This is an accepted version of this page Stefan Terlezki, CBE (29 October 1927 – 21 February 2006) was a British Conservative politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Cardiff West from 1983 to 1987.

Terlezki experienced life in both Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, which made him a powerful voice against totalitarian governments.

Terlezki was brought up in the nearby farming community of Antonivka,[1] where his first teacher at the village school was the Ukrainian poet Mariyka Pidhiryanka.

After the German invasion in 1941, Stefan Terlezki was put to forced labour repairing a railway bridge over the river Dniester, damaged during the Red Army retreat.

[1] After several weeks in holding camps, he became part of a shipment sent in railway cattle wagons to a slave distribution centre in Austria.

Terlezki worked on farms near Voitsberg between 1942 and 1945, interrupted only by a spell digging trenches for the German defences at Radkersburg and three weeks imprisonment after his arrest by the Gestapo for insubordination.

Terlezki was in a large group who boarded a train thinking they would be taken home but who ended up in a camp in the eastern Austrian province of Burgenland.

His father and sister were already in Siberia, sent there during Joseph Stalin's post-war purge of western Ukraine, where nationalist guerrillas fought the reimposition of Russian rule.

The Conservatives argued that his wartime experiences made him well suited to the role, which involved inspecting prison conditions in different countries, later including former Communist states.

He condemned the preservation of close ties with Russia, especially the leasing of military bases in Crimea and argued that more should be done to promote the Ukrainian language and to discourage the use of Russian.