Foreign & Commonwealth Office

London SWIA 2AH
Telephone: 0171-270

20 September 1999

Ms Zoe Polanska-Palmer
33 Cedar Road
Broughty Ferry
Scotland
DD5 3BA

Dear Ms Polanska-Palmer,

Thank you for your letter of 30 August to the Foreign Secretary. I am replying as the desk officer dealing with Russia.

You were understandably upset by an article in the "Toronto Sun", which claimed that a Foreign Office official had replied to Count Tolstoy on 13 July denying British involvement in the repatriation of people claimed by the Soviet Union as Soviet citizens at the end of World War Two.

The news story is misleading. Our reply did not claim that Ministers were unaware that forcible repatriation occurred. There is no question of our wanting to hide these events from public view, or deny that such reepatriation occurred.

The policy of forced repatriation was a binding requirement of the Yalta agreement signed by the British and US governments with the Soviet Union. The official documentation makes clear that Allied Governments had concerns about this requirement. But it was clear that the British Government was bound by these obligations to repatriate those claimed as citizens of the USSR, using a minimum of compulsion where this could not be avoided. Documents detailing British policy on repatriation are available in the Public Record Office, and also in the official FCO publication "Documents on British Policy Overseas" (see for example: Series I, Volumn VI, No. 76).

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