requirement of goodness in human nature. And who will define for me what is freedom, what is despotism, what is civilization, what is barbarism? And where are the bounds between one and the other? Who in his soul can so confidently weigh up this goodness and evil, so that he can measure them without confusing the facts?

"Who is the more human and who more the barbarian, between this lord, who, seeing the threadbare clothing of the singer, withdraws angrily from the table, not having bestowed upon him a millionth part of his fortune, now sits in his bright clean study serenely pronouncing upon the affairs of China and justifying the slaughters perpetrated there - or this little singer, who, risking prison, with a single franc in his pocket, for twenty years never doing harm to anyone, wandering through mountains and valleys cheering people with his song - at whom they jeered, whom just now they would have flung out, and who, exhausted, hungry, ashamed, has departed to sleep somewhere upon rotten straw?"

The unpleasant impression Tolstoy gained of the English tourists at Lucerne is not to be dismissed on grounds of alien misapprehension or xenophobic prejudice. The complacent bourgeois ideal of social conformity as the prevailing virtue inevitably appeared more prevalent in Britain than elsewhere, since her middle class was so much larger, richer, and more securely established than its comparable estate in other European countries. In any case the type of genteel boor who provoked the passionate indignation of Tolstoy's Prince Nekhlyudov is as sardonically delineated in the works of his compatriots Thackeray and Dickens.

This indifference to the demands of personal compassion which characterised a prominent element of the English middle class, accompanied as it was by compensatory devotion to general principles of justice and liberty, continued to provoke the contempt of the markedly unconformist and aristocratic Russian author. Nevertheless Tolstoy enjoyed the friendship of sufficient independent-minded and intelligent Englishmen to be fully aware that their country, no more than any other, was not to be judged by the deficiencies of a particular set, however prominent and influential.

As the most outspoken Russian advocate of freedom of publication since Herzen, he expressed in words and still more in actions his profound appreciation of England's pre-eminence as home to liberty of expression.

Consequently in 1908 it was to England that he first turned for publication of his suppressed polemic I Cannot be Silent. The worldwide notoriety which ensued upon its publication ensured that Tolstoy received an ever-increasing flood of correspondence, by the far the greater part of which proved warmly congratulatory. The painter Ilya Repin publicly voiced this support in an article published in the newspaper The Word:

'Leo Tolstoy is right - better the noose or imprisonment, than to continue silent while daily acknowledging the dreadful punishments which disgrace our country, when such a silence effectively amounts to approving them'.

Before leaving this topic it is important - especially when comparisons come to be drawn with attitudes towards violence and censorship in another country - that the circumstances of Leo Tolstoy's publication be placed in their historical and personal context.

First it should be remembered that Tolstoy's indignation was not provoked by any feeling that the culprits whose execution he deplored were innocent of the crime with which they were charged. His objection derived from his conviction that the death penalty represented murder inflicted by the state, and that depredations perpetrated by the poor against property-holders arose from the justifiable intent of restoring a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Tolstoy's compassion and outrage were provoked, it will be recalled, on his learning of the execution of a dozen or more peasants, following a summary hearing before a field court operating under emergency regulations introduced by Prime Minister Stolypin in August 1906. From a European or American perspective the execution of a dozen people for a single crime appears indeed draconian. However the state of Russia in 1908 bore no resemblance to that of any European or Northern American country of today.

Tolstoy's booklet was published in the autumn of 1908. From the beginning of that year until mid-May 1910, 19,957 terrorist acts and violent robberies were officially recorded, in the course of which 732 government officials were murdered and 1,022 wounded. The carnage wrought among the general public was still more frightful: during the same period 3,051 private citizens were killed, and 2,829 wounded. Among the former category was the fianc( of my great-aunt Lily, who was shot for no discoverable motive on the eve of their wedding. Aunt Lily never married, and wore mourning to the end of her long life. As Richard Pipes has written: 'No government in the world could have remained passive in the face of such violence'.

Leo Tolstoy's uncompromizing attachment to principle is illustrated by the fact that the victims included his brother-in-law, murdered by workmen on 19 May 1907. In September his own estate at Yasnaya Polyana was plundered by local peasants, several of whom were discovered during a police search to be in possession of firearms. A bitter dispute arose between Tolstoy and his wife over her insistence on accepting Government protection from further assault.

The censorship against which Tolstoy likewise protested was undoubtedly oppressive and of questionable legality. Newspapers which printed extracts from I Cannot be Silent were fined, and at least one editor was arrested. However it cannot be said that these punishments were wholly dire, and the fact that so much was published on the subject despite the summary power of the authorities indicates the relative ineffectiveness as much as it does the arbitrary nature of censorship in pre-revolutionary Russia.

The other side of the coin which should be kept in mind when comparisons come to be made is the extent to which Russian journalists, editors, and publishers were prepared to defy the law in order to keep their readers informed of what they regarded as matters of legitimate public concern. The 1907 emergency powers authorised provincial governors to impose fines of up to 3000 roubles and terms of a maximum three months' imprisonment for violations of the press laws.

None of the foregoing is intended to palliate the arbitrary character of the Imperial Government, still less to depreciate Tolstoy's courage in publishing his illegal denunciation, which earned him not only the wrath of the Government but also (what was probably more difficult to bear) resentment on the part of those who had suffered at the hands of the terrorists and their criminal confraternity. My concern here is solely to place in perspective aspects of the Russian predicament in 1908, in order to compare them with similar issues arising in Britain in 1998.

I conclude this section by reminding the reader that in 1908 Leo Tolstoy was obliged by the Russian censorship to take advantage of the freedom of England to publish his I Cannot be Silent. How times have changed in this regard ninety years later will shortly be seen.

May 1920: A Refugee from Russia

'There are two maxims for historians which so harmonise with what I know of history that I would like to claim them as my own, though they really belong to nineteenth-century historiography: first, that governments try to press upon the historian the key to all the drawers but one, and are anxious to spread the belief that this single one contains no secret of importance; secondly, that if the historian can only find the thing which government does not want him to know, he will lay his hand upon something that is likely to be significant'.

(Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations, p. 186)

On Saturday 22 May 1920 the passenger ship S.S. Dongola steamed into Southampton port from Helsinki. On board was a group of English people of varied ages and backgrounds who had been held prisoner in Soviet prisons and camps for over two years. On 12 February Britain and the Soviet Union, following months of acrimonious wrangling, had signed an agreement at Copenhagen for mutual repatriation of their citizens interned during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Following the Agreement three months were to pass before the British prisoners finally came to be released from their various places of confinement, where the ravages of typhus presented a threat more deadly even than Bolshevik outrages.

Among the delighted Britons descending the gangplank to a rapturous reception from anxious relatives and friends was a bewildered seven-year-old Russian boy. Two days later the Daily Mail published his photograph, with the explanatory caption:

'Among the refugees and liberated prisoners from Russia who landed at Southampton on Saturday were: Left - Rev. F.W. North, Anglican chaplain in Moscow; centre - Dimitri de Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, whose English mother is dead and whose father is missing'. By chance an adjoining photograph showed Winston Churchill playing polo at Roehampton. As Secretary of State for War it was he more than any other international statesman who had consistently urged the necessity of assisting the White armies to crush 'the foul baboonery of Bolshevism'.

It was in this way that my father came to Britain. He owed his life to the devotion of his English nanny, Lucy Stark, and his aunt Lily, who had concealed him for two years from the Red Terror in Kazan, conducted under Lenin's personal instruction as 'a model of mercilessness'. When negotiations began in Copenhagen, the Soviet authorities released the British chaplain, Mr North, from prison and assigned him the task of registering British subjects for repatriation. At considerable personal risk he added my father's name to the list, under pretence of his being Lucy's illegitimate child.

My father was doubly fortunate, both in his hair's breadth escape from the searches of the Cheka, and in the chance that brought him to England rather than another European country. For had he found refuge, like so many of his compatriots at that time, in Belgrade, Berlin, or Paris, then his life - and mine - might have ended very differently from the peaceful death he met at his home last year.

So it was that I came to be born in England, fifteen years after my father's arrival. My mother was English, but owing to my parents' early divorce I was brought up with my sister Natasha by a Russian stepmother. In consequence I led a curiously dual existence, which appeared natural to me at the time. At home my parents spoke Russian, as did our gardener and his wife - both refugees from the second wave of emigration during World War II. In the constricted circumstances of the War and its aftermath, we received and paid few visits. Attending the Russian Orthodox church in London and constantly encountering Russian relatives and friends, I felt myself a Russian.

At the same time I attended that most military and conventional of English public schools, Wellington College, where I made many friends and was very happy. In this way I came to feel myself both English and Russian, as I am in any case by ancestry. This I was to find a distinct advantage when by chance I stumbled upon the terrible story of Britain's forced repatriation of fugitive Russians and other nationalities at the close of World War II.

A devout lover of history from an early age, as a boy I listened enraptured to stories of pre-revolutionary Russia recounted by the older generation of Russian emigres. In church and elsewhere I occasionally met more recent refugees, from some of whom I heard dark tales of people packed off at bayonet-point by British soldiers for delivery to Stalin. Such stories aroused my indignation, for I could not share the contemporary widespread acceptance of the Soviet Union as an advanced socialist state, which for all its abuses and sacrifices had hugely improved the material condition of its people.

In April 1956, aged twenty, I was arrested and fined for raising a placard at Victoria Station in protest against the state visit of Bulganin and Khrushchev. It was then by chance that I heard for the first time an English account of the repatriation. The kindly police sergeant who brought me supper in my cell lingered to enquire curiously what had motivated me to so rash an action. Emotionally I voiced my view of the evils of Communism, and my indignation that the Queen should be compelled to entertain men whom I regarded as mass murderers.

To my surprise the officer agreed with me, and recounted a strange incident he had witnessed as a soldier in Austria eight years previously. His company had been detailed to guard a train taking Russians home, and were startled to see one or two fling themselves to their deaths as the carriages gathered speed. My informant and his comrades were counting the days until their long-deferred leave began, and yet here were ordinary people who preferred suicide to returning home!

Not for many years however was I to concern myself in any depth with the tragedy. In my youth I enjoyed the company of optimistic enthusiasts, plotting the downfall of Churchill's 'Bolshevik baboonery'. Together with my friend Christopher Daybell I travelled from university in Dublin to London, only to arrive a day too late to join the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Among fellow-sympathisers in London was a young journalist named Peter Huxley-Blythe, who involved himself much more deeply than I in the story of the forced repatriation. His researches eventually saw the light in 1964, when a small publisher in Idaho published his account under the title The East Came West. Though it achieved small circulation, it retains value principally on account of the testimonies Peter acquired from some of the older surviving Cossacks.

Other works appeared upon the subject, but attracted almost no attention outside the isolated ranks of scattered emigre( communities. As early as 1957 the Polish historian Jozef Mackiewicz published Kontra, a narrative account of the particularly brutal and treacherous handover of thousands of Cossacks by British soldiers in Austria. Kontra found a German publisher, but the British public continued entirely ignorant of operations conducted as they had been under conditions of exceptional secrecy. In the United States Julius Epstein fought a long and valiant battle to secure the release of public documents which he believed would illuminate this dark page in Allied history. His untiring labours culminated in the publication in 1973 of a vigorous exposure and condemnation of the outrages, entitled Operation Keelhaul.

