Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS New Soviet Drive For Repatriation By William Henry Chamberlin All the smiles of Soviet leaders are not reserved for foreign statesmen and visitors. A campaign of smiles and...
...A campaign of smiles and blandishments is being waged to induce political refugees from the Soviet Union and satellite states to return to their homelands...
...These are lies...
...A Soviet woman agent came to his apartment with pictures of his family and information about his former wife in Russia...
...Issue after issue of the magazine For Return to the Homeland follows the same pattern...
...There are lush, sentimental patriotic appeals...
...A philosopher will get a solicitous letter from a philosopher in the Soviet Union...
...they deprived us of civil rights, property and professions...
...they terrorized people to vote for one pro-Communist slate of candidates...
...The vast majority of Soviet political refugees have too vivid bitter memories to be easily persuaded to cross the Soviet frontier again...
...The leitmotiv of the magazines and radio stations specially created for this campaign is that all will be forgiven, that even emigres who fought in the Vlasov army or were active in anti-Communist movements abroad need fear no reprisals if they return to their native countries...
...A prominent figure in the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, an enterprise supported by the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, goes by the pseudonym of Boris Yakovlev...
...Those who remain in Europe are sometimes sick, and living conditions in the camps are drab at best...
...If your reader had happened to face the same fate, would he call the picketing against that deadly Communist system and representatives of this system a disgrace...
...they condemned me as an 'enemy of the people' because of devotion to Latvian national ideals...
...Apart from these generalized appeals, those in charge of "Operation Repatriation" have gone to corsiderable trouble to learn as much as possible about the tastes, habits and family connections of Soviet citizens living abroad...
...There are pictures of beaming returned emigrants, accompanied by alleged personal stories describing lives of unrelieved darkness in Germany or Austria, followed by bright sunshine when the emigrant returns to the Soviet Union...
...I believe he would not...
...The more energetic and adaptable of the refugees have mostly found new homes overseas...
...However, the repatriation campaign, which is being pressed with considerable energy (three radio stations in Poland are devoted exclusively to this purpose), is a challenge which calls for an adequate response...
...But a deep distrust of the West had been created in the newer Soviet emigrants, and this was a definite handicap when there was an attempt to stimulate anti-Soviet activity among them...
...One of the most disgraceful aspects of the Yalta agreement was the Allied consent to repatriate, by force if necessary, Soviet citizens in the Western zones of occupation...
...Yakovlev had her handed over to the police...
...There were terrible scenes of attempted mass suicides in some cases when American and British troops cooperated with Soviet repatriation squads...
...The new Soviet and satellite drive for repatriation differs radically in method from the crude slave-catching methods employed immediately after the war...
...Don't believe them...
...So far, the results of the campaign or not impressive...
...it is a reasonable suspicion that the known figures among those who return, like the Pole Hugon Hanke, are Communist "plants" who were recalled...
...It is fear, inspired by the lying propaganda of the transoceanic gentlemen and their vile accomplices who drum into you day and night the idea that you will be received in the Soviet country as renegades, will be persecuted and sent to forced labor...
...There is standard Soviet political propaganda, based on daily news developments...
...But it is up to the West to show that it does care about these uprooted human beings and that it can absorb them...
...It would be a severe moral and psychological blow to the West if any considerable number of these people were voluntarily to take the road back to slavery...
...No more harsh words about "fascist traitors...
...This is not the first Soviet effort to reclaim citizens who "chose freedom" abroad...
...Their sentiments are expressed in the following letter of a Latvian refugee in a Boston newspaper, replying to someone who had criticized him for picketing a Soviet delegation: "The Soviets abused my nation, religion, morality and justice...
...We know what prevents you from returning...
...they imprisoned, killed or deported my people and my folks without any trial...
...The tone of the campaign is set by the following excerpt from an appeal broadcast over the new radio station, "For Return to the Homeland": "We know that many of you dream of returning to the motherland, yet cannot make up your minds to take this step...
...The worst of these episodes ceased as the cold war became more intense...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 45
