The unquiet graves of Yalta: forty-five years ago, seventy thousand Cossacks and Yugoslavs were "repatriated" to torture, slavery and death at the hands of Stalin and Tito. Was this a war crime?

The Unquiet Graves of Yalta

NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE in London closed with the libel hearing of all time. Aldington v. Tolstoy (a lord and an emigre count, together with a second defendant, plain Mr. Nigel Watts) resulted in record damages of 1.5 million pounds sterling. Costs of an estimated further 1 million pounds sterling were awarded against the two defendants; none of which, they promptly declared, could they possibly pay. The allegation against which the plaintiff, Lord Aldington, was suing was that he was a "war criminal" who had sent back seventy thousand Cossacks and anti-Tito Yugoslavs to their deaths in 1945.

At times, the case, which ran for a near record of eight weeks in the sulphurous confines of a tiny courtroom, threatened to become not just a matter of libel, but a major war-crimes trial--against Britain. The savage charges had been around for many years, but the manner of their being repeated, day after day, in the press and TV coverage, affected British consciences like nothing else in living memory.

The whole story goes back to the infamous Yalta agreement, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the beginning of 1945, when the defeat of Germany was already a certainty; and, indeed, it often seemed that the Yalta signatories should have been the principal defendants standing in the witness box in Courtroom 13. Under Yalta, all Soviet citizens captured while serving, or having served, with the Germans were to be repatriated--forcibly if necessary. As the European war ended in May 1945, British troops had reached the Austrian province of Carinthia. There, amid the terrible chaos of defeat, they found some four hundred thousand surrendered German troops, and among them forty thousand "White Russians." Some of these had committed appalling crimes during the war (for which they earned the group as a whole scant respect among the war-weary British); but a lesser number were old emigres from the time of the Russian Revolution, who were not Soviet citizens, and who should never have been sent back.

However, most of them were repatriated, amid appalling scenes of brutality. The old emigres were either executed, or despatched to long sentences in Gulag. Also repatriated at the same time were miscellaneous groups of Yugoslavs who had fought against Tito. They, too, suffered enormities of torture and massacre at the hands of the Communist Yugoslavs. But, unlike those claimed by the Soviet Union, they were not covered by the Yalta agreement; and, indeed, the Serbian Chetniks among them had actually fought, for a while, on the Allied side. But their return was dictated by military expediency. The weakened British forces were faced with a major threat from the Titoist Yugoslavs; and, it has to be said, were not supported by their American brethren-in-arms. In the military parlance of the time, the "area had to be cleared" in order to face possible action against Tito. Thus the price paid for securing parts of Austria and northern Italy against an envisaged Communist threat was a dreadful human injustice.

This was the background. I myself first heard about the repatriations shortly after I had left the British Army, at the end of the war, from my godmother, Kitty Atholl--a tiny and valiant anti-Communist, unkindly nicknamed "the Red Duchess" for her unorthodox criticism of official Tory policy. She had started a "League for European Freedom" through which--a still small voice in the wilderness of the late Forties--she fought tirelessly against Soviet Brutalities in Eastern Europe.

Thirty years later, in 1974, revelations by Solzhenitsyn about the 1945 repatriations gave rise to a courageous and harrowing expose by Nicholas Bethell, called The Last Secret. Three years later, the standard was taken up by Nikolai Tolstoy, in the first (and best) of his three books on the subject, The Victims of Yalta. As the title would suggest, Tolstoy lambasted the British framers of the Yalta provisions, as well as those whom he deemed personally responsible for the 1945 repatriations. It was an honorable, and profoundly disturbing book which pulled no punches. Tolstoy at the time was 43 years old, a second-generation Anglo-Russian, collaterally related to the great novelist. His father had dropped the title of "Count"; young Nikolai retained it. An extraordinarily attractive, intense young man with piercing blue eyes, Nikolai, for all his Russian blood always affected to dress like an English Edwardian squire.

Yet his writing came increasingly to reveal a fanatical obsessiveness that was more Slav than Anglo-Saxon. Appalled by the injustice inflicted upon his fellow White Russians, and dedicated to the cause of seeing that it should be requited on a public platform, Tolstoy progressively persuaded himself that the repatriations had flowed from an evil conspiracy. In Stalin's Secret War (1981), his second book (described by a not-unfriendly reviewer as "unbearably strident"), he squarely pinned the blame on Harold Macmillan as the central villain in the conspiracy.