By chance it was in the previous year that the British Government introduced its 'thirty-year rule', whereby selected state papers are placed on public release thirty years after the event.( This for the first time made it possible to attempt a history grounded on official documents. Hitherto the most valuable sources, which retain their primary importance, were the memoirs of Cossack survivors. In 1957 Nikolai Krasnov, great-nephew of the famous Don Ataman surrendered by the British to be hanged by the Soviets, miraculously emerged after eleven years of purgatory in the camps of GULAG and published a vivid memoir of his harrowing experiences, 'The Unforgettable' (Hezabyvaemoe). Meanwhile the veteran Kuban Ataman Vyacheslav Naumenko had long been diligently collecting survivors' memoirs, which he issued at first in individual fascicules, afterwards published in 1962 and 1970 in two volumes bearing the title 'The Great Betrayal' (Velikoye Predatelstvo). Both these works remain invaluable to historians, primarily for their irreplaceable first-hand descriptions of events by long-departed witnesses, but also for occasional unwitting clues they provide to the nature of the secret policy pursued by 5 Corps.

It was shortly before the publication of Epstein's book that the English writer Nicholas Bethell and I independently learned of the recent release of British documents, and initially ignorant of each other's plans set about preparing books upon the subject. Bethell's The Last Secret was published well before my book, and for the first time alerted the British public to the grim story. Based on eyewitness accounts and such British state papers as were then accessible, The Last Secret provided a brief but thorough account of the whole story, from the signing of the Yalta Agreement in February 1945 to the final Operation Eastwind, when in 1947 the British and Americans offered up their final human sacrifices to Stalin.

Bethell condemned the operations in temperate but uncompromizing terms. However a distinct and ominous note appeared in the introduction to his book, written by the Conservative British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. After summarizing the author's findings, Trevor-Roper admonished his readers against adopting any 'unhistorical' condemnation of those responsible for the barbarities described, since 'the particular context of those years ... prevented a humane solution'. 'This is not a book which calls for judgment', he concluded: 'it calls, as good books do, for reflection'.

Here one may recognise the complacent detachment displayed by those well-fed Englishmen whom Tolstoy encountered at Lucerne. Once again there is the lofty profession of concern for humanity, combined with callous disdain for its individual members. As I was one day to discover, Trevor-Roper did not speak for himself alone, but for an influential stratum of English society. What I took for mere pompous platitudes might have been detected as sounding a minatory note, which had I heeded could have saved me and my family much distress. However, like Prince Nekhlyudov, such calculating and patronizing contempt for the sufferings of those less fortunately placed provokes my intense anger. What was intended as a warning acted if anything as a spur.

Until the appearance of Bethell's book I had continually feared that my researches might prove to be anticipated by his discoveries. In the event my Victims of Yalta did not appear until four years after The Last Secret. Several factors brought about this prolonged delay. It was not until 1977 that documents covering the final operations in Italy in 1947 came to be released. Throughout the intervening period I spent long months in tracking down eyewitnesses of all nationalities involved, so many of whom remained alive and well at that time. Here I found my Anglo-Russian background an immense advantage, in that it enabled me to gain the confidence of people of different nations, and I believe assisted me to empathise with both parties.

At an early stage I was provided with unexpected encouragement by a chance comment from Solzhenitsyn, which appeared in the first volume of his Gulag Archipelago. Describing Stalin's criminal blunders in 1941, which led millions of Russians to fall into German hands, in turn becoming those victims of Yalta whom the British and Americans returned to sate his vengeance, the author enquired rhetorically: 'What Lev Tolstoy is going to describe that Borodino for us?'

What served most to prolong my labours was the increasing realization that something especially sinister had occurred in Austria immediately after the War's ending. That the British delivered up 50,000 Cossacks and their families might at first glance be regarded as but an extension of the cruel policy which despatched more than two million Soviet citizens from all over Western Europe to Beria's filtration camps and the hell of GULAG.

As a White Russian, however, I could not but be struck by the fact that a large number of distinguished tsarist emigre officers were included in this particular operation, despite the fact that the Yalta Agreement covered only Soviet nationals. Even the heavily-censored British military records could not suppress the fact that their inclusion was deliberate, nor the exceptional care with which it had been concealed from higher command.

Had my father in 1920 found refuge in Yugoslavia or Austria instead of England, we might well have found ourselves among those thousands of Russian emigrants who converged on Southern Austria during the chaotic closing days of the war. In that case we too would have been secretively included among those passed over the bridge at Judenburg for despatch to GULAG camps. Neither my age nor my birth outside Russia would have served as protection. Bethell had noted the violation of policy, but made no attempt to investigate its motivation beyond a conjecture that Keightley might have felt it necessary 'to placate the Soviet authorities'.

Inasmuch as our plight would have been no different from that of the wretched Soviet citizens condemned by the Yalta Agreement, the moral distinction is not great. But even among a slaughter of thousands, the needless inclusion of those who would otherwise have escaped cannot be regarded as a negligible factor. However what really focussed my mind upon the issue was my own White Russian background, which lodged the issue in my consciousness with especial clarity and persistence. Generals Krasnov, Shkuro, and the other White generals betrayed to the Soviets were legendary figures of the White cause, familiar to me from earliest childhood.

It is scarcely surprising that hostile critics have alleged that it was precisely this factor which misled me into overestimating the distinction contemporary British soldiers might be expected to have drawn, and to suspect conspiracy where confusion provides a more likely explanation. Naturally I accept that the issue must be judged exclusively on the evidence, and here I am concerned only to note a factor which led me to investigate it with a personal concern an English author had no reason to share.

This said, as an historian I am I confess fascinated by the work of detection which our profession involves. Somebody had plotted the secret handover of the White Russians, and I became increasingly determined to discover the identity of that shadowy figure or figures. There appeared something deeply sinister about a conspiracy which involved as machiavellian a deception of the Allied governments as of the White Russians. It was clear then, and thanks to the Russian archives is irrefutably demonstrable now, that Stalin had an especial interest in laying hands on his old enemies of 1918. But who were the Englishmen so deeply concerned to serve his interests, and what was the overriding motive that induced them to disobey their own superiors, in order to steep their hands gratuitously in the blood of those whom honour and duty should have bound them to protect?

It was not until after the publication of Victims of Yalta that my attention was belatedly drawn to the parallel handovers of Yugoslav citizens. Fugitives from Tito, as the Cossacks were from Stalin, thousands of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Montenegrins poured across the Karavanken Mountains and the River Drava in order to find sanctuary under British protection during the second week of May 1945. The Yalta Agreement bore no reference to them, and yet the same 5 Corps Headquarters which betrayed the Cossacks arranged for the Yugoslav prisoners of war and refugees to be lured to their deaths under pretence of being sent to their families in Italy.

That two such unauthorised betrayals occurred at the same time and place appeared to me unlikely to reflect a mere coincidence, and so I directed my attention to this story. After prolonged investigation it proved fully as treacherous and unaccountable a business as that of the Cossacks, and the ultimate mystery deepened.

I have pursued these trails now for a quarter of a century, and during that time have learned much that I never dreamed of discovering in those far-off days when I conducted my researches from our snug cottage in Somerset. But just how sinister was the secret I was determined to uncover only began to emerge as I gradually drew close to its heart. Then I too began to experience the plotters' power and utter ruthlessness, and to discover that it was far from having been dissipated after the summer of 1945.

31 May 1945: 'An Operation of War'

25 February 1944 Foreign Office to British Chancery, Berne:

'In our telegram No. 4635 of the 29th December 1943 we asked that the Swiss Government might make a strong complaint to the German Government regarding the conditions in which British Prisoners-of-War were transferred from Italy to Germany...

'It appears that during the journeys referred to above prisoners of war were crowded into cattle trucks at the rate of 45 men to each truck and were also compelled to march at a pace which forced them to jettison food and personal effects which were irretrievably lost. Further it appears that during these journeys prisoners of war were struck so severely with bayonets and rifle butts that several had to receive medical attention. 'Such treatment indicates a total disregard of the obligations imposed by the Prisoner of War Convention'.

26 May 1945

Brigadier Geoffrey Musson, commanding 36 Infantry Brigade: 'I realise that we are dealing with people of many nationalities whose languages we cannot talk and that there are many women and children amongst them... If it is necessary to open fire you will do so and you must regard this duty as an operation of war... If a person or body of people attempts to escape you will order them to halt by shouting at them. If they deliberately disregard your order and run away you will open fire, aiming at the legs if you consider this will be sufficient to stop the attempted escape; if not, shoot to kill'.

28 May 1945

Major-General Robert Arbuthnott, commanding 78 Infantry Division: '1. In accordance with the terms of the Yalta agreement all Soviet nationals in the hands of other allies are to be returned to the Soviet Union... including their camp followers who have fought with or co-operated with the enemy... Lying sick and expectant mothers will be sent by ambulance'.

7 June 1945

Major-General Arbuthnott:

'... I would like to express to all ranks who took part in this operation my appreciation of the way in which this duty was performed... Unfortunately many women, children and old people had to suffer ... Be that as it may, it is greatly to the credit of all concerned, officers and other ranks, that the task was handled so resolutely and with so little fuss...'

Today I have come to Moscow to announce publicly my reasons for my inability any longer to accept British censorship of my work as an historian. On 30th November 1989 in the English Royal Courts of Justice, Mr Justice Michael Davies issued an injunction placing me under a permanent and worldwide prohibition from uttering

'any ... words or allegations ... that (Lord Aldington) in connection with the handover in 1945 to Soviet or Yugoslav forces of military or civilian personnel was guilty of disobedience or deception or criminal or dishonourable or inhumane or other improper or unauthorised conduct or was responsible for the subsequent treatment of any such personnel by the Soviets or the Yugoslavs ...'

On 27 May 1945 General Domanov, commanding the Cossack settlement (Kazachi Stan) which had surrendered to the British in Austria, was informed by Major Rusty Davies, the young British officer appointed to supervise the great host of Cossack refugees, that he and all his officers were invited next day to a conference with a senior Allied commander at Villach. There they would be informed about the anxiously-debated question of their ultimate disposition by the British military authorities. On receiving the news most Cossack officers were delighted, believing that at last they might receive confirmation of their hope that they might be transported en bloc to some spot in the world where they could maintain the traditional Cossack way of life, free from fear of ever falling once more into the hands of Stalin.

One or two, instinctively suspicious after a lifetime under a system characterised by its adherence to the lie, requested an assurance that it was not intended to deliver them up to the Soviets. But Davies cheerfully assured them on his word as a British officer that all was as he had told them, and the lorries drove off amid the waves and cries of the officers' wives and children.

