No Happy Childhood Behind the Iron Curtain: Cold War and Imperial Perspectives in the Anglo–Soviet Dispute Over Unaccompanied Baltic Children (1947–1952)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the postwar Anglo–Soviet dispute within the League of Red Cross Societies over unaccompanied children from the Baltic states, whose postwar Soviet citizenship Britain contested. It argues that the resolution of this dispute was prevented by the novel Cold War view, common to both the British and the Soviet governments, that children socialised by ideological enemies were future enemies. With reference to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s comparative study of empires, it also suggests that, while the proposed repatriation or actual resettlement of the children in former British settler colonies and the United States may have been influenced by Cold War rivalries, the citizenship offered to these children was also determined by the ‘politics of difference’ of the Soviet, British and even the US empires.

Notes

1 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 16.

2 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 140.

3 The UNRRA was the agency overseeing the repatriation of millions of DPs in 1945–1946.

4 The IRO replaced the UNRRA in 1947. In charge of non-repatriable DPs, the IRO had US and British but not Soviet support (Salomon 1991, pp. 167–77). On the history of this agency, see Holborn (1956).

5 The US Zone also hosted a group of Baltic unaccompanied children, equally contested after 1947. However, this group consisted of only 90 children; besides, they were over 12 years of age and, therefore, able to express their opinion and oppose repatriation (Taylor 2017, pp. 288–93).

6 Although the aftermath of World War II, and especially the loss of India in 1947, marked the start of the decline of the British Empire, until the Suez crisis (1956) Britain felt that decolonisation could be gradual and continued to behave as an imperial power (Lloyd 1996, p. 337). Therefore, it could be argued that at the time of the European DP crisis discussed in this article (1945–1952), the British politics of migration, including children’s migration, could still be informed by imperial practices.

7 As suggested by the reviewers of this article, children may be constructed as potential enemies not only in conflicts between states, but also within states. For example, during the Spanish and the Greek civil wars the rightwing victors felt the need to ideologically re-educate the children of their enemies, while the losers sought to evacuate their children to countries sympathetic to their ideological cause (liberal democracies or communist countries, including the Soviet Union); see Legarreta (1985), Kowalsky (2004, ch. 5), Danforth and van Boeschoten (2012), and Carballés (2013, pp. 108–9). From the 1950s onwards, the Soviet Union and United States would fight domestically a similar battle to shield their youth from the perceived negative impact of mass-culture and alien ideologies (Fürst 2010; Holt 2014). Britain’s domestic concerns, in turn, extended to its colonial indigenous youth (Sutton 2016). The novelty of the Cold War, however, was to bring the political struggle for childhood to the global level.

8 On general US refugee policy in the early Cold War period, see Loescher and Scanlan (1989, pp. 1–24).

9 See GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 119.

10 GARF, f. 9526sch, op. 6, d. 179, ll. 61–7. The figures do not specify whether these children were located in areas liberated by the Red Army, zones under foreign control or both, though.

11 In the Soviet Union ‘children’s homes’ could be boarding institutions, day-care centres or orphanages, as they evolved from ideal socialist state institutions, intended to socialise all children, to refuges for children displaced by emergencies and state repressions in the early decades after the Russian Revolution; see Goldman (1993) and Ball (1994).

12 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 65.

13 Proudfoot (1956, p. 268), reports 2,073 children as repatriated, 1,889 resettled and 1,016 reunited with their families. However, he also notes the unreliability of these UNRRA figures, which explains the discrepancy between the 7,135 children left in UNRRA care by 30 June 1947 and the only 4,090 children passed onto the IRO (Proudfoot 1956, p. 268, fn 3).

14 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 64.

15 Respectively, GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 16; and GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 17.

16 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 18.

17 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 19.

18 Ironically, a previous attempt by the Red Cross to meddle in national sovereignty had failed on Soviet soil; see Lowe (2014).

19 Both the Polish and Greek children were similarly disputed at the League by the respective communist and nationalist governments (Zahra 2011b, pp. 202–7; Danforth & van Boeschoten 2012, pp. 78–81).

20 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 21.

21 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 22.

22 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 22.

23 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 22.

24 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 25.

25 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, ll. 39–49.

26 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, ll. 54–8.

27 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 57. Subsequent Soviet attempts to mobilise the Secretariat of the League to get lists of children’s names and mediate to let Soviet representatives visit children’s homes in the British Zone would also come to nil; see GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, ll. 87–8.

28 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 42.

29 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, ll. 42–3.

30 The National Archives (hereafter TNA) FO 1052/492, Letter no. 1689 from General Pisarenko to Brigadier Kenchington, 14 June 1948, p. 1. The Nazis erased the identities of many children who were candidates for Aryanisation; see Rossy (2015, p. 446); hence the Soviet claim.

31 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, ll. 42–3. The absence of parents could make a difference in the Allies’ decisions about repatriation. For example, in contrast to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia let parents travel to Germany, and they received a more sympathetic treatment by US courts in the US Zone; TNA FO 371/101567, United Nations (Economic and Social) Department–Refugees (hereafter USR) 1842/10 B. U. P. and A. P., ‘So Auschwitz Ivan Must Go Home’, New Chronicle, 19, 30 September 1952.

