Living with dictators

David Carlton

The task of preparing a biography of Anthony Eden has led me to give much thought to the issues raised first by Lord

Bethell in The Last Secret and now by Count Tolstoy in the majestic and harrowing Victims of Yalta. No humane person could fail to be disturbed by their chilling accounts of the treatment of the repatriated Russian prisoners of war. Yet

there has been in the reactions of many reviewers and commentators a failure to see these events in a wider context and a propensity to exaggerate the degree to which pro-Soviet gullibility, or worse, influenced the shaping of British policy.

For the first fault reviewers have little excuse. Tolstoy himself wrote in his final paragraph: 'British and American attitudes to forced repatriation cannot be considered in isolation. They formed aspects of overall policy towards the Soviet Union, and were unavoidably secondary to the main issues... The fate of the Russians was an unfortunate but unavoidable sacrifice to the greater aim.' It was this aspect that was of supreme Importance, and not the speed or comfort With which British prisoners of war falling Into Soviet hands would be repatriated, though this was certainly not a negligible consideration. Eden took the same line at the time, writing on 2 August 1944 in a paper for his colleagues: `To refuse the Soviet Government's request for the return of their own men would lead to serious trouble with them. We have no right whatever to do this and they would not understand our humanitarian motives. They would know that we were treating them differently from other Allied Governments on this question and this would arouse their gravest suspicions.'

We may similarly explain many other disagreeable decisions. First came the British Cabinet's willingness to welcome the Soviets as allies in June 1941 even though they had joined with Hitler in attacking Poland, in whose cause the British had gone to war in 1939. Similarly, British spokesmen refused in 1943 p'ublicly to blame the Soviets for the Katyn massacre though there was no serious doubt among the competent authorities of their guilt. Again, in October 1944 Churchill entered into a bilateral spheres-of-influence understanding with Stalin, involving recognition of his forcible incorporation of the Baltic States and much of Poland, and giving him preponderant and probably permanent control over Bulgaria, Romania and the remainder of Poland. And, early in 1945 the British saw fit to make no public pro

test at Stalin's cynical abduction of fifteen Polish leaders who had gone to Moscow for consultations on the formation of a Polish government on the basis of the presumed immunity of quasi-diplomatic status.

Where Tolstoy, in the present controversy, has been less than fair is in his treatment of the motives of those principally concerned on the British side. He wrote, for example, again in his con cluding paragraph, that 'Foreign Office officials held that Stalin's intentions towards the West were beneficent and that to work in co-operation with him was not only possible but also essential to British interests'. This was in fact true only of some of the officials. They were not, moreover, the most senior and their pro-Soviet outlook cannot be presumed to have been unreservedly shared by the decisive policy-makers. For example, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was Permanent Under-Secretary throughout the war, accepted the need for most acts of

appeasement vis-a-vis Moscow but his motives were not based on sympathy or a belief in Stalin's goodwill. In June 1943 he commented on a dispatch by Sir Owen O'Malley which set out the case against the Soviets concerning Katyn. O'Malley concluded: 'We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre; and in view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right...' Cadogan commented: 'This of course raises terrible problems ... But we have perforce welcomed the Russians as allies and have set ourselves to work with them in war and

peace the other disturbing thought is that we may eventually, by agreement and in collaboration with the Russians, proceed to the trial and perhaps execution of Axis, "war criminals" while condoning this atrocity. I confess that I shall find that extremely difficult to swallow.'

Tolstoy is also to a degree unfair to Eden. He wrote: 'This was no cynical policy of Realpolitik. Eden and his advisers were not postponing an inevitable confrontation: they sincerely believed in Stalin's goodwill — Eden himself felt for Stalin strong affection and admiration.' Christopher Booker, in his review of Victims of Yalta (Spectator, 18 February), has carried even further this view pf the Foreign Secretary: 'Throughout his career he was cast for that perennially tragic

role, "the boy hero who cannot grow up", the man who spends his life unconsciously obsessed by the strong, dominant "Father" to whom, at the depths of his own psyche, he cannot imagine himself succeeding ... And in Stalin, Eden ... found the hypnotically fascinating "Father-figure" whom he would seek to placate to the ends of the earth.'