The afternoon of 28 May wore on, and when there was no sign of the officers' promised return in time for supper, a feeling of dread descended upon the waiting crowd. That evening an exhausted and half-hystericalofficer appeared in the camp. His appearance sufficed to convey an increasingly general fear: the British had undoubtedly betrayed them - the officers were being driven eastwards at speed under in guarded lorries escorted by armoured cars. Why these elaborate precautions, and what the necessity for convoying every officer, if all that was intended was to inform the Cossack high command of British intentions? Suspecting the worst, Alexander Shparengo had flung himself from the lorry as it slowed down at a bend in the road near Nikolsdorf, discarded his uniform, and made his way back with all speed to warn those who remained of the planned betrayal.

Shparengo's fears were ominously confirmed when Olga Rotova, an old emigrant from Yugoslavia, was summoned at eight o'clock to meet two British officers. After years of employment with the Standard Oil Company, Olga spoke fluent English and acted as interpretress to Major Davies in the Cossack camp. The brief exchange which followed provides an instructive and all too characteristic example of British conduct towards the Cossacks. 'I went along', recalled Olga. 'There stood only a lorry-driver and two of those English officers, who had departed with our officers. 'I turned pale.
'"Where are the officers?" I asked.
'"They are not coming back".
'"But where are they?"
'"I don't know".
'"But you promised four times that they were coming back. So you were lying?"
'Unable to meet my gaze, one of them replied:
'"We are only British officers fulfilling the orders of our superiors"'.
It would be superfluous to reflect how such a response would have been regarded by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Next morning at ten o'clock an agitated Major Davies appeared in the camp office to announce that all Cossacks were to be sent to the Soviet Union, under the terms of the Yalta Agreement. 'Including the old emigrants?' asked Olga Rotova. 'Including the old emigrants', confirmed Davies. The handover was arranged for 31 May, later that day altered to 1 June.

Throughout the next three days the tens of thousands of Russians and Caucasians around Lienz remained in an agony of apprehension and indecision. Black flags were hung on trees and over barracks doors, placards were erected declaring 'BETTER DEATH HERE THAN OUR SENDING INTO THE USSR!!', and a general hunger strike was agreed. The clergy took on the task of providing moral guidance, while the cadets provided organised disciplinary strength. Thousands of Cossacks signed petitions compiled by an emigre junior officer from Slovakia, appealing to the King and Queen of England, Churchill, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Pope Pius XII. Translated into English, they were given to Colonel Malcolm, Davies's commanding officer.

Irrational waves of optimism surged amidst the sea of despair which gripped the settlement. Strained relations between Stalin and the Anglo-Americans were reported on the radio. Much hope was attached to the likely effect of the petition. The improvised camp leadership decided upon a policy of passive resistance. The British were renowned for their humanity, and it was inconceivable that they would employ violence against their defenceless charges, whom honour bound them to protect - above all since they included thousands of women and children. If the Cossacks could but hold out for three or four days, the British sense of decency was bound to prevail.

For all the temporary raising of wild hopes such as these, fear and despair prevailed throughout the camp. Few managed to sleep over the next three nights, and people gave themselves up to prayer, clinging to loved ones from whom they knew they might shortly be parted for ever.

On the afternoon of Thursday 31 May thousands of men, women, and children gathered in a dense throng in the square facing the northern perimeter of the former German army barracks of Peggetz, a mile from the snug little town of Lienz in Eastern Tyrol. Every face was turned towards Hut 14, converted in recent weeks with loving care into an Orthodox church. From within came the sounds of the liturgy intoned by the priests of the Cossack settlement, the Kazachi Stan, at intervals solemnly taken up by the vast congregation assembled under the open sky. It was a beautiful spring day: in the orchards around apple-trees were in full blossom, and bright sunshine gleamed on snowbound peaks towering above each side of the long valley and warmed the green meadows below.

After the service was completed, the priests emerged and proceeded around the square, bearing on high a wooden crucifix lovingly carved by Cossack craftsmen with the image of the suffering Christ. Pausing in the middle of the square, the leading priest present, Father Vasily Grigoriev, addressed his anxious audience in loud resonant tones. Thousands of Cossacks and refugees had packed the camp square. Following the liturgy, Father Vasily read aloud the text of the petition to the huge crowd. It recounted in outline the fate of the Cossack people, who had from the outset fought uncompromizingly against Communist tyranny. Enduring indescribable suffering during more than two decades of Soviet rule, they had seized the first opportunity of escape, many being liberated from prisons and forced labour camps. These were the fugitive Soviet citizens, who had recently been joined by large numbers of White emigrants formerly domiciled in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and other European countries. All that these defenceless people implored, the petition concluded, was to be permitted to work under conditions of forced labour, however arduous, in some empty quarter of the vast British Empire.

Next morning at early dawn, concluded Father Vasily, everyone should assemble again on the same spot to hear divine service. Only God could save them now, and even if only an hour or so were gained the British would hardly attack people gathered in prayer. The people dispersed to their huts, where they passed long hours in a sleepless vigil. Shortly before dawn, when the darkness was accentuated by thick clouds, a faint rumble grew closer and ever more distinct. It was the slow clatter of a train approaching along the nearby railway line from Lienz, the first since the war had ended three weeks earlier.

When the dawn light was still grey and the air chill, the people emerged from their huts, passing along the rows on their way to the square. In the midst of the broad open space a wooden dais had been erected, upon which were set two improvised altars. As the priests made their preparations for celebration of the liturgy, the crowd assembled according to the pre-arranged plan. Since the barracks at Peggetz had been primarily designated for the Cossack families, a great proportion of its inhabitants were elderly people, women, and children. They gathered about the centre, encircled by a protective ring of young Cossack soldiers and cadets, sons and brothers determined to protect their families as best they could. Not less than four thousand people were collected on the spot.

The service had been in progress for nearly an hour, when the sound that all had dreaded was heard amidst the singing. Amid the chanting of 'Our Father' was heard the gatthering roar of approaching motors, and a moment later a convoy of military vehicles poured into the square from the gateway giving onto the road to Lienz. At the front of the column was a jeep, seated in which was the familiar figure of Major Davies. As it came to a halt, a column of three-ton covered trucks moved round to the western side of the square, while a squadron of armoured cars took up position on the right flank, their machine guns trained upon the crowd.

Through an interpreter Davies called upon the people to co-operate by entering the lorries voluntarily. Their only response was to continue singing, while the young men on the perimeter linked arms to form a protective human chain. After a second vain attempt, Davies barked out an order. From the backs of the trucks sprang down sixty soldiers, some armed with rifles and fixed bayonets, while other bore heavy pickaxe helves. The company drew up in close order on the western side of the square.

At a further order from Davies, his troops fired a volley over the heads of the crowd. A shriek arose from terrified women and children, and the dense throng lurched back before their assailants. Ready for the opportunity, the soldiers raced forward and launched a ferocious attack on the fringe of the crowd. Lashing out indiscriminately with rifle-butts and bludgeons, they dragged forth individuals and flung them into the backs of their trucks. A platoon standing in reserve fired a second volley over the heads of the crowd, while the armoured cars on the other side trundled forwardmenacingly.

Panic broke out among the people. While the young men on the outer rim continued an obstinate resistance, despite the blows which rained down on them, the spontaneous backward movement of so vast a number brought many to the ground, while others willy-nilly were pressed back over them. Women were screaming and children crying, even while others near the altar continued praying with all the strength they could summon. Beneath the accumulating heaps of bodies people were suffocating or being trampled to death.

The scenes that took place that day were horrible almost beyond description. British soldiers snatched babies from their mothers, flinging them into trucks; old men were beaten and kicked senseless to the ground; pregnant women were trampled underfoot; an unusually sadistic officer had to receive medical treatment for the blisters on his hand raised from excess of beating his defenceless victims.

Those who could sought to break away in flight. Two avenues presented themselves: the wooden boundary fence to the east which suddenly burst under the intense pressure, causing a swarm of terrified people to surge out into the field beyond. Others ran between the barrack huts to the south, making their way towards a narrow wooden bridge spanning the River Drau. Olga Rotova saw men staggering blindly forward, blood pouring from their beaten heads. Arrived at the banks of the Drau, which at this time of year is in full spate, she witnessed the utter despair of many of her people. Women were flinging their babies into the racing waters, hurling themselves in after them.

Despite British official attempts at the time and since to minimise the number of casualties, it is clear that hundreds of people were massacred by British troops during the operations conducted in early June 1945, and that the majority of the victims were civilians, a large number being smallchildren. The most terrible atrocities (a mere glimpse of which is attempted here) occurred in Peggetz camp. Perhaps the most repellent aspect of this particular outrage is the fact that its inhabitants were primarily refugees: the families, dependants, and other displaced victims of World War II. Though they included many able-bodied men, joined by others from nearby camps who infiltrated the camp to protect their families on 1 June, the majority of Cossack troops were quartered in temporary encampments distributed elsewhere along the Drau. They too were entrained on that and ensuing days in a series of comparably brutal round-ups, whichthere is regrettably not space here to describe.

Colonel Malcolm, commanding the battalion responsible for the administration and handover of the inhabitants of Peggetz, recorded at the time:
'This camp accommodated about 5000 men, women & children, being thefamilies and followers of the Domanov Cossack Division'.

All this is horrifying enough in all conscience, but what ensures its unique category, even among other major war crimes, is that it was wholly unnecessary. By 22 May a US cavalry corps had arrived on the edge of the British zone, with orders to take over the whole of the valley of the Drau where most of the Cossack families were encamped. Thus ten days before the carnage of 1 June the Cossacks could have ceased to remain a British responsibility, and have passed peacefully into American custody. Such was the arrangement agreed by the two Allied commanders, Alexander and Eisenhower, and the early arrival of US troops across snow-bound Alpine passes was due to the driving energy of General Patton.

One man intervened to obstruct this humanitarian move: Brigadier Toby Low, now Lord Aldington. On the afternoon of 22 May he telephoned the Chief of Staff of 8 Army in North Italy, assuring him:
'Do NOT now consider necessary for us to be relieved up to boundary suggested in our 0 449 dated 16th as situation in Lienz well in hand and can be organised by one unit'.

The Allied commanders immediately concerned saw no reason to dispute this considered appraisal from the man on the spot. However at his headquarters in Frankurt, the head of US Military Intelligence for SHAEF, Colonel Anthony J.D. Biddle Jr., pre-war US Ambassador to Poland, learned from his agents in Austria that 'Toby Low is planning to hand the Cossacks over to Stalin'. Informed that 'Low is running rings round Keightley' (his Commanding General), the horrified Biddle urged SHAEF command to intervene. However Eisenhower had no reason to believe that British troops could behave like Nazis, and the puzzled Americans stayed put. Biddle's British counterpart similarly informed the Foreign Office, whose reaction is regrettably not hard to surmise.

Aldington himself, Cowgill, and their judicial friends now claim that an American takeover would have made no difference, since they too would have been obliged under the Yalta Agreement to hand the Cossacks over to the Soviets. The argument is revealing of their concern, but bears no relation to reality. Alexander's appeal to Eisenhower was explicitly grounded on humanitarian grounds, and Eisenhower's acceptance must have been similarly motivated. Otherwise why did he not suggest that Alexander save everyone trouble by ordering the Cossacks to be handed over directly to the Red Army in Austria?