This is where I came in, having recently been appointed (in 1978) the former Prime Minister's official biographer. Trying to weave a way through the tangled cobweb of truths, half-truths, and downright inaccuracies woven by Tolstoy proved to be one of the longest and most arduous tasks I have ever undertaken as a writer; it was certainly the most difficult part of the whole biography. Equally the charges made by Tolstoy were the most serious that had ever been leveled against any British Prime Minister. To have evaded them, or appeared to sweep them under the carpet, would have been a gross dereliction of a biographer's duty.

In simplest terms, the charges were these: In May 1945 Macmillan, who was Churchill's Political Advisor to the Allied C-in-C of the Mediterranean, Field Marshal Alexander, had been sent by Alexander to Carinthia to advise the Corps Commander there, one General Sir Charles Keightley, on how to deal with the problem of Tito and his Soviet backers, then pressing aggressively on the door. According to Tolstoy, during the brief encounter of an hour or so, Macmillan managed to "conspire" with Keightley and his right-hand man, a thirty-year-old much-decorated brigadier called Toby Low (who later became Lord Aldington, and a pillar of the Tory Party), to send back all the "White Russians." This was flouting the orders of the high command, and deliberately deceiving both his best friend, Alexander, and his boss, Winston Churchill.

IT WOULD BE impossible here to go into all the evidence, on both sides, which I set out at length in Volume I of Harold Macmillan; but there was a time when the case against Macmillan looked daunting. The detective work carried out by Tolstoy was most diligent, and praiseworthy--but (as it turned out) incomplete. So many replies to key army signals appeared to be missing; from which Tolstoy would often conclude that they had been destroyed, or suppressed. At the same time, however, I personally had a strong hunch--based on little at the time, apart from my own experience as a wartime soldier of how the military mind actually works--that the kind of "conspiracy" alleged by Tolstoy was most improbable, simply on the grounds that too many senior officers would have to have been "in the know." Equally, Tolstoy had elucidated no motive whatsoever for the Macmillan-Keightley-Low "conspiracy."

Tolstoy's third, wildest and most irresponsible book, The Minister and the Massacres (published in 1986) at last came out with a motivation: Macmillan (who was, of course, the "Minister") had in some way been in the thrall of the KGB! It was a bad book, based on a few thoroughly specious suppositions (I counted 262 "seems" or "might-have-beens" in almost as many pages, before I gave up), and in it Tolstoy jeopardized what claim he had to be a serious and objective historian by his tendency to shape the facts around conclusions he had already formed. He also committed the fundamental error (not uncommon among contemporary historians) of judging the actions of the past with the knowledge and standards of today. In addition, the book was highly libelous of both Macmillan and Low/Aldington (Keightley, being dead, was beyond the avail of British libel laws). Friends and relatives urged Harold Macmillan (by then the Earl of Stockton) to sue, but--already 92--he reckoned (correctly) that he could not have withstood an ordeal in court such as was imposed on Lord Aldington this past year. He died in December 1986, not surviving to see his vindication; the Tolstoy allegations undoubtedly made his last years miserable.

Macmillan and Aldington both consistently refused to see Tolstoy. When Macmillan was first approached for an interview, he was already over eighty; he turned down many of the applications to take up his time (he received a plethora from young American PhD students); and he had, perhaps intuitively, no high regard for Tolstoy's credentials as an "historian." But, in being rebuffed by Macmillan and Aldington, Tolstoy assumed that both must have been guilty of a "conspiracy."

IN RETROSPECT, what I recall as being particularly distasteful at the time was the credulity with which the media and the British literary establishment reacted to the Tolstoy allegations. Even among the most respectable journalists and historians, who should have known better, one encountered a strong (and immediate) belief that Tolstoy had to be right, that Macmillan had to be a villain. It was not dissimilar to the credulity with which allegations were accepted, many years ago, that Winston Churchill had personally had General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Polish hero, murdered.

Perhaps equally distasteful was the way in which Tolstoy's publishers so readily accepted The Minister and the Massacres. Century Hutchinson must surely have been aware that several other publishers had rejected it on the grounds that the book was libelous, if not of Aldington, then certainly of Macmillan. It was to cost them 30,000 [pound sterling] subsequently in an out-of-court settlement to a separate libel action by Aldington.

Tolstoy's obsession had brought him into contact, in 1985 with Nigel Watts, a Kent property developer who had a burning private grievance against Lord Aldington. Watts felt that his sister had suffered an injustice when the Sun Alliance insurance--of which Aldington was then chairman--refused to pay out on an accident policy after the death of her husband. For Watts, Tolstoy drafted a pamphlet, accusing Aldington of being a "major war criminal whose activities merit comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia." It further charged him with "having issued every order and arranged every detail of the lying and brutality which resulted in these massacres." Ten thousand copies were circulated where they would inflict the greatest injury upon Aldington--including residents of the village where he lived and the parents of boys at Winchester College, Aldington's old school, of which he was then warden.

