Even at the height of the war, five months after the German invasion, on November 6, 1941, Stalin still sought to justify his policy of 1939— 1941. He still described the Nazis with sneaking sympathy. "As long as the Hitlerites were engaged in the recovery of German lands, reuniting the Rhineland, Austria, etc., with Germany, they could be considered nationalists with some justification."166 This was a strange pronouncement coming from a man who claimed to be the main theoretician of "proletarian internationalism." It sounded like understanding, if not approval, of the Nazis9 actions. In fact, Stalin himself recovered some former lands of the Romanov empire with Hitler's assistance—the Baltic states, western Byelorussia, and the western Ukraine—at the time acquiring some "lands" formerly belonging to the Habsburg monarchy—Northern Bukovina and the Trans- carpathian Ukraine.
Stalin also struck a nostalgic note in a completely different historical context. In a telegram congratulating Pieck and Grotewohl, on October 13, 1949, on the occasion of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, he wrote: 'The experience of the last war has shown that the greatest sacrifices were borne by the German and Soviet peoples, and that, in Europe, these two peoples have the greatest potential for carrying out major actions of worldwide significance" (emphasis added—A. N.).167
Woe unto the other European peoples, who did not have such great potential!
Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, has made clear what Stalin meant by "actions of worldwide significance."
He had not guessed or foreseen that the pact of 1939, which he had considered the outcome of his own great cunning, would be broken by an enemy more cunning than himself. This was the real reason for his deep depression at the start of the war. It was his immense political miscalculation. Even after the war was over he was in the habit of repeating, "Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible!" But he never admitted his mistakes. (Emphasis added—A.N.)168
Stalin nevertheless did learn a few lessons from his mistakes. The main practical conclusion, which he drew after the war, was to avoid sharing a common border with Germany. In 1941, a common border had left the Soviet Union open to German attack on a large front. After World War II, Stalin reverted to the idea of a cordon sanitaire, in a unique and modified form. This time, instead of the prewar cordon, a buffer zone of "fraternal socialist countries" separated the Soviet Union from Germany. Most likely Stalin thought that Germany would eventually reunite. Thus he returned to an ancient geopolitical concept: do not share a border with a powerful neighbor.
Twenty million human lives—such was the cost of Stalin's miscalculation.
THE TWILIGHT OF THE STALIN ERA, 1945-1953
REPATRIATION
The war was over. Troop trains full of demobilized Soviet soldiers headed east from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. Soviet civilians came out to meet them at all the railroad stations wearing their best clothes, which had somehow been preserved despite the war and were often in tatters. Those who had taken Berlin and Budapest danced gallantly on the platforms, dragging out their war booty accordions.
CHAPTER
There were other troop trains heading east as well, but these had sealed doors and barred windows. They too carried Soviet soldiers, but no music or singing came from these tightly locked cattlecars. No one met them at railroad stations. These trains kept traveling day and night. There were also troop ships that pulled up to deserted wharfs to unload former Soviet prisoners of war returning from the Nazi camps. They touched foot on their native soil under heavy guard. Also being returned were those who willingly or otherwise had aided the Germans or had worked for them. Among them were some who had never lived in postrevolutionary Russia but whom the British, American, or French allies had considered Soviet citizens. They were turned over to the Soviet government, to deal with as it saw fit, without trial of any kind.
At the end of the war more than 5 million Soviet citizens were in Germany and other countries of Western Europe, including former prisoners of war, workers and peasants who had been transported to Germany for forced labor (the so-called Ostarbeiter), and people who had left the Soviet Union at the time of the German retreat.
Under the Yalta agreement, Soviet citizens wishing to return to their homeland were to be repatriated. The agreement also provided for forced repatriation; it extended to those wearing German uniforms at the time of capture and to those who had belonged to the Soviet armed forces after June 22, 1941, had not been released from their duties, and on the basis of reliable information were thought to have collaborated with the enemy.1 In practice this agreement opened the way for forcible repatriation of anyone, indiscriminately, without distinction, even including people who were not Soviet citizens.
First the British government and then the United States responded in a most obliging way to the Soviet government's intention to regain as its subjects all who had turned up in the West during the war, regardless of their personal desires.2 The Soviet government was anxious not only to prevent the formation of a new political emigration in the West but also to disrupt or destroy the old emigr6 community.
The forced repatriation began soon after the end of the war and was largely completed by 1947. Some of the former Soviet prisoners of war, delivered to the ports of Murmansk and Odessa by British ships, were shot by NKVD troops right on the docks where they were landed. Among those being forcibly repatriated many attempted suicide. The Soviet officers in charge of this operation did not hide from their British counterparts that death awaited many upon their return to the Soviet Union.3
The British authorities also delivered former White emigr6s who had never been Soviet citizens. Even the NKVD officers receiving the repatriots, who had seen much in their lives, were amazed at this unexpected gift from the British. Merkulov, the Soviet minister of state security, said the following of the British: 'They don't even know that we have them trapped in a corner on a chess board and now we'll make them dance to our tune like the last pawn on the board."4
In Paris the NKVD conducted virtually a public manhunt for Soviet citizens who did not want to return to the USSR.5 In the Beauregard detention camp, where those subject to repatriation were held, the Soviet authorities behaved just as they did in the concentration camps on Soviet territory. It was only two years after the war, in 1947, that under the pressure of public opinion the French police raided the Beauregard camp and found stores of weapons. Only then was the camp closed.6
Altogether 2,272,000 Soviet citizens—prisoners of war and those of "equivalent status"—were repatriated to the Soviet Union with the help of the British and American authorities. What was their fate? The overwhelming majority were accused of treason. They were not tried individually. Special three-men boards (troikas) handed down group sentences. Twenty percent were given death sentences or twenty-five years in camps; 15—20 percent were condemned to terms between five and ten years; 10 percent were exiled to remote parts of Siberia for periods of no less than six years; 15 percent were assigned to forced labor detachments rebuilding areas destroyed by the war; and only 15—20 percent were allowed to return to their homes. Of the 15—20 percent remaining, some were undoubtedly killed or died in passage and some escaped.7 The Allied governments knew that many of the forced repatriates faced certain death, but those governments were not particularly concerned, guided as they were by pragmatic considerations and the wish to assure themselves of Soviet cooperation in the postwar world.