The fact is that the Americans would certainly have screened and retained the old emigres, and did not share 36 Infantry Brigade's capacity for brutalizing women and children. Eisenhower's order of 19 May is explicit on this issue:
'Accompanying the Cossacks are an estimated additional 11,000 camp followers (women, children and old men). Until these people can be segregated and properly disposed of as displaced persons they should be accorded the same treatment as the forces they accompany'.

Those who arranged the handover of the Cossacks to the Soviets did so in full awareness of their likely fate. Immediately after issuing his secret 'verbal directive' of 13th May to General Keightley to hand over all Cossacks, including the ''White' Russians' and 'their wives and children', British Minister Harold Macmillan was content to acknowledge in his diary that 'to hand them over to the Russians is condemning them to slavery, torture and probably death'.

It is indisputable that the repatriation of the Russians and Yugoslavs represented a major violation of the laws of war and humanity. Article 6 of the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal provided for the trial and punishment of those found to have perpetrated "War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment, or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder and ill-treatment of prisoners of war ..
"Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population ...
"Leaders, organisers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any ofthe foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan".

As Mr Justice Jackson emphasised at the outset of the Nuremberg Tribunal: 'while this law is first applied against German aggressors ... it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment'.

An Amendment to the British Manual of Military Law, issued in April 1944, instructed British troops of the invalidity of 'the plea of superior orders' as justification for war crimes, and emphasised 'the major principle that members of the armed forces are bound to obey lawful orders only and that they cannot therefore escape liability if, in obedience to a command, they commit acts which both violate unchallenged rules of warfare and outrage the general sentiment of humanity'.

The case of the Cossacks and Yugoslavs is exceptional in one striking respect among major war crimes, in that those who bore primary responsibility at 5 Corps Headquarters acted in deliberate disobedience to orders.

Both the circumstances of the event and Macmillan's subsequent justification of his lack of concern on the grounds that 'the Cossacks .. were practically savages' suggest that the forced repatriations might further be held to constitute a violation of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2 of which provides that 'In the present Convention, genocide means any ... acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group ...'

Since Lord Aldington was Chief of Staff throughout the decisive time of planning the operations, under English law it is impossible to criticise the conduct of 5 Corps command without incurring the danger of being held implicitly to impute to him responsibility for the planning and perpetration of war crimes.

There can be little doubt that the set purpose of the injunction was to suppress any animadversion on the operations. Thus the unqualified prohibition on any suggestion that Aldington 'was responsible for the subsequent treatment of any such personnel by the Soviets or the Yugoslavs' forbids adverse allusion to every decision made at Corps Headquarters to which its Chief of Staff could have been privy. Aldington's case at trial was that, though he undeniably played a significant role in preparing and implementing the handovers (especially in the case of the Yugoslavs), his confident belief that those handed over would be honourably treated meant that his could not be regarded as culpable responsibility.

This telling aspect of Davies's injunction was confirmed by the High Court judgment of 19th July 1990, which included this pronouncement by Lord Justice Beldam: 'It is also clear that, having had the respondent on his oath recall to the best of his ability the complicated events of May 1945 in which he took part, the jury were determined to demonstrate their satisfaction that he had played no part in, and bore no responsibility for, this shameful episode of history'.

Taken literally, as Court judgments must be, this ruling forbids my citing with or without comment a number of documents explicitly issued by Aldington in his capacity as Chief of Staff to 5 Corps (the most significant of which bears his signature), since to do so would contradict Beldam's judgment.

Davies's injunction included an obligatory rider granting 'the said Defendants ... liberty to apply to vary or discharge this injunction'. The extent of this 'liberty' was demonstrated by Judge Davies's refusal on 6th January 1997 to respond to my request for clarification of a specific point.

At successive hearings English High Court judges have avowed their confident view that they, rather than historians, should be empowered to decide the interpretation of history. Davies pronounced that 'unfortunately authors (and this is not a criticism of Count Tolstoy,because I am sure that all historians are the same), ... are not always concerned with real evidence, that is the point'. He went on to instruct the jury on successive occasions to regard me as 'a self-styled historian',and advised them of his hope that their 'decision in this case, whatever it may be, will put at rest a debate which has raged for years. It would be very nice to think that it would, and that one side or the other, or preferably both, would shut up about it all once you had given your decision'.

It is hardly necessary to state none of the jurors pretended to any understanding of history. Indeed, one betrayed his illiteracy by proving incapable of reading the oath. However, while matters of legitimate public concern in Britain continue to be constrained by the libel laws, so long will half-educated members of the public, acting under the practised cajolement of judges, be ascribed power to utter historical interpretations of canonical authority unaspired to by a Gibbon or a Mommsen.

It was with reference to my trial that Lord Denning, reputed one of the most liberal of English judges, advocated extension of libel law to protection of the reputations of the dead. As he clearly envisaged, such a measure would provide the judiciary with authority to adjudicate over the whole of history.

Such authority is in fact already unabashedly claimed by the English judiciary. In the High Court judgement of 1990 which denied me access to the Appeal Court, Lord Justice Beldam explained that the falsity of my 'interpretation of the many contemporary documents ... was amply demonstrated by [the jury's] award to the respondent of the unprecedented and enormous sum of damages of £1.5 million'. One is left wondering whether my researches would have been falsified to a less grievous extent had the award been, say, £500,000, and whether the judiciary holds this approach to historical judgment equally applicable in other fields of scholarship.

The most potent weapon in the armoury of oppression is the extensive powerof censorship which England's libel laws confer upon the wealthy and powerful. No other country in Europe or North America possesses anything remotely approaching this uniquely effective means of suppressing serious exposure of malfeasance. Though this is not the place for a general criticism of the English legal system, it is impossible to understand how Britain alone among combatant nations in World War II has been enabled to protect her war criminals from exposure without some understanding of her archaic legal procedures.

Unique to English libel law is the concept that the Defendant (i.e. the accused) is guilty until proven innocent. Unique too is the prohibition on granting legal aid to libel Defendants, the justification for this exception being so palpably frivolous that its upholders wisely remain reticent on the topic. At libel hearings the motivation and character of the Defendant are broadly speaking discounted by the Court, whereas the virtues of the Plaintiff tend to be extolled by judges in terms which make the panegyrists of later Roman emperors appear petulant detractors by comparison. The supposed suffering undergone by the (usually wealthy and secure) Plaintiff is dwelt upon at length by sympathetic judges, while the attendant danger and fear which an unsought action visits upon the unwary Defendant are suppressed. The Plaintiff is scrupulously protected from any disclosure of discreditable behaviour not considered directly relevant to the action, whereas the reputation of the Defendant may be subjected to harsher excoriation by the Judge even than by Counsel for the Plaintiff.

This however is only the beginning of the story. In Court the Defendant discovers himself to be caught up in a theatre of Gothic appearance and practice, where in melodramatic fashion hero and villain are identified from the outset. It is clearly appropriate that the Plaintiff's Counsel should open the action, but no reason has ever been forthcoming to explain why he is additionally privileged to deliver his Final Submissions at its conclusion. Since judges tend to identify with wealthy and well-connected litigants, this practice ensures that the jury may retire with anything up to a week's rhetoric of plaudits showered upon the Plaintiff and dark insinuations against the Defendant ringing in their ears.

Every detail of the setting of this dramatic display is scrupulously arranged to ensure that no untoward mischance frustrate judicial intent. The Plaintiff and his Counsel are 'by custom' situated in immediate proximity to the jury. Judge Davies utilised this convenient 'custom' to permit Lord Aldington to mutter for their benefit throughout the trial a sotto voce running commentary on the proceedings. This succession of ingenious contrivances ensures that the Plaintiff almost invariably wins in cases where the Judge's prejudice lies in his favour, whether the prevailing motive be fellow-membership of an exclusive local golf club, or some issue of more serious concern to the great and good.

The great advantage of this system over the former exercise of Crown prerogative in the field of criminal libel is that the ruling camarilla is enabled to silence and ruin its troublesome critics, without the state's involvement being apparent. So elaborate a procedure did not evolve by accident, and the facility with which its reform might be effected betrays the extent to which it represents an instrument designed for a conscious purpose.

As if this were not enough, I faced the united hostility of that uniquely bizarre institution which is the English judiciary. Judges in England and Wales are appointed by the Lord Chancellor, a minister of the government of the day, under a procedure so secretive as to be specifically excluded from the provisions of the 1984 Data Protection Act.

The Act of Settlement of 1701 provided that judges cannot be dismissed 'but upon the Addresses of both Houses of Parliament': a procedure so impractical in real terms that despite the inevitable occurrence of innumerable incompetent and corrupt judges over the passage of three centuries, only one (and he Irish, needless to say!) has been dismissed throughout that period. As Dr Johnson objected in 1775: 'There is no reason why a Judge should hold his office for life more than any other person in publick trust... A Judge may become corrupt, and yet there may not be legal evidence against him. A Judge may become froward from age. A Judge may grow unfit for his office in many ways'.

It would be hard to conceive of a system better calculated to ensure selection of a body of men so broadly characterised by bigotry, self-satisfaction, and intellectual torpor. Furthermore English judges are prevailingly selected from an unusually constricted social and professional background. There is evidence indicating that common membership of a masonic lodge has on occasion induced a judge to favour one party against another, while the profession's concentrated membership of the Garrick, Athenaeum, and similarly exclusive clubs accentuates their propensity to common prejudices and absence of professional detachment.

In my case the Judge's notoriously corrupt conduct of the trial provided obvious grounds for appeal. However a successful application by Aldington for security of costs in the sum of £125,000 denied me access to the AppealCourt. Subsequently it emerged that Aldington had gained his application by means of fraud. His costs had been secretly met throughout by the Sun Alliance Insurance Company, of which he was formerly Chairman. This transaction was kept secret from shareholders until the decision of the Appeal Court was made.

All appeared to have gone well for Lord Aldington and his allies on thejudicial Bench and in other influential quarters. However it had not occurred to them that an historical tragedy of the magnitude of the 1945 deportations might not be so easily suppressed as they had supposed. Fresh evidence inevitably continued to accrue after the 1989 trial, touching on every aspect of events. Above all, the English Courts had not reckoned with the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, which opened a flood of evidence confirming the justice of my original charges.

Even in 1989 the nature of the crime was so clearly indicated by evidence then extant, that Aldington was obliged to rely primarily on his alibi. Until he was obliged to issue his libel writ in 1987, he had repeatedly asserted that he did not depart from Austria before his birthday on 25 May 1945. This inescapably placed him in a position of prime responsibility for the relevant decisions and deceptions of higher command adopted at his Headquarters, virtually all of which occurred before that date.

Immediately after issuing his writ, however, Aldington suddenly recollected that he had in reality departed at dawn on 22 May. However he delayed supplying any details until shortly before the trial opened two years later, thus effectively denying the Defence opportunity to check his story. Endorsed eagerly by Judge Davies at every turn, Aldington provided so circumstantial an account of his journey home to England in Court as to persuade the jury of the accuracy of his belatedly revised memory.