Tolstoy had, this time, gone too far--much too far. Aldington suffered a flood of anonymous telephone calls. He sued Watts for libel. In a mad act of courage or self-immolation, depending on how one looks at it--Tolstoy then established yet another precedent for British libel annals: he put up his hand and said, in effect, "me too." Up to now, Tolstoy had not been involved in Aldington's suit. But his association with Watts, who was palpably motivated by malice, and who did not help his case by storming out of court during the judge's summing up, clearly cost him dear when the final bill came to be paid.

It took two and a half years for the case to come to trial. In the meantime new evidence had been gathered that was devastating to Tolstoy's "conspiracy" thesis. In addition to, and largely supporting, the material that I had managed to collate on Macmillan's role, an ex-army brigadier, Tony Cowgill, had independently taken it upon himself to track down all the "missing links" in the story. Many of the signals declared "suppressed" by Tolstoy were turned up by Cowgill's persistence. Well before the trial his committee had reached "the view--quite different from where we had all started--that Tolstoy had in fact got his interpretation of what happened in 1945 crucially wrong." Among other things, a set of documents discovered in Washington, D.C., after the trial had actually begun revealed such a wealth of discussion of the repatriation plans on various British army levels that the "conspiracy" theme collapsed totally.

In Cowgill's opinion, Macmillan was left entirely in the clear; it remained with the jury in Courtroom 13 to dispense justice for Aldington. But a jury including one black, one Asian, and six women, all too young to have been in the war, seemed remote from the dreadful events of 1945, as one after another elderly Cossack and Yugoslav survivor filed through the witness box to give searing evidence for Tolstoy. Whatever one may have thought of Tolstoy's case, his articulateness and courage in the box demanded admiration; it was the kind of courage that, in wartime, might have gained a Victoria Cross (probably posthumous).

Tolstoy was, however, remorseless in his repetition of the war-crimes charges against Aldington in court; at several times when I was there the old man was reduced to tears. It was this arrogant impenitence, and Tolstoy's inability to ascribe any rational motive to Aldington, that must have sunk him in the jurors' eyes. At the end of eight weeks in court, they vindicated the honor of the old soldier, Lord Aldington, and found that he had been grievously libeled. Tolstoy declared that he was bankrupted. An appeal is reported to be pending.

However grievous the libel committed, it was the grotesque scale of the damages chiefly that left a bad taste in the mouth by trial's end. Aldington, it was argued, a rich man, would have been contented with no more than 150,000 [pound sterling] and vindication.

Meanwhile, on the wider issues thrown up by the case, there is still much discomfort in Britain. Tolstoy, in pursuit of this grail, has ruined himself; one journalist likened the Count to "Prince Rupert, charging the rabble. Now he has been reminded what happens to lone cavaliers." But, at least, and at hideous cost to himself--as well as great pain to Lord Aldington and Harold Macmillan--he did achieve his declared ambition of getting the tragedy of 1945 publicly aired.

Had Tolstoy triumphed, the implications would have been quite immense. Those in the Foreign Office currently involved in the decision to repatriate the Vietnamese "Boat People" would doubtless now the suffering sleepless nights. Britain's (and America's) role in the Nuremberg Trials would be deeply in question.

Repeatedly in Courtroom 13 the judge, Michael Davies reminded the jury that this was not a war-crimes trial. Yet at times it certainly seemed like that. It was not the place for such a judgment to passed, and doubtless the historical argument will continue. But if a war crime had indeed been committed by Britain in 1945, then the jury's verdict made it plain that it was not the Aldingtons and Macmillans who were guilty, but all who were responsible for Yalta, from Churchill and Eden downward. In all his obsessiveness, however, Tolstoy failed to recognize one fundamental truth, nor (at least during the days when I was there) was the point ever made as forcefully as it should have been in Courtroom 13: namely, that it was not the British, but the corrupt and brutal Communist regimes of Stalin and Tito, which actually carried out the torture and executions of the wretched repatriates of 1945. This has to be where any tortuous parallel to Nuremberg breaks down.

Mr. Horne's second, and final, volume of the official life of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was published by Viking--Penguin in November. It was selected by the New York Times as one of the 13 "best books" of 1989.