The Minister and the Massacres

The Minister and the Massacres (1986) is a history written by Nikolai Tolstoy about the 1945 repatriations of Croatian soldiers and civilians and Cossacks, who had crossed into Austria seeking refuge from the Red Army and Partisans who had taken control in Yugoslavia.

He criticized the British repatriation of collaborationist troops to Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav government, attributing the decisions to Harold Macmillan, then UK minister of the Mediterranean, and Lord Aldington.

In a second telegram sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Alexander asked for guidelines regarding the final disposition of “50,000 Cossacks including 11,000 women, children and old men; present estimate of total 35,000 Chetniks – 11,000 of them already evacuated to Italy – and 25,000 German and Croat units.” The telegram said that in each of above cases, “returning them to their country of origin immediately might be fatal to their health.”[1] Tolstoy "reconstructed what happened when, on May 31, the commandant of the military camp at Viktring, 'Lieutenant Ames', reported that he had received orders for 2,700 of the civilian refugees in Major Barre's camp to be taken to Rosenbach and Bleiburg the following day, to be handed over to Tito's partisans.

"[2] British reviewers of Tolstoy's history noted what they thought were weaknesses in his book, influenced by his having been among the victims of losses in the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution.

Alistair Horne wrote: Trying to weave a way through the tangled cobweb of truths, half-truths, and downright inaccuracies woven by Tolstoy proved to be one of the longest and most arduous tasks I have ever undertaken as a writer.[...]

Appalled by the injustice inflicted upon his fellow White Russians, and dedicated to the cause of seeing that it should be requited on a public platform, Tolstoy progressively persuaded himself that the repatriations had flowed from an evil conspiracy.[...]

[3]Stevan K. Pavlowitch wrote:[4]The story, as told by Nikolai Tolstoy in his most controversial book, The Minister and the Massacres (London: Century Hutchinson, 1986; p. 442.

The trouble is that the author identifies so strongly with the victims that he is obsessed with the need to find and name the individuals who, on the British side, were ultimately responsible for their fate.

[9] Almost simultaneously, author Ian Mitchell wrote in The Cost of a Reputation (1997) (about the ensuing libel case) that the archives had been weeded of most of the incriminating documents,[10] but he criticised Tolstoy for concluding his book with the allegation that Macmillan was an ally of the Soviet Union's NKVD.

But, before Mr Nicolson admitted what he’d done, some historians had taken his written report at face value and used it to try and ‘prove’ that the surviving deportees who now spoke of how badly they had been treated were lying.

Tolstoy wrote a 2,000-word text for him, which Watts published as a pamphlet entitled "War Crimes and the Wardenship of Winchester College", which he distributed to anyone he thought might have heard of Aldington.

Parliament will find the implications of this decision difficult to ignore.The Sunday Times reported in 1996 that documents obtained after these events from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) by Tolstoy's backers[17] suggested [clarification needed] that under Government instructions, files that could have had a bearing on the defence case might have been withdrawn from the Public Record Office and retained by the MoD and Foreign Office throughout the run-up to and during the libel trial.