32 For example, in posters the ‘motherland’ could be portrayed as a mature woman calling for action or as a young woman carrying a child, in need of armed protection, a figure later revived during the Cold War; see Snopkov et al. (2006, pp. 99, 103, 132).

33 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 142.

34 TNA FO 371/94940, Letter 101.1/18/51 from British Embassy, Moscow, to Northern Department, Foreign Office, 1 June 1951, p. 13: encl. ‘I Want to Go Home, to My Native Land, to My People!’ Komsomol’skaya pravda, 31 May 1951. In fact, all DP national groups resisting repatriation were particularly motivated by a desire to preserve their language and culture and to reject Soviet indoctrination; see Wyman (1989, pp. 99–101).

35 The Soviet press insisted that resettled children were ‘deported to slave labour’ to the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, see TNA FO 371/94940, Letter 101.1/18/51 from British Embassy, Moscow, to Northern Department, Foreign Office, 1 June 1951. This may have referred to older children recruited as labourers. However, not only the Soviet observers, but also others compared the selection of refugees for resettlement to a kind of slave market, as only able-bodied refugees fit for work were allowed to migrate (Cohen 2012, pp. 112–13). The Stalinist template of ‘happy childhood’, with its corollary of unhappy ones emerged in the 1930s and was relaunched after the war (Kelly 2007, pp. 93–129).

36 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 143.

37 By indicating the year 1939 as a watershed, the British government prevented the forcible repatriation of children from countries annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939–1941. Although the Baltic children were a substantial group, the Soviet authorities also claimed rights over other, non-Baltic children; see, for example, GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 79.

38 TNA FO 1052/492, Letter no. 352 (55/21/48) from HM Embassy [in] Moscow to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 6 May 1948, p. 1; TNA FO 1052/492, Directive ZECO/011137/SEC ‘Visits to Children’s Homes’ to Regional Commissioner[s] of Land Niedersachsen, Land North-Rhine/Westphalia, Land Schleswig-Holstein, Hansestadt-Hamburg, [and] Chief PW and DP Division from Brigadier Kenchington, Deputy Chief of Staff (Executive), Zonal Executive Offices, CCG, Lubbecke, 5 June 1948, Appendix A.

39 TNA FO 1052/492, Note no. 352 (55/21/48) from HM Embassy [in] Moscow to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 6 May 1948, pp. 1–2.

40 TNA FO 1052/492, Letter no. 1689 from Pisarenko to Kenchington, 14 June 1948, p. 1.

41 As confirmed in TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/1, Letter from Countess Limerick, Vice-Chairman of the BRCS, to Sir William Strang, Foreign Office, 16 January 1952, encl. 1a. Note ‘Repatriation of Soviet children’, p. 1.

42 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/1, Letter from Countess Limerick, Vice-Chairman of the BRCS, to Strang, 16 January 1952, encl. 1a. Note ‘Repatriation of Soviet children’, p. 2.

43 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/1, Letter from Countess Limerick, Vice-Chairman of the BRCS, to Strang, 16 January 1952, encl. 1a. Note ‘Repatriation of Soviet children’, p. 2.

44 GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 80; and TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/1 Letter from Sir William Strang to Countess Limerick, 22 January 1952.

45 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/1 Letter from Sir William Strang to Countess Limerick, 22 January 1952.

46 Immigration History Research Center (hereafter IHRC) 3033, Displaced Persons from Estonia—Records, Box 21 (D24), Folder 60 ‘British Zone: orphans 1946–1950’ [IHRC 3033-21-60], p. 39 ‘Statement regarding the Citizenship of Unaccompanied Children’ [1947].

47 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/4 Letter from Countess Limerick to Sir William Strang, 28 February 1952, and encl. ‘Notes on Meeting Held at the Foreign Office, Wednesday, 20 Feb. 1952’.

48 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill, Political Director and Head of Chancery, Office of the UK High Commissioner (22c), Wahnerheide, Rheinland, to W. D. Allen, Foreign Office, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 1.

49 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill to W. D. Allen, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 1.

50 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill to W. D. Allen, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 1. Even if there were any children born of Soviet mothers and foreign fathers, the Soviet Union had less reason to claim them. In particular, the children fathered by Germans were stigmatised all over Europe and even seen as dangerous in the long term. For an overview of the problem, see Ericsson and Simonsen (2005), Mochmann et al. (2009).

51 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill to W. D. Allen, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 2.

52 TNA FO 1049/1830, Letter from Brigadier Gordon de Bryne, Office of the CAO/DCOS (Exc), Lubbecke, BAOR 1, to Logan Grey, Political Division (DP Branch), UK High Commissioner, Berlin BAOR 2, 21 October 1949. BAOR stands for British Army of the Rhine and refers to the British occupation forces in Germany after World War II.

53 TNA FO 1049/1830, Letter 13035/70/38 from Northern Department, Foreign Office, to Chancery, British Embassy, Moscow, 3 January 1949. This view adds to the antagonistic US and Soviet views of peacetime childhoods under the respective rival regime, see Peacock (2014).

54 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill to W. D. Allen, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 2. