What to do with displaced people who no country wants – lessons from 1945
IS GOVERNMENT supposed to work for the people or are the people simply a resource of government? For most of “civilised” history, in most “civilised” countries, there has been a war going on between government and people or, more broadly, those people with public power and those without it. The question is how is that power used: to rule by consent of the ruled or to rule in defiance of their interests?
It ought to be stating the obvious to say there is a world of difference between top-down government (status gives orders) and the bottom-up variety (contract means choice of government). Sadly, it is not obvious to the Scottish (and so far as I can see most of the British) power elite. For most of them, the best evidence for status is their ability, and willingness, to cheat or deceive those of lower status than yourself.
There have been few better illustrations of the distinction between militarised status and civilised contract on a practical level than the contrast between the Soviet and the Anglo-American approaches to the millions of displaced people in Europe in 1945. It is a story with considerable modern relevance. Sheila Fitzpatrick , a considerable authority in the field of Soviet studies, has written an excellent book about this issue: Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War.
When World War Two ended, there were refugees without number wandering around the devastated continent, along with surrendered German troops, displaced persons and Soviet citizens who knew enough about top-down governance to want to make sure they never returned to their country of origin. The only principles which might help decide what to do about them were contained in the Yalta Agreement, made between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in February that year. But that dealt only with the Soviet aspect of the story, leaving many others to be worked out on the hoof after the German surrender. That was where the problems started as the two sides misunderstood each other so completely that co-operation was almost impossible.
Prof. Fitzpatrick (below) goes into the administrative background of the 1945 crisis in fascinating detail, and also tells the story of what happened after the war-time alliance broke up, and Stalin moved on from killing Germans to killing Soviets. It is a story which has many illuminating parallels with the way modern governments behave towards refugees and illegal migrants.
The problem erupted because the Soviet state considered its people as its “property”, entirely without rights against Soviet status-holders, to be disposed of as an uncomplaining human resource in any way that suited the state.
The author explains: “Lost Souls, the title of this book, refers not only to Displaced Persons’ (DPs) uprooted state but also to the old Russia use of the world ‘soul’ (dusha) as a unit of property under serfdom, when a noble landowner’s wealth was defined not so much by acreage as by the number of souls (serfs) on his estate. The Russian state, too, was an owner of peasant serfs, and this concept of the workforce as a form of property persisted in subterranean form in the Soviet Union’s reaction to its loss of almost half a million citizens to the post-war DP camps in Europe.” (p. 5)
Later, she says, “In the Soviet view, everyone who had held Soviet citizenship was ‘theirs’ and ought to be repatriated. This included residents of the Baltic states, the parts of Ukraine and Rumania incorporated into the Soviet Union after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, whose citizenship was received by fiat from above and who regarded the Soviet Union not as a homeland but as an enemy occupying power.” (p. 31)
This brought into focus a problem which exists almost as much today as then: “The anglophone use of the term ‘nationality’ differed from that of the Soviet Union and East European countries. For the Americans and British, nationality was the same thing as citizenship… For the Soviets, there was no ‘Soviet’ nationality, only Russia, Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, Jewish, and other nationalities, all of who shared Soviet citizenship.” (p. 31) The Soviet Union was, following Russia, an empire. The only one of the Allies who took the Soviet line on places like the Baltic states, considering them all Soviet, was, perhaps revealingly, the one which had done least to win the war, namely France.
The Russian/Soviet idea that people have no agency if it conflicts with state policy is still operative. Even after shedding fourteen of the fifteen Soviet republics and all the dependent countries round about, Russia still considers its people its property. They must be prepared to die for his regime. It is largely due to his craving for lost status that President Putin invaded Ukraine.