In the years that followed evidence has been painstakingly unearthed which falsifies almost every detail of Aldington's reconstructed 'memory'. Most damning of all was the discovery of the record of the signal sent from his Corps Headquarters the day after his departure, which proved that he had perjured himself throughout the trial.

So extensive and clear was the evidence, that eminent lawyers advised me to take an action for perjury against Lord Aldington. The affidavit was prepared by Richard Rampton QC and his junior counsel Victoria Sharpe, two of the most experienced and respected libel lawyers in the practice. An equally reputable firm of solicitors, Messrs Schilling & Lom, volunteered to prepare the case for hearing. In the event Mr Rampton was prevented by his prior commitment to another case from representing me in Court, and his place was taken by Mr Alun Jones QC. All these distinguished lawyers were so convinced of the strength of my case that they acted throughout for no charge.

Lord Aldington, as ever fearful of a hearing held in open Court, applied for my application to be 'struck out' as intrinsically worthless. The ensuing case was heard before Mr Justice Andrew Collins, a thoroughly disreputable character newly appointed to the Bench after being exposed before the Scott Commission as having perjured himself as a Crown prosecutor in an attempt to send an innocent defendant to gaol. Collins summarily ordered the case to be heard in secret: a power jealously preserved by the judiciary, of which the public for obvious reason is kept in ignorance.

His fawning attitude towards Lord Aldington, and cavalier dismissal of any evidence damaging to his interest ('it cannot be true if Lord Aldington denies it'), led to my Counsel's threatening to withdraw from a hearing which was as farcical as it was shameless. In the event he was persuaded to continue, on account of the fact that my appeal to the European Court of Human Rights required my having exhausted all domestic remedies. Since Collins made no attempt to disguise the fact that he had prejudged the case, my Counsel agreed to continue on the condition that a transcript would be made available for use in an appeal.

A full assurance being given (in fact recordings are taken of all hearings), the case predictably concluded with Mr Justice Collins agreeing to strike out my application. For good measure he made my solicitors liable for costs payable to Aldington, and in this skilful way prevented my being legally represented for the future. When my solicitors applied for a copy of the promised transcript, they were informed that owing to a technical error each of the three successive days of the hearing had been regrettably unrecorded.

When I went through the motions of appealing against the Collins judgement, the Appeal Court found against me. This time there was not pretence of a destroyed transcript: I was flatly denied access to it.

Given this awesome armoury lying at the disposal of the English authorities, it is not surprizing that well-intentioned friends have from time to time advised me to abandon a struggle which appeared patently hopeless from the start - above all for someone who, as Davies was at pains to emphasise to his jury, is of foreign 'ancestry and background'.

Two factors have principally prevailed upon me to continue my battle. In the first place my concern to seek justice for the thousands of Aldington's victims is not motivated by any foolish belief that I must necessarily succeed. It is a sad fact that in this world truth is far from being an invincible weapon. Equally, being confident after a quarter of a century's research that I have broadly been proven right in my interpretation of the crimes and tragedies which took place in 1945, I would regard it as contemptible not to seek to make those facts known.

Secondly, despite the pronouncements of the judges to the contrary, I am an historian. The notion that I should be deterred from seeking the truth of past events to the best of my ability I find as professionally unacceptableas it is morally repugnant. Of course as an historian I have better reasonthan those who are not to appreciate that there cannot exist any definitive 'truth' about past events. 'Understanding' is the more appropriate term inthe context, which can only be reached by continuing research, and above all OPEN AND INFORMED DISCUSSION (the capital letters will strike dread into the judicial heart).

Had Lord Aldington's action against me related to a private dispute of limited scope, there can be no doubt that he and his friends on the bench would have silenced me long ago. Like my unfortunate friend Nigel Watts, had I continued obdurate I should have been lodged in gaol for as long as the threat was perceived to persist.

It was the fact that the issue arose out of an historical event of major proportions that presented a wholly unforeseen threat to the judges' power to constrain opinion. Their general ignorance of any field of knowledge beyond the narrow compass of their profession led them to repose unbounded confidence in their capacity to regulate the course of scholarly investigation, however abstruse or complex its nature. Today the English judiciary remains blithely unaware that ultimately it can no more check the advance of knowledge in 1998 than could the Inquisition in 1633 suppress Galileo's revelation that the earth circulates the sun.

In England, however, freedom of expression on exceptionally delicate subjects can be checked by many methods, most of them legal and others less so - but always permissible. Following the trial Lord Aldington's lawyers circulated a forged Court document to all libraries in England and Wales,purporting to shew that my book had been found libellous in consequence of the trial. Such is the culture of deference in official circles in Britain that virtually every copy was obediently withdrawn by librarians, none of whom consulted me or my lawyers to establish the validity of the claim. The success of this forgery has ensured up to the present time that the only versions of events in 1945 permitted officially acceptable in Britain are those asserting that the forced repatriations were wholly justified, and blackening the reputation of the defenceless victims.

Fresh evidence inevitably emerges, which in turn requires fresh perspectives and understanding. I must not labour the point, but it is a measure of the extent of English judicial simplicity that it was not anticipated that an event so recent and of such magnitude, involving many different nations, must of necessity have generated a body of evidence so extensive as to be unlikely to have attained total discovery by any arbitrarily-selected date.

The capacity of English judges to pronounce on any issue beyond the constricted intellectual bounds of their profession is further illustrated by their inability to anticipate that historical understanding is inevitably subject to endless modification in consequence of subsequent accretion of information. In the event it was this factor which resulted in embarrassing consequences beyond the imaginings of the judicial mind.

The dramatic collapse of Communism in Russia and Yugoslavia during the months following the trial resulted in the release of archival material containing revelations of unanticipatable significance. As early as 1991 General Volkogonov, appointed head of the Russian archives by President Yeltsin, authorised my unprecedented access to the records of the Red Army, SMERSH, and NKVD. The voluminous evidence I have acquired in consequence of this generous aid cannot however be published, owing to the restrictions imposed by British censorship.

As I write these words the British press is filled with reports of the state visit of the Emperor of Japan. Much coverage is devoted to Japanese cruelties inflicted upon British prisoners of war in World War II, accompanied by vociferous demands that the Emperor (in despite of his country's constitutional prohibition) issue a public apology for events which occurred when he was a schoolboy. Like Leo Tolstoy when he read the report of the Kherson executions in the newspaper Russia on 11 May 1908, my indignation boiled over when today (26 May 1998) I read a lengthy article in the Daily Telegraph by John Keegan, a prolific writer on military history.

Headed 'TIME FOR A JAPANESE APOLOGY', Keegan draws disparaging comparisons between Japanese savagery and British chivalry and magnanimity during and after World War II.
'In the West, where morality is still founded on Christian precepts, wrongdoing is expiated by confession of culpability, which is recognised by others as an attempt to make good the wrong done. Confession, "owning up", although it will not exempt the wrongdoer from punishment, may nevertheless establish him or her as someone who deserves a measure of forgiveness'.

Keegan goes on to explain that Japanese brutality was not characteristic of their military tradition, which on the contrary 'observed the traditional samurai code of ethics - bravery in the face of the enemy, courtesy towards the weak'. It was only in the 1930s that Japan's rulers introduced a deliberate policy of brutalization into their armed forces, which resulted in dreadful crimes committed in occupied neighbouring counties and against Allied prisoners of war.

However, concludes the moralist,
'Since 1945, Japan's ruling class has adopted another change of culture, specifically benevolent and anti-war. Should it be so difficult for them now to go the extra mile and fully apologise for the cultural aberration since the 1930s? If they remain unwilling to do so, that would suggestthat their apparent change of heart is only a change of face. That would be shameful'.

Keegan's complacent assumption of moral authority surely rates as one of the most striking instances of British hypocrisy on record. Japan's war crimes were abhorrent, and her government's financial compensation to the victims was as derisory as her recent expressions of regret appear inadequate. Nevertheless many of her war criminals were tried and severely punished after the war, and she has at least paid some compensation and proffered some apology.

But what do we find in the case of Great Britain? Like the Japanese, the British Army has by and large long been respected for its traditions of honour and chivalry. The vicious acts perpetrated in Austria in May and June 1945 represent a striking aberration from the customary conduct of the British soldier. As with the Japanese, it proved necessary for those who authorised crimes against humanity of such a scale to brutalise their own soldiers, in the process seeking to dehumanise the victims in order to remove any inhibitory sense of shame or compassion.

But here the resemblance stops. NO British soldier of any rank has been punished for participation in war crimes. Suggestions of financial compensation for the few surviving victims have repeatedly been contemptuously rejected by the British Government. In 1958 the Foreign Office cursorily refused the pittance for survival in DP camps in Germany, requested in a petition submitted by a handful of non-Soviet old emigres released under Krushchev's amnesty, whose handover in 1945 violated even those orders under which the British 5 Corps claimed to be operating.

As for an apology, it is surely now superfluous to mark the difference between the Japanese and British reactions. Successive British Governments, both Labour and Conservative, have refused to conduct an official enquiry into the events. In 1990 a High Court Judge pronounced that Lord Aldington had acted 'nobly' in 1945, war crimes legislation designed to bring to justice possible offenders domiciled in Britain was carefully phrased to exclude British war criminals from its provisions, and following Lord Aldington's triumph in the courts in 1989 Government ministers declared the issue to have been conclusively resolved by the jury's verdict and the impartial adjudication of the 'Cowgill Report'.

As for the outrageous Tolstoy, Judge Davies succinctly put the official view, when on 2 November 1989 he reminded the jury at the Aldington trial: 'I am quite certain that the jury will be thinking ... that it is at least possible that you have allowed ancestry and background to influence your cool historical judgment on the matters which we are investigating'.

An influential extension of this view of the innate untrustworthiness of foreigners was earlier voiced by the same John Keegan, who in today's newspaper censures Japan's asiatic incapacity to proffer adequate apology for war crimes. In an spluttering condemnation of my book The Minister and the Massacres, Keegan concluded with his version of the determining factor of this regrettable story:
'The truth of the matter is the Balkans is a backyard region ... The losers presented the British with a problem when problems marched in droves, and that [sic] the British solved it by doing what seemed easiest at the time. No credit to anyone involved. But when Alexander the Great captured Darius's Greek mercenaries after the battle of the Granicus, he put them all to the sword. The aftermath of all wars is very nasty and prudent minorities should take care not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time'.

Now the true position is made clear. It was the troublesome refugees who bore real responsibility for what occurred. Uncouth creatures from 'a backyard region', they gratuitously 'presented the British with a problem', which the British had no alternative but to solve by sending them to be enslaved or killed. By the end of May 1945 British officers were deeply preoccupied with the complex organization of race-meetings, cricket-matches, yachting on the W(rthersee, and similar demanding projects. If a horde of ill-bred foreigners, people like sixteen-year-old Zoe Polanska and her schoolgirl friend Tonia, liberated by Allied bombing from Nazi imprisonment and torture at Dachau, were inconsiderate enough to seek refuge 'in the wrong place at the wrong time', then what could they fairly expect but to be bayoneted, battered with rifle-butts, flung into cattle-trucks, and shipped off to 'slavery, torture, and probably death' - as Keegan's hero Macmillan placidly accepted was the fate to which his 'verbal directive' consigned them?

