Moscow dossier embarrasses US and Britain

Moscow dossier embarrasses US and Britain ahead of Riga summit


· File shows that UK backed Russia's Baltic occupation
· Kremlin seeks to open rift among Nato members

Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Friday November 24, 2006
The Guardian


In a move likely to inflame tensions ahead of next week's Nato summit in Latvia, Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, yesterday declassified documents claiming that Britain and the US had approved of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states a year before Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union.

Received wisdom has it that the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, was deeply ambivalent about Moscow taking control of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940. But the editor of the 400-page dossier, Major General Lev Sotskov, told the Guardian it demonstrated that the UK and US "perfectly understood" that the region was needed as a buffer zone for the inevitable moment when Nazi Germany would break its non-aggression pact with Moscow and attack the Soviet Union.

Gen Sotskov said the documents proved that American and British leaders were often divided over their position on Soviet troop movements and their "public declarations clashed with internal assessments". But Soviet intelligence showed that Churchill decided it was a pragmatic move not to confront Moscow's occupation of neighbouring territory, which ended with the Nazi invasion of the Baltics in 1941. "Churchill realised this was the only way," he said. "He saw it as a not very pleasant but necessary step to prevent Germany from further intrigues and advance."
The fact that Germany's strike at the Soviet Union ran out of steam later in the war was partly because it had to cross the Baltics, thus justifying Churchill's reasoning, Gen Sotskov said.

Publication of the NKVD documents - almost certainly compiled with material uncovered by spies such as Donald MacLean and Kim Philby - was given wide play in the Russian media.

Moscow says its army saved the Baltic states from Nazism. The Baltic states have always bitterly argued that they were illegally occupied and then forcibly assimilated into the Soviet Union at the end of the second world war. Latvia's president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, yesterday told the Financial Times that Nato's first summit in Riga would "remove the very last traces of the iron curtain" from the Baltics.

The dossier was commissioned by the lower house of the Russian parliament and the timing of its release hints at a desire by Moscow to sow dissent between western Europe and the Baltic states which recently joined Nato and the EU. The Kremlin has tense relations with all three Baltic states and is incensed at Estonia's plans to remove a monument to Soviet soldiers who "liberated" the city in 1944 after three years of Nazi occupation, during which some men from the Baltic countries joined Waffen SS units.

Gen Sotskov said he accepted that the dossier would be controversial, but the documents were incontrovertible. "Sober-minded people should say, 'Yes, that's how it was'," he said.

Churchill is on record as saying in 1939 that it was in Britain's interests "that the USSR should increase their strength in the Baltic, thereby limiting the risk of German domination in that area". However, he said two years later that no territorial change made during the war should stand without the "free consent and goodwill of the parties involved". He was said to be furious at the treatment that Soviet troops meted out to civilians in the Baltics in 1940 and he later refused to recognise the countries as part of the Soviet Union.

The Baltic states remained in Moscow's grasp until the Soviet break-up in 1991.

Asked what reaction he expected to the dossier in the Baltics, Gen Sotskov said: "That's their problem. All I can say is that the SS was recognised as a fascist organisation at Nuremberg, but in those countries people still march under its flag."

Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the SVR, said the dossier was not published to coincide with the Riga summit but was "probably connected with the fact that monuments are being taken down in the Baltics".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1955972,00.html