In 1945, Britain did not recognise Ukrainian as a nationality, but pressure from Canada and the United States changed that. From late 1945 on, the American army started housing Ukrainians in separate facilities from Poles. Eventually, Lieut.-General Sir Frederick Morgan, deputy chief of staff of Allied forces and a senior officer in the refugee and repatriation administration, decided that Ukrainian was a nationality “of people who had been mistreated by the Soviets.” (p. 33)
The Jews were an equally knotty problem since few of them wished to be “returned” to the Soviet Union, especially those who had never lived in it, only in territories it now claimed as its own, or were equally questionable, like Poland which had demonstrated an enthusiastic anti-Semitism before the German invasion. Many wanted to go to Palestine, but the British would not allow that. Both the Soviets and the Americans lobbied for Jews to be able to settle in Palestine. Friction between the British troops (some of whom had been on the wrong end of Jewish terrorism when policing the League of Nations mandate there) reached a point that, by 1947, “it was quite evident that many of the British hated the Jews more than the German people ever did.” (p. 27)
The western Allies eventually got fed up of the way in which “the Soviet Union continued to push for co-operation in the repatriation of its citizens. The USSR never made any concessions or offers of compromise… They persisted doggedly and fiercely.” (p. 164) This had the predictable result that the western Allies stopped even trying to co-operate with the Soviets. Instead of trying to organise repatriations, whether voluntary or forced, they began to adopt a new policy of resettlement. In 1947 the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was founded, and in 1948 the State of Isreal came into existence, which largely solved the Jewish problem, but it left many others unresolved.
Naturally, the Soviets accused the IRO of being “an instrument of Anglo-American policy”, saying it was “nothing less than a supplier of cheap labour without rights for capitalist countries… ‘Slave market’ became the dominant theme in Soviet rhetoric against resettlement.” (p. 165) Towards the end of 1947, Sholto Douglas, the wartime hero (who Fitzpatrick calls, in one of her rare slip-ups, “general” rather than “Marshal of the Royal Air Force”) who was soon to become Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, took action. He ordered all the Soviet representatives out of the British zone. The Americans went further and closed the Soviet Repatriation Mission down entirely. The Soviet staff refused to leave the building, so General Lucius Clay, the Military Governor of the US zone, had the building surrounded with barbed wire, then he cut off the water, gas, telephone and electricity. Marshal Sokolovsky fumed but had to retreat.
The resettlement programme got into high gear and operated until 1951, eventually “re-homing” about a million DPs, a third of whom had come from the Soviet Union. The United States was the favourite destination, followed by Australia, then Israel, after that came Canada then the UK and, way down in numbers, south America. Nearly 150,000 preferred to stay in West Germany and Austria. Eventually, Stalin gave up trying to force unwilling people back to the Soviet Union and the world settled down to never having it so good—angry young men and Scottish Fascists excepted.
Are there any general lessons to be drawn from this story that have relevance today? For my money, the most important one was best expressed by Lord Palmerston in 1853. Shortly before the outbreak of the Crimean War, he said: “The Policy and Practice of the Russian Government… has always been to push forward its encroachments as fast and as far as the apathy or want of Firmness of other Governments would allow it to go, but always to stop and retire when it has met with decided Resistance.” That applied as much in the mid-twentieth century as in the mid-nineteenth. It applies with ever greater force in Ukraine today.
The problem is that we now have such weak leaders confronting Putin that he has concluded that we suffer from “apathy and want of Firmness.” At the Downing Street level, he is right, though it cannot be helpful to have a sub-government in Holyrood standing on the sidelines but opposed to any British immigration reduction proposals because it wants to seem locally popular. Instead of making constructive suggestions, we see Swinney the Switherer flapping his fingers in impotent panic, rather like Darbi in the Jennings books when some wizard wheeze of theirs looks like being derailed by an ozard oik of uncertain parentage.
What Putin is trying to do is substitute status for contract in Ukraine, with himself as the status-holder. He wants to be “stronger for status”. What we should be doing is beating him back with all the resources at our command while ruminating on the refugee problem which we face right now. This is a genuine dilemma.
Who would have refused requests for asylum from terrified Jewish refugees from a burnt-out ghetto in Galicia in 1945? Likewise, who would not refuse request for asylum by cynical and sometimes violent economic migrants disguised as refugees today? Is it possible that John Swinnery does not see the difference? Or is he just a pharisee with ideas above his moral station? Has he ever heard of Lord Palmerston?
Established in 2006, ThinkScotland is not for profit (it makes a loss) and relies on donations to continue publishing our wide range of opinions – you can follow us on X here – like and comment on facebook here and support ThinkScotland by making a donation here.
Photo by YuniarAI from Adobe Stock
