How Britain delivered a million into slavery

sir – Between 1944 and 1947, Britain delivered up to Stalin more than a million Soviet nationals, together with a substantial number of Russians bearing citizenship of other countries.

As a British politician complacently recorded at the time, this was knowingly “condemning them to slavery, torture and probably death”. His estimate was accurate. While a substantial number were slaughtered at the moment of handover, the remainder were consigned to the slave-labour camps of Gulag.

There, they lived and died in appalling conditions, fully as terrible as the miseries suffered by slaves transported to the Americas in past centuries. And these events occurred, not centuries ago, but within living memory.

This year is the 75th anniversary of especially dreadful scenes enacted in Austria, when women, children, and even babies were beaten with rifle-butts and pickaxe helves into cattle-trucks transporting them to the sadistic slave-drivers. The annual commemoration due to have occurred on the spot at this time has had to be cancelled due to Covid-19.

No British government or prime minister has ever expressed public regret for this monstrous crime, nor is it likely that any form of public expiation will ever be enacted. Individual applications for compensation from a pitiful number of survivors in the Fifties were contemptuously rejected.

Nikolai Tolstoy

Southmoor, Berkshire