Immediately following my exposure in 1986 of the extent of the crimes and the identity of its perpetrators, the British Government secretly established and funded a professedly independent 'Committee', with the official remit of obscuring the crime and protecting its principal perpetrators. So confident were the authorities in their assumption of the credulity of a public deprived of access to all but officially-approved information by the libel laws and lack of a Freedom of Information Act, that they entertained no qualms in recruiting onto their four-man 'independent Committee' two men who bore personal responsibility for the operations, as morally to have blood up to their armpits.

Thomas Brimelow (needless to say, subsequently ennobled) was from 1945 to 1947 one of that handful of grey officials at the Foreign Office who took it upon themselves to ensure that every man, woman, and child, however obscure their refuge in war-ravaged Europe, should be sought out and delivered to SMERSH. As I had documented in my Victims of Yalta, Brimelow and his colleagues, wholly unconcerned with international law, did not scruple to violate that of their own country, deliberately violating theAllied Forces Act in order to despatch thousands of Russians from Britain itself to Soviet ports. Subsequent reports of quayside massacres by horrified British sailors and soldiers were minuted with contemptuous dismissal.

Brigadier Tryon-Wilson, Lord Aldington's fellow Chief of Staff in Austria, spent much of May and June 1945 painstakingly arranging for provision of trucks and railway stock needed to deliver the thousands of victims to their executioners. A man with such a record was unlikely to feel his honour besmirched when invited to perjure himself as a witness in the 1989 libel action.

So far from seeking the redemption their spokesman John Keegan loftily recommends to the Japanese, the British authorities conspired to protect their influential predecessors' crimes by meeans of this surreptitious approach. Unable to refute my reconstruction of events by rational arguments, they turned to other means to destroy my reputation as a reputable historian. This was after all a tried and tested approach, deployed when the system ('the Thing', as William Cobbett well termed it) came under exceptionally grave threat.

My accusation against Lord Aldington, who as Chief of Staff acted in a capacity which common sense alone might suffice to indicate the extent of his responsibility, provided them (so they believed) with opportunity for crushing me as an individual and silencing me as an historian through the uniquely effective legal means afforded by the English libel laws.

After a significant display of reluctance, Aldington issued a writ for libel against me. It seems hard to imagine that a man conscious of his innocence would have undertaken such a course, given the huge expense and supposed risk of submitting his reputation to twelve semi-literate members of the public. My two-page photocopied indictment was circulated almost extc \l1 "War Criminality and International Lawclusively among people connected with Winchester College. As Warden of the College, he was ideally placed to arrange a meeting at the school, where he could have demonstrated his innocence before an audience he might expect to prove as sympathetic as could be hoped for. The libel laws could be counted upon to prevent the public learning my side of the argument.

However, as has since emerged, Aldington's well-placed friends were not slow to assure him that neither expense nor risk would arise were the dispute to be placed in the hands of the libel courts. It was his good friend Sir Thomas Bingham, then Master of the Rolls and now Lord Chief Justice, who encouraged him to undertake the action. Apart from their close friendship, Bingham owed Aldington a favour for appointing him a Fellow of Winchester College. It was Bingham too who recommended his friend to engage as counsel Charles Gray QC, a lawyer possessed of talents peculiarly apt for such an undertaking. As an additional precaution (it pays to be careful, even when you hold every trump card), Mr Justice Michael Davies, Aldington's close neighbour in Kent and fellow-member of the exclusive little Rye Golf Club, exercised his authority as Head of the List to select that judge he considered pre-eminently appropriate to preside over such a case - himself.

As for the hundreds of thousands of pounds required to mount such an action, the Sun Alliance Insurance Company assured their former Chairman that his legal expenses would secretly be met to whatever extent proved necessary. No troublesome need for consultation with shareholders: English company law is most obliging when a Director finds himself in trouble.

31 May 1998: "I Cannot be Silent"

'It seems to me that it is the especial duty of an historian to record merit, and to confront evil deeds and words with the fear of disgrace in the eyes of posterity'.

(Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, iii, 65)

'... I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate'.

(Lord Acton, A Lecture on the Study of History)

'He then departed from the senate, and committed suicide by starvation. The Senate ordered his books to be burned by the magistrates: but they survived, first concealed and ultimately republished. This leads one to scorn the crass stupidity of those who believe that the authority of the present time can suppress the memory of succeeding ages'.

(Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, iv, 35)

May 1908: I Cannot Be Silent

Russian Censorship in 1908 War Criminality and English LawIt may justly be asked why I have delayed nearly nine years before feeling undertaking this public defiance of the corrupt judicial and political administration of Britain. I have never sought to conceal my contempt for the verdict of the Court in 1989, which pronounced me a criminal, while awarding Aldington guarantee of perpetual protection from exposure. As if that were insufficient, a succession of English High Court judges has enthusiastically endorsed Lord Aldington's fantastic financial reward of £1,500,000. The Foreign Office vigorously argued the appropriateness of the sum before the European Court of Human Rights in 1993 and 1995. It is not hard to imagine the feelings of the scattered survivors of his atrocities, when they read of the mercenary little Lord's public expressions of delight at being granted a sum beyond the dreams even of his avarice: a sum which amounts to just £200 for the head of each of his 75,000 victims.

From the moment his verdict was pronounced, I felt in honour bound to ignore Judge Davies's injunction. Seeking as it does to check the advance of historical knowledge, it is patently as ignorant as it is oppressive. Instructing the jury, shortly before inviting their verdict, he expounded the English judicial view of history: Members of the jury, there may also have been speculation as to whether your decision in this case, whatever it may be, will put at rest a debate which has raged for years. It would be very nice to think that it would, and that one side or the other, or preferably both, would shut up about it all once you had given your decision.

It was in reference to my case that Lord Denning, by English standards an exceptionally 'liberal' judge, publicly advocated extending the English libel laws to protect the reputations of the dead. Such a measure would of course empower the judiciary to regulate the writing of history. Several judges before whom I appeared confidently expressed the view that their pronouncements bear an authority as absolute over history as they do in law.

To a large extent this attitude reflects the notoriously constricted intellectual capacity of leading English judges, and the fatuity of their belief that history can be decided by judicial fiat but served to increase my determination to ignore their threats. I never hesitated to reiterate my interpretation of events in 1945, though (unlike that of the judges) it continually evolved with the regular emergence of fresh historical evidence. Over the years I have accepted regular invitations to express my views in the media and public lectures abroad, and it appears that the judges felt it safer to ignore me rather than enforce proceedings which might have the effect of dangerously reigniting public concern over an issue on which so many of the British public impudently hold views at variance with those they have been instructed to believe.

However publicity even of the magnitude which the issue has continued to ensure remains essentially ephemeral. Moreover I am not primarily concerned to indict Lord Aldington for his criminal responsibility, which even the dwindling band of his defenders has come to acknowledge as generally accepted by the public. As an historian I see my task as that of establishing as clearly, fully, and accurately as possible the course of events in British-occupied Austria in 1945.

This can only be achieved by my writing a book, in which most of the colossal array of fresh archival evidence I have accumulated since my last book on the subject appeared in 1986 will for the first time be made public. Whether it will justify the interpretation I place upon it will be for readers and other historians to judge, but until such a book is published no one is in a position to arrive at any informed view.

Since the English judiciary claims worldwide authority extending far beyond even the bounds of the former British Empire, the only way in which I could publish my researches uncensored by judicial interference would be to emigrate.

Being as English as I am Russian, this is not something I intend to do - at least, not for such a purpose. Like my relative ninety years ago, I now challenge the British authorities to do their worst. Punishment in such a cause I would regard as an honour - above all, when I consider how relatively mild must be imprisonment in even the grimmest of England's squalid gaols, compared with the sufferings of Aldington's thousands of victims, bayoneted and bludgeoned into cattle-trucks by British soldiers, mercilessly tortured and machine-gunned in the forests of Slovenia, or enduring a living death in the slave-labour camps of GULAG.

After my prolonged exposure to the working of English justice I am far from being so ingenuous as to imagine the threat an idle one. In Imperial Russia the maximum sentence for public violation of the censorship laws was three months imprisonment. In England Nigel Watts received an eighteen months' sentence for writing three intemperate letters.

The fact remains that, regardless of my personal fate, in time the truth will inevitably emerge. Should my incarceration serve to remind future generations of this atrocious crime and the centuries-old system of judicial corruption which has served so effectively to protect its perpetrators, it will fulfil a worthwhile purpose.

Since 1990 I have on numerous occasions set about compiling the book upon which I am now belatedly at work. Yet time and again, to my intense frustration, I found myself unable to complete the task. Much of this failure I confess must be ascribed to the frustrations of attempting to write in a country where an historian's work can be subjected to the suffocating censorship which I have experienced.

However there existed another less discreditable inhibition. My confidence was undermined by an uneasy awareness that I had not reached a position where I could achieve much more than confirm arguments set out in The Minister and the Massacres, which had gained almost universal notoriety in consequence of the trial in 1989. With hindsight, there seemed little point in labouring to produce a book no publisher would dare to publish. Nor did it appear a necessary step towards engaging the support of the British public, when there existed every indication that the overwhelming majority was firmly persuaded of Aldington's guilt.

Of necessity it was only by gradual steps that fresh evidence accumulated to the extent that it now so materially affects understanding of what really occurred in 1945. This is not the place to set out the extent and nature of the material I have discovered, though it will scarcely surprise the reader to learn that a major part emerged from the Russian archives. Hitherto I had written almost exclusively on the basis of evidence available from British and American sources. Now at last these can be assessed in the vital context of the vast range of Soviet records, to which even in 1989 I never dreamed I would gain access.

It was a curiously coincidental combination of events late last year which brought me to the resolution that I could no longer remain silent. In November 1997 Christopher Booker, the journalist recruited in 1986 to set the 'Cowgill Report' in his flawless prose, unexpectedly published a third version of that officially-authorised justification of British war crimes. Booker's mysteriously entitled A Looking-Glass Tragedy was published by the otherwise reputable firm of Duckworth in November 1997, despite their awareness that seven years after its ignominious rejection by a succession of respectable publishers the author had made no attempt to update its contents.

A Looking-Glass Tragedy contains no evidence of note which has not already been published in the 'Cowgill Reports'. Under normal circumstances it is pre-eminently a book to ignore, and that I would cheerfully do - but for one unusually squalid aspect of its contents. Writing under the banner headline CONSPIRACY OF LIES in the Daily Mail on 22nd November 1997, Booker announced that 'the fate of the Cossacks and Yugoslavs who were handed over, although tragic, turned out to have been seriously exaggerated .. Despite the general impression that almost all the 45,000 Cossacks returned to the Soviet Union were either shot or died in Stalin's labour camps, it [has] emerged that the majority were actually released from the camps a year later'. Writers like Solzhenitsyn or myself, anxious 'to build upmaximum sympathy for them as innocent victims', now stood exposed as having been speciously engaged in 'blurring over much of what really happened to the Cossacks when they returned to Russia'.

