The words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to describe the forced repatriation of about 2 million Soviet and former Russian citizens to the USSR in 1945. Nicholas Bethell, in tonight's programme, deals with one such group of Cossacks who ended the war in the Drau Valley in Austria. They hoped to stay there and believed that the British troops would let them.

But in the Yalta agreement made between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin it was privately agreed that all prisoners of war would be repatriated. They were repatriated, often with force at bayonet point on to lorries and railway trucks, and taken to labour camps and firing squads in the Soviet Union. This included women and children, as well as non-Soviet citizens who should not have been repatriated.