OPPOSITE:

Freedom of expression, Orwell believed, was threatened by what he called "the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life". He went on to cite an episode that illustrated this:

When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians - mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives - had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the . . . displaced persons refused to go back to the USSR, and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 . . .

The episode to which Orwell refers was the forced repatriation by the British and other Allied governments of about two million Soviet citizens who had ended up as displaced persons in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Some who were compelled to return may have participated in Nazi atrocities and been war criminals; others were prisoners of war whom the Nazis had used as slave labour. Many were Russian conscripts who had joined the Germans in the vain hope of better treatment.

As some of these displaced people had families with them, many of those that were sent back were women and children. Not all were in fact Soviet citizens - some had left Russia during or soon after the civil war. Knowing that repatriation could lead to execution or a long spell in the Gulag, many resisted return, some of them committing suicide or killing their infants in view of the British and American soldiers who were tasked with clubbing them on to trains. The repatriation policy was implemented under the Yalta Agreement, though the pact did not authorise coercion and Stalin seems to have been surprised that it was enforced with such vigour.

In the years following the war the displaced people to whom Orwell refers were not much more than a nuisance for Western governments. He could have been under no illusion when he wrote about them that he could do anything to alter their fate. He wrote partly to illustrate the ­self-censorship being practised by many journalists at the time, but more fundamentally because he believed it was his duty to bear witness to the truth. He felt compelled to report the facts, even if - as in this case - doing so would have no practical effect.

Thomas Ricks does not examine this particular episode, but it illustrates a trait that Orwell shared with Winston Churchill.

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