What the people knew was not true, what was true was not known

Since a clear understanding of the Western leaders’ duplicity depends in part on the accuracy of certain documents in the Soviet archives, it is essential to compare their version of important events with what is known or believed in the West.

Immediately, the reaction of most Westerners will be, ‘How can one trust Soviet records, knowing that the Soviet system normally depended on mass deception?’ This is a main reason that the Soviet archives are dependable. Virtually all the Soviet lying went on outside the archive. Soviet archives could safely record the truth because they were top secret, available only to the top members of the regime.

As General Dmitri Volkogonov has written, Lenin began the practice, enforced rigidly for seventy years, of storing most important documents recording Soviet actions and policies, no matter how brutal.16 Thus the paradox foreshadowed by George Orwell became reality: what the people knew was not true, what was true was not known.

This dizzying paradox was not unknown in the West at the time of Watergate, of the bombing of Cambodia, of the French atrocities in Indo-China and Africa, of the UK police actions in Northern Ireland, the arms sales to Iraq in the 1980s, of Canadian war crimes in Somalia, and so on.

Many of the statistics of the Gulag kept in the CSSA support both the picture of terrible suffering and of a strange but endurable prison-society whose major fault was captivity, much like the common picture of a Western jail.

What objective tests can we apply to the accuracy of these statistics? The most impressive evidence of the accuracy of the NKVD records is the story of the documents recording the Katyn massacre. In April 1940, the Red Army slaughtered many thousand Polish officers taken prisoner during the Soviet attack on Poland in 1939. This massacre was of course hidden from the local population, and from other units of the army and the NKVD. Records of the slaughter were routinely made and sent to Moscow.

After the Germans invaded Russia, the surviving Poles became the allies of their captors. Released from prison to help form a Polish army to fight the Germans, the Polish General Anders met Stalin in Moscow. Unaware of the fate of the missing officers, Anders asked Stalin face to face to return them. Stalin dissimulated. Anders pressed the point, sending one of his staff officers all over the USSR to search for the missing men.17 They found nothing definite, but vague, disquieting rumours. At first the Poles thought that some 3,000 had been massacred; later they suspected it was more, perhaps as many as 15,000.

After the Germans took the Katyn region and discovered some of the mass graves, they held an investigation that showed that the Soviets were guilty. When the Polish refugee government in London asked the International Red Cross to investigate, the Soviets broke diplomatic relations with them. After the Red Army retook Katyn, the Soviets held their own commission which found the Soviets innocent and the Germans guilty. But the German evidence of Soviet guilt was so compelling that both Churchill and Roosevelt covered it up as a matter of policy. Churchill told Roosevelt that the massacre had been committed by the Russians, and advised him to keep this secret. An American friend of President Roosevelt, Ambassador Earle, showed the President proof that the Soviets were guilty, but following Churchill’s advice, the President forbade him to publish it.18And Katyn was a massacre of Poles, who were allies of the West.It was to defend these people that Britain and France had gone to waragainst Hitler.

At the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945–46, the Soviets presented a case against the Germans so absurd, based on fumbling witnesses who muffed their rehearsed lines and a clumsy forgery of evidence, that the Americans and British were able to persuade them to withdraw it. For fifty years Soviets from the lowest to the highest positions lied, deceived, dissimulated, hypocritically accused others, offended friends, made new enemies, murdered those who told the truth and lost face while the world argued over, and suspected, who had killed the prisoners of Katyn. And for fifty years, the NKVD document ordering the death penalty for the Katyn prisoners lay on the shelves of the archives in Moscow, along with letters and memos ordering the subsequent cover-up.19In the same archive were other papers showing that Molotov, Kaganovich and Stalin had ordered the execution of 38,679 army officers, poets, writers and apparatchiks in 1937 and 1938.20 Surely, if the Soviets were ever going to falsify documents, it would have been those ones. And they remained, intact, accurate, damning.

A war crime in which the British collaborated with the Soviets was hidden by both powers in 1945 and for long after. In fact, the British government and one senior officer, Lord Aldington, were still denying responsibility fifty years later. In 1945, the British delivered thousands of prisoners of Russian nationality, including women and children, into Soviet hands in the full knowledge that the Soviets would shoot the leaders and enslave the rest. These people were ethnic White Russians who had fought the Soviets as allies of the British during the Russian Civil War. They fled Russia before the Soviets could catch them at the end of the war, so they had never been Soviet citizens.

Stalin had no legal rights to many of these people, and no moral right to any of them. But the British delivered them anyway, in scenes of dreadful suffering and protest so grotesque that very soon the British soldiers were rebellious and their officers feared they would not be able to deliver any more prisoners.21All this was revealed a few years ago in several books and a pamphlet by the renowned British author Count Nikolai Tolstoy, to the amazement and fury of high officials of the British government. They immediately closed ranks against the author, who says that they committed or procured perjury and illegally sequestered documents in order to help Lord Aldington succeed in a libel action against Tolstoy.

16 Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin (New York: Free Press), p. 29. Volkogonov also told me similar things during an interview at Staraya Ploshschad in Moscow on 17 May 1993.
17 W. Anders, An Army in Exile (London: Macmillan).
18 Louis Fitzgibbon, Katyn: A Crime Without a Parallel, p. 183.
19 Politburo Minutes, 5 March 1940, File No. P.13/144, Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow. With thanks to Dmitri Volkogonov.
20 F-2, Op. I, D.259, in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow. With thanks to Dmitri Volkogonov.
21 See Nikolai Tolstoy, The Minister and the Massacres; also Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta; also Elfrieda and Peter Dyck, Up from the Rubble.

 Crime and mercies
The Fate of German Civilians
 Under Allied Occupation,
 1944–1950

JAMES BACQUE