A Looking-Glass Tragedy reposes securely on the shelves of libraries throughout England and Wales, from which my The Minister and the Massacres has been obediently removed by librarians on Lord Aldington's instructions. Influential British historians lavished praise on what Alistair Horne termed 'Booker's work of remarkable, painstaking diligence'. Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, confirmed that 'Booker does a wonderful job in explaining the context'. John Keegan, a prolific writer on military history, believed the subject 'deserves the fullest historicalinvestigation. Christopher Booker is in a position to undertake the task'.

Booker's discovery that, contrary to popular belief, few Cossacks had died in Soviet captivity was vigorously endorsed by these experts. 'Of the Cossacks repatriated to Russia, few were actually killed; horrendous as their privations were, the vast majority survived the Gulag', wrote Alistair Horne, personal biographer to Harold Macmillan. Dr Robert Knightof the University of Loughborough likewise accepted that 'many of the lower ranks seem to have been released from the Gulag surprisingly soon'.

Booker's dramatic 'discovery' derived from a single source: a brief memoir included in a collection of Cossack memoirs painstakingly assembled by the veteran General Vyacheslav Naumenko, which he published in New York in two volumes in 1962 and 1970. Booker explained that 'Velikoye Predatelstvo (The Great Betrayal) was significant because it remains to this day the most comprehensive account of what happened to the Cossacks and Germans during the years after they had been handed over - and in this respect, it again provides a rather different picture from that given later by Tolstoy'.

Furthermore:
'The fullest and most detailed account of this story contained in Naumenko's book was that provided in three letters sent to him in 1954 by Gerhard Petri, a senior lieutenant on von Pannwitz's staff ...' This assertion of the unique authority of Petri's account appears not a little arbitrary, comprizing as it does fewer than six pages of a 719-page collection, and it is hard to see why a solitary German account should be accorded preference over the wealth of Cossack memoirs which predominate in Naumenko's collection.

However that may be, what Petri's account proves, according to Booker, is that relatively few of the Cossacks repatriated from Austria in 1945 stayed for long in the camps, let alone died there: '... even among the officers and Germans, probably the majority survived their sufferings, to be released between eight and twelve years after the war. The vast majority of the rank-and-file, possibly amounting to well over 30,000, were released from the camps into 'internal exile' after a year and freed three years later'.

Despite Booker's vaunted mastery of his source, he has in reality never read a word of Naumenko's great collection, his difficulty being that he knows not a word of Russian. The passage upon which he relies for his astonishing claim that 30,000 Cossack rank and file soldiers were released from GULAG camps in 1949 is a brief passage from Petri's account, this translation of which appears in the British Government's 'Cowgill Report': 'At the end of 1949 the Reds condemned all the Germans and all the officers of the Cossack Corps to 25 years collectively. The rank and file were sent home'.

The first of these sentences is correctly translated. The second, however, reads in the original Russian:
Russian readers will at once notice that a word has been omitted from the Cowgill version: rather a significant one, as it happens. For what the sentence really states is:
'The German rank and file were sent home'.
Anyone with a cursory knowledge of post-war history will at once recognise the allusion. During the last quarter of 1949 the Soviet Union effected the final repatriation of unsentenced German and Austrian prisoners of war, in consequence of which 158,195 returned to their homes.

Thus Petri was referring to Germans who had nothing whatever to do even with the Germans in the Cossack Corps, let alone the Cossack rank and file. It is clear that the omission must have been deliberate, and that its purpose was to falsify history, for the purpose of misleading readers that nothing very dire befell the Cossacks handed over by Aldington and his colleagues.

That the omission of the key word 'German' was deliberate is not just an unmistakable inference. As I have said, though Booker would like his readers to believe that he has read Naumenko's book from end to end, it is a fact that he cannot read a word of Russian. Thus it cannot have been he who doctored the record, and it is not difficult to discover who did.

The only member of the 'Cowgill Committee' who could speak Russian was Thomas (later Lord) Brimelow, who at the time of the forced repatriation had been Second Secretary at the Northern Department of the Foreign Office. His posting at the Moscow Embassy from 1942-45 seemingly left him with a particularly soft spot for Stalin's Russia. A confirmed socialist, he was one of the most ruthless proponents of the forced repatriation policy, supporting the Foreign Office's secret violation of English law to return unwilling Russians from Britain, and expressing particular eagerness for the handover of terrified women and children. In June 1945 he welcomed Soviet ravaging of Eastern Europe as introducing a more equitable distribution of property. He was certainly right in respect of Red Army soldiers' attitude towards women.

Emphasizing Brimelow's meticulous attention to matters of detail, Booker acknowledges:
'We [the Cowgill Committee] also benefited greatly from his ability to read documents, books and diaries in both German and Russian'. It must be clear by now that it was Brimelow who translated the passage upon which Booker relies for his 'no Holocaust' claim, and that Brimelow's omission of the crucial word 'German' was deliberate. Not only was he scrupulously accurate by nature and a fluent Russian-reader, but unlike his fellow-members of the 'Committee' he must have recalled well the liberation of German prisoners of war in 1949, which lay directly within his professional field at the Northern Department.

Booker's attempt to deny the horrific fate of the Cossacks is contemptible, and morally places him on a par with those who seek to deny Hitler's slaughter of the Jews. At the same time, his is an exceptionally pliable and inadequate personality, and he is widely regarded as a foolish and vainposeur, eager for attention regardless of its nature. One can feel contempt for Booker (many people in Britain do), but scarcely anger.

What really angers me is the fact that this evil lie was originated by one of those very 'desk-murderers' who sent the Cossacks to their fate, exulting in the service he rendered Stalin.

It will not have passed unnoticed that there may be a secondary, more pragmatic reason for seeking to deny the Cossacks' suffering. For if it be accepted as a fact that they were despatched to a terrible fate, then it is natural to conclude that someone must have been responsible. If not Aldington, who was 5 Corps Chief of Staff at the time, then who? The question has only to be posed to make its danger apparent. It is after all the rhetorical question posed by that great proportion of the British public who accept Aldington's guilt, while not pretending to any detailed knowledge of the evidence.

However if it could be demonstrated that in fact nothing distressful occurred at all, then the question becomes meaningless. Brimelow's sinister forgery had a secondary practical purpose, very characteristic of its devious deviser.

Not content with distorting history, Brimelow collaborated with his friends in the Foreign Office in establishing the 'independent' Cowgill Committee, devised as a camouflaged instrument to destroy my reputation as an over-persistent critic of the forced repatriation policy.

Then, when Aldington was persuaded by Sir Thomas Bingham to launch his libel writ, Brimelow was given opportunity to intervene yet more efficaciously. With the whole-hearted co-operation of successive Foreign Secretaries Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe and Douglas (now Lord) Hurd, the Foreign Office adopted elaborate measures to remove documents essential to the defence case from the Public Record Office. At the Ministry of Defence Aldington yet again found a Minister who had attended his school, George Younger, who made comparable arrangements for removal of military documents.

Throughout the libel action Brimelow regularly attended as an adviser to Aldington and his team. Meanwhile Cowgill, the former MI6 officer, attended regular daily briefings at the Ministry of Defence. After each session he would repair to the chambers of Aldington's lawyer, Charles Gray QC, to discuss precisely how advantage could be gained from the manipulation of vital papers.

Nor was Gray the only lawyer linked to the ubiquitous Cowgill Committee. On Day 19 of the trial I alluded in passing to the fact that I had compiled a ninety-page critique of the first Cowgill Report, published in late 1988 with the purpose of swaying public opinion against me at the trial. Both Gray and Cowgill looked unnerved, as well they might, since the Aldington legal team and Cowgill Committee were effectively acting as a united body. What discoveries had I made, which might yet be used to their disadvantage in the trial?

Four days later Gray requested Judge Davies to order my notes to be handed over to him. Since the Cowgill Committee officially had no connexion with the trial, my counsel, Richard Rampton QC, expressed astonishment at the request and vigorously opposed it. However Judge Davies promptly issued aspecial ruling compelling me to produce the copy Aldington and Cowgill so urgently needed.

All this but touches on the fringes of the machinations which surrounded the trial, and associated Cowgill Reports. All this I have become accustomed to, as any citizen of England must once he approaches too close to the seat of power. But that the icy hand of Brimelow should reach out from the grave to direct British officialdom's campaign of lies seeking to deny the suffering of the Cossacks is something which revolts me to the core. I can remain silent no longer.

I quoted earlier the words Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy wrote to his wife Sophia:'You would not believe how, from the very commencement of my activity, that horrible Censor question has tormented me! I wanted to write what I felt; but at the same time, it occurred to me that what I wrote would not be permitted, and involuntarily I had to abandon the work. I abandoned, and went on abandoning, and meanwhile the years passed away ...'

Nothing my relative wrote strikes closer to my heart than these words. My dear wife alone knows the difficulties I have encountered in compiling this brief and unsatisfactory pamphlet, which has brought me more distress and frustration than anything I have previously attempted. Why should this be? After all, all that is required is a brief summary of a long and complex story, which no reasonable person will expect to be exhaustive. It is only necessary to ensure that the summary be fairly balanced, and that what it does contain is throughout factually accurate. Such an achievement scarcely represents an insuperable task - and yet I have found found it a horrible business. Why should that be?

Obviously I am not happy at the prospect of being confined to prison for an indeterminate period, when so many years of my productive literary life have been spent in fruitlessly combating a legal system, the extent of whose corruption has startled some of the most experienced lawyers in this country. As Nigel Watts discovered to his cost, the penalty for infringing the political censorship exercised by the English law of libel far exceeds anything provided under the legal code of pre-revolutionary Russia. I have many books planned and ready to write, and have reached an age where the allocated span of my life has all too perceptibly begun to dwindle.

Moreover it is likely that the authorities' long-declared intention of confiscating my library and archives will be no longer postponed. This in itself would be sufficient to put an end to my ambitions, and ensure that I will reach my end contemplating a largely wasted life. I am not Leo Tolstoy, but I nurture the modest belief that I have a contribution to make to historical studies which I should be sad to see come to nothing.

I suppose that no one who is not a writer can fully imagine the extent of the debilitating effect of censorship. Not only is there the prohibition upon investigation and publication of matters of public interest and concern, but the intolerable frustration of being compelled to remain silent in face of officially-inspired publications which pervert the truth and vilify those who seek free and open discussion. The silencing of an author affords licence, too, to others who, motivated it may be by vainglory or desire of financial gain, are afforded licence to print whatever insults and lies they choose, undeterred by fear of response.

In my case a greater obstacle lay in my acute consciousness of the inadequacy of a publication of this limited scope to present an adequate rebuttal to a lie so extensively disseminated, backed by all the resources of the British state. So much that is of prime importance had inevitably to be glossed over or omitted altogether. Finding myself at every stage faced by this necessity for abbreviation and excision, I confess that I find myself succumbing to enervating sensations of inadequacy and despair.

I am conscious too that another possessed of stronger will than mine would have discovered means of subjugating such weakness. So I am all too aware of the inadequacies of this little work, and of how little it may achieve.