The reality is more complicated. Eden's favourable recollections in his memoirs of his first meeting with Stalin in the spring of 1935 were not fully reflected in his contemporary reports to his colleagues. And certainly after he became Foreign Secretary, at the end of 1935, he entered upon an anti-Soviet phase that lasted until after his resignation in 1938. In 1936, for example, he deplored the possibility of the Franco-Soviet Pact being ratified. Again, in 1937, he bitterly opposed the French Government's desire to bring a Soviet representative to the Nyon conference on Mediterranean piracy. True, he became rather pro-Soviet in 1939 and, it may be claimed, remained so at least until 1943. But his reasoning was probably not outright ideological sympathy with, still less personal affection for Stalin. It was rather that at this time he regarded Hitler, Mussolini and other Fascists as a greater threat to European

peace and civilisation and that he saw the campaign for a Soviet alliance in 1939 as

one among many means of embarrassing Neville Chamberlain against whom he was now implacably opposed for reasons as varied as one would expect in an ambitious politician. Churchill, it is fair to add, took a similar line.

It is of course possible to argue that Eden and Churchill were fundamentally in error to articulate and probably in large measure genuinely share the view that the various forms of Fascism were a greater evil than Communism, and that, despite differences, Great Britain should seek an alliance with the latter. But there can be no doubt that after Hitler's invasion of Prague their position was widely supported. Hence if Eden and Churchill are to be condemned for their preference, they certainly do not deserve to stand alone.

The fact is that no British statesman in power for any lengthy period during the last thirty years can escape the charge that he has in some sense been an appeaser of dictators. The limitations of British power and the proliferation of dictatorships throughout the planet has made that inevitable. Historians who accept this premise will surely not condemn Eden or any of his contemporaries for appeasement as such. They can only evaluate the way in which particular forms of appeasement were pursued and the wisdom of choices made where alternative paths of appeasement were on offer. For example, if one considers the plight in which this country found itself in, say, December 1940, one is perhaps obliged to ask not so much whether we were wrong to fail to go to war with both Germany and the Soviet Union over Poland but whether we have been proved to have been unwise to go to war and to remain at war with even one of them.

By 1944, it is true, British forces were back on-the European continent. But this had only come about because Hitler had obligingly declared war on the United States whose Congress would otherwise probably never have declared war on him. And in any bargaining about the future of Europe the British now had to recognise that Roosevelt, given his benevolent mood towards Moscow as revealed at the Teheran conference, could not be counted on to stand up to any communising designs that Stalin might have and that he would indeed be likely to take his forces home after Hitler's final defeat. In the circumstances Churchill and Eden decided that the balance of military force between Great Britain and the Soviet Union was such that it would be folly not to try to tie down Stalin to making only limited gains before he realised the full extent of what might be his. Hence the `notorious' percentage agreements of October 1944 which Stalin in fact substantially honoured until at least 1947.

It is right to consider the spirit in which Eden approached the percentage agreements and the related policy of repatriation which Stalin personally informed the Foreign Secretary would place him deeply 'in our debt if we could arrange this matter for him'. Eden was at this stage by no means as hopeful about Stalin's intentions as he had been at an earlier stage of the alliance with the Soviets, when he had indeed been extremely well-disposed towards them — with the result that he had often clashed with Churchill on the subject. But as early as March 1943 he had expressed views that were not exactly those of a fellow

traveller. Asked in Washington whether he thought Stalin's long-term aims were sufficiently limited to permit good post war relations, he replied that he did not know but thought no harm could be done by giving them the benefit of the doubt for the time being. By March 1944 his views had hardened. He minuted: 'I con fess to growing apprehension that Russia has vast aims and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean and the "com munising" of much that remains.' And by October 1944, at the time of the per centage agreements, he was filled with alarm at the implications for his future reputation. Thomas Barman, the dip lomatic correspondent, has recalled an incident in the British Embassy in Mos cow: he [Eden] seemed exhausted and depressed as he came into the Ambassador's room... Suddenly he stopped: "If I give way over Lvov ja Pol ish town demanded by the Soviets]," he said, "shall I go down in the history books as an appeaser?" He did not wait for an answer... Perhaps he did not want an answer. It was clear enough that he was plagued almost beyond endurance by the need to make what he regarded as an unreasonable and unjust concession.' Whatever all this may be thought to show, it is clearly not compatible with the view that 'in Stalin Eden...found the hypnotically fascinating "Father-figure" whom he would seek to placate to the ends of the earth'.

