15. The forced repatriation of millions of Soviet dissidents and POWs by Western Allies resulted in the imprisonment, torture, and execution of hundreds of thousands
At the famed Yalta Conference in February 1945, a less well-known agreement was struck between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union concerning the repatriation of Russians back to the USSR once hostilities had ceased. Whilst seemingly convenient and good-natured, the agreement failed to take into account the desire of the individual to return to the Soviet Union, included persons who had fled the USSR or explicitly fought against it, and overlooked the inevitable fatal conclusions for many of these individuals upon their return to face Stalin’s retribution.
Between 1946 and 1948 several million civilians and prisoners of war were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union, first by force and after numerous suicides through deception; individuals were told they were being transported away from the Soviet Union to safety, whilst instead placed on sealed trains heading into the Soviet Union. In addition to Soviet POWs, among those forcibly returned were white émigré-Russians who had never been Soviet citizens, anti-communist Russians who had fought against the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and the counter-revolutionary Cossacks who had fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) before fleeing into exile.
Unsurprisingly few of these groups were welcomed upon arrival, with author Nikolai Tolstoy describing American soldiers returning from delivering a shipment of people to the Soviets as “visibly shamefaced” after having “seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees”. It is estimated almost all repatriated Soviet POWs were convicted of treason under Order No. 270, prohibiting a soldier from surrendering, and sentenced to forced labor. Regarding non-POWs, it remains unclear the precise fates of many of these individuals, with the closest estimates suggesting the executions of tens, if not hundreds of thousands. At least 20% of returned civilians received violent punishment, and between 230,000-360,000 repatriated persons were sent to the Gulags; those few that survived until 1955, and the period of de-Stalinization, were released during a general amnesty.