However at the end of it all I know I must do something. I have seen Lord Aldington, confident in the protection conferred by his position at the Rye Golf Club, perjure himself over and over again. Let it be assumed for a moment that he really is as guiltless as English judges have pronounced him: that he really did believe Stalin and Tito incapable of maltreating those who had fought against them; that his order of 21 May ('In all cases of doubt, the individual will be treated as a Soviet National') really was intended to reflect the 8 Army ruling 'In cases where nationality is in doubt, personnel concerned will be sent to 373 PW Camp for adjudication'; and that he was right forty-five years after the event in recalling blazing sunshine on the morning of 22 May at Klagenfurt, and all contemporary reports to the contrary wrong. Allow all these things, but consider also the undisputed consequences of his actions. Given the circumstances, might not a man so innocent of guilt have found it appropriate to attempt some sincere gesture of contrition or regret?

No, we are talking of Lord Aldington. A man inadvertently kills a child who dashes out before his car in a busy street. No one can hold him to be at fault, but does he hesitate to express his sorrow to the grieving parents? Does he not remain consumed with guilt, though reason tells him the accident was unavoidable? Lord Aldington's orders sent hundreds of children and babies to their deaths, but never once has he expressed repentance for his actions or pity for his victims. On the contrary, he and his protectors have been at ever-increasing pains to malign the victims. Murdered and tortured in their lives, their memory must be disfigured to ensure Lord Aldington's self-respect as he and Michael Davies strut across their golf course.

Under protection of an injunction designed to prohibit publication of any reasoned response, it is alleged by his officially-sponsored supporters that the 15 Cossack Cavalry Corps belonged to the SS (false); that its soldiers perpetrated war crimes in Slovenia, North Italy, and Austria (false); that 30,000 Cossacks were released by Stalin to their homes in 1949 (false); that Field-Marshal Alexander secretly authorised the use of force to deliver Russians to SMERSH (false); that 8 Army authorised 5 Corps to lie to Yugoslavs in order to lure them into the power of Tito (false).

I have witnessed, too, the gloating arrogance of Aldington's judicial friends upon the bench, as they savour their power to bend the law whichever way they choose. The smirk upon the self-satisfied features of Sir Stephen Brown, when he protected Aldington from the inconvenience of my being permitted an appeal hearing, was doubtless that which he permitted himself when returning the innocent Birmingham Six to prison. When Judge Andrew Collins ruled evidence inadmissible by definition if it was unacceptable to Lord Aldington, the perversion of justice troubled him no more than in the Ordtech case, when to gain his long-desired elevation to the bench he perjured himself to secure the conviction of a guiltless defendant.

When my spirit flags, I think not of these unprincipled and ill-educated little despots, who in their eighteenth-century costumes issue injunctions they pronounce binding throughout the world, but of all those countless victims whom Aldington without ever a twinge of conscience consigned in cattle-trucks to the slaughter-house. Like his judicial colleagues, he was not motivated by the pathological obsession of a Hitler or a Stalin, nor even the chill bureaucratic efficiency of an Eichmann or a Brimelow, but by overweening longing for social recognition and reward: Sir Toby Low, Member of Parliament; Lord Aldington, Warden of Winchester College ... These, it seems, were the classic bourgeois ambitions, lampooned in the nineteenth century by Thackeray's Book of Snobs, which in this terrible twentieth provided such a man with sufficient motive for mass murder.

When my resolution wavers, I think of Milan Zajec, the bones of whose four brothers lie yet in the charnel-pit of Koevje; of Ivan Matveievich Kudrenko, the proud Kuban Cossack who wore out his life in a lone crusade to ensure that his comrades did not die forgotten; of Karl-Gottfried Vierkorn, who spent nearly nine years toiling as a slave labourer in the flooded coalmines of Donetsk.

I also think of others involved in different contexts: of the chivalrous Field-Marshal Alexander, whose orders if obeyed would have saved the Cossacks in spite of the Yalta Agreement; of Major Paul Barre, whose conscientious objection to a patently inhumane order saved 6,000 Slovenecivilians from intended slaughter; or of Major Rusty Davies, racked by a lifetime's guilt for fulfilling orders his unhappy but ultimately compliant superiors ought to have rejected.

Finally a promise I cannot avoid is that to which I solemnly engaged myself to Evgenia Borisovna Polskaya in Pyatigorsk on 26 June 1996. Sadly I learned of her death last year at the age of eighty-seven, but if anything this has increased my resolve to let no more time pass by without fulfilling my solemn word to Evgenia Borisovna that I would do what I could to make the world aware of events which brought death and indescribable suffering to the children whom she loved and cared for, and effectively destroyed the greater part of her life.

Whether or not this publication achieves its purpose remains to be seen, but whatever the outcome history long outlives the pronouncements even of English judges, and nothing can stop the truth from eventually becoming known. If my imprisonment serve no other purpose, it will provide lasting testimony to the corruption of the ruling camarilla in Britain, which remains unique among combatant nations of World War II in refusing to acknowledge or atone for its war crimes.

In post-war Germany there was reputed to exist a sinister underground organization named 'Odessa', established by former members of the SS to arrange refuge for Nazi war criminals. Every organ of the German state was deployed to apprehend and bring such people to justice, and even at the present time aged men with evil pasts are arraigned and brought to trial. This year Italian courts sentenced two former SS officers, Erich Priebke and Karl Hass, to life imprisonment for their role in the 1944 massacre of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves. That they acted in obedience to orders was no defence: the Nuremberg Charter merely acknowledged in formal terms the pre-existing law and custom of war.

In France Maurice Papon, an official in the French Vichy Government, has received a ten-year gaol sentence for arranging the deportation of 1,690 Jews (including 223 children) to the transit camp at Drancy, whence they were transported to the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. He would have received double the sentence, but for the fact that the jury accepted that he was unaware of their ultimate destination and fate. It was precisely this plea which the judge presiding over the Aldington case accepted as a vindication.

Contrast the situation in England. Papon is without doubt a despicable creature. There is some extenuation of his crime, in that his actions were committed in wartime, effectively under the occupation of one of the most ruthless regimes known to history. Aldington, on the other hand, acted as representative of a civilised democracy and committed his crimes in peacetime. He violated not only almost every provision of international law, but acted against orders in arranging the forcible handover of tens of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs, lured or driven into cattle-trucks, in which they were locked until safely delivered into the hands of their executioners.

His 'Definition' order of 21 May, which ruled that every member of the Cossack 'units', including old emigrants, Germans, and Austrians, were to be regarded as Soviet nationals, ensured that thousands were handed over whom the 8 Army order of 13 March instructed him to protect. Most incomprehensibly evil of all was his personal intervention on the afternoon of 22 May 1945 to prevent the transfer of the Cossacks to safety in Germany. As his closest colleague, Brigadier Tryon-Wilson, thoughtlessly confirmed in his 1990 interview recorded at the Imperial War Museum: '... if you remember at one stage, I think it was Alex got on to General Eisenhower and said: "Look, can you relieve 5 Corps, and take all the Cossacks and Russians, and take them over. Can you come in and take over that area and that area there, so that we can concentrate on this area of the front instead of the enormous area which we were operating in". And probably, when you spoke to Brigadier Low, he will have told you that at the moment critique he decided that he didn't want that help, because operationally we were in a position to deal with it as we thought right and proper, and - which he did do'.

Papon sent 223 Jewish children to Drancy, claiming he had not guessed their ultimate destination. Aldington arranged for nearly a thousand children - many of them newly-born babies - to be handed over: and that, not to some supposedly innocuous intermediary destination, but into the hands of SMERSH itself.

Papon will spend the rest of his days in gaol, a contemptible figure, whose prime fault appears to have been weakness rather than malice. There is nothing weak about Aldington, and everything that is malicious. But no cell door opens for Aldington. The British War Crimes Bill was rephrased expressly to protect him and his kind. In England the equivalent of the Odessa organization sits in high places, and it is its opponents who are hunted down. Those who expose the actions of a British war criminal must be silenced. Nigel Watts received an eighteen-month gaol sentence for criticizing Aldington in three short letters: a term amounting to about a sixth of that pronounced on Papon. In my case, if the punishment is to prove commensurate to the crime, I may expect the twenty years that Papon escaped.

As I have said, I shall doubtless find the confinement a torment hard or impossible to bear. Without my wife, my children, my library and work my life will I fear seem pointless and unendurable. But far harder and more impossible to bear is the prospect of further remaining silent in face of such monstrous injustice, corruption, and cruelty. At least I shall no longer feel that my silence makes me complicit, in however small a degree, with the gloating triumph of evil which stalks across this once fair country.

Leo Tolstoy was prepared to face imprisonment, defying Russian censorship in order to denounce the formal execution of twelve violent men. How much more should I follow his example, when British censorship extends its protective hand over a man who bears responsibility for the illicit organization of the death and enslavement of 75,000 innocent men, women, and children?

On the ninetieth anniversary of my illustrious relative's completion of his I Cannot be Silent, here in free Russia I conclude my own protest with his words:

.. I cannot and do not wish to struggle further, because (I frankly confess it) my exposure of these men will, one way or other, provoke the exclusion I welcome from that circle of people among whom I dwell, and in which I cannot but feel myself to be a participator in the crimes perpetrated ... all those transportations of men from place to place ..those hundreds of thousands of starving labourers tramping across Russia .. those hundreds of thousands of wretches, dying of typhus and scurvy in holds and prisons inadequate to contain such a multitude ... the suffering of mothers, wives, fathers of the exiled, the incarcerated, the hanged .. And recognizing this, I can no longer endure it: I cannot, and must free myself from this painful predicament.
It is impossible to live so! I at least cannot live so, and will not. That is why I write this, and will by all means in my power circulate it both in Russia and abroad, that one of two things may happen: either these inhuman deeds may be stopped, or that my connection with them may be dissolved, and I put in prison, where I may be clearly conscious that these horrors are not perpetrated in my name ...

N.N. Gusev, (Moscow, 1928), pp. 155-57, 175.
Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years (London, 1908), p. 107.
Ibid., pp. 194, 318.
S.A. Makashina (ed), (Moscow, 1978), i, p. 552.
Aylmer Maude (ed.), Family Views of Tolstoy (London, 1926), pp. 8-13.
Gusev, : 1891-1910, p. 635.
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (London, 1990), p. 170.
Cf Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia,
1894-1917 (Princeton, 1993), pp. 20-38.
Ch. Zalilova and K. Neshchimenko (ed.), (Moscow, 1978), ii, p. 264;
Tolstaya, ii, pp. 306-7.
Caspar Ferenczi, 'Freedom of the Press under the Old Regime, 1905-1914', in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (ed.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989), p. 197.
( In the absence of a Freedom of Information Act, the British Government retains total discretion to decide which documents are suitable for public scrutiny. Furthermore (as I have since learned to my cost) these documents may be withdrawn from the Public Record Office and withheld without explanation for as long as the appropriate Minister chooses. In my case I was alerted to the release of the documents in 1973 by a friend, Robert Temple. Initially we planned to co-operate on a book, but the scheme was soon abandoned for reasons too involved and unimportant to relate here. However last autumn two competing books about my writing and the libel action alleged that I 'stole' the book from Temple shortly afte