Clearly Eden feared that just such an attack would be made upon him in the history books as appears in that of Tolstoy. But fortunately for Eden historians do not always agree. In this case a tenable counter-argument would be that, at least in the context of 1944, we should focus not only on the lamentable loss of much of Eastern Europe and the cruelty of enforced repatriation but also on how much was saved for the liberal democratic cause. Today, for example, there are more states in Europe living under free democracy than ever before. The critics of Churchill's and Eden's conduct in 1944 have to show that at that stage there was an alternative strategy that would have seemed likely to achieve a better or even as good an outcome. As Churchill said of one among many acts of appeasement. `It is indefensible except on one ground: that there is no alternative.'

Obliging Stalin by repatriating at least the large bulk of his prisoners of war was clearly judged by Eden and Churchill to be unavoidable if he were to be enticed into accepting a spheres-of-influence agreement that was extremely favourable to the British, given the prospective military balance in Europe, especially in the context of what the British knew about Roosevelt's hopelessly feeble attitude, which later extended even to hostility to British moves to prevent Communist takeovers in Italy and Greece. It has not been proved that their judgment was mistaken on the broad repatriation issue, though certainly reser

vations can be entered about the way in which some marginal individual cases

were subsequently handled, about the puzzling dispatch of the White Cossacks and about the continuation of the policy under changed conditions during Bevin's time at the Foreign Office. Nor, incidentally, has it been proved that Cham berlain was wrong in the existing military circumstances to sign the Munich Agreements, fatal though they were for some Czechoslovak citizens. Late in the war Hitler himself was reported to have said of Munich: 'The old man outfoxed me.'

One is entitled to ask whether maybe Churchill and Eden did not similarly outwit Stalin in 1944.

It is right, too, to ask whether Tolstoy is correct to suppose that the Americans' approach in 1944 was really so much bet ter than that of Churchill and Eden. They were unenthusiastic about forcible repat

riation, though eventually, like the supposedly heroic Lord Selborne, they went along with it. But they were largely unconscious of any Soviet threat to the liberties of Europe. As Harry Hopkins had said to Eden late in 1943: 'Sure we are preparing for a battle at Teheran. You will find us lining up with the Russians.' So if the Americans had had their way in 1944 the Soviet prisoners of war might not have been signed away but no plans would have been made to prevent Communist takeovers throughout Europe. It is of course irrelevant to point to American conduct in later years: the succession of the tough-minded Truman and the successful explosion of the American atomic bomb soon transformed the picture almost as fundamentally and unexpectedly for the British as Hitler's declaration of war on the Soviets and the Americans had done in 1941. It would be as unfair to blame Eden and Churchill for not anticipating this sea-change in 1944 as it would be to subscribe to the view that Chamberlain should have based his policies in 1938 on the expectation that the Americans and/or the Soviets would come to our rescue in any war with Hitler. And the fact that Eden and Churchill were themselves so unfair as tacitly to endorse such a verdict on Chamberlain provides no justification for our treating them in similar fashion.

To conclude, no memorial is really required for the victims of repatriation. It already exists in the liberal democracy of Greece. Perhaps then, if we wish to taunt Moscow further on this matter, the best course for this country might be to redouble its efforts to bind Greece securely into the West through her admission to the EEC. Some in Moscow would surely grasp the piquancy of an outcome that would finally assure the West of a lasting territorial gain, leaving the land of Lenin with a partial quid pro quo in the form of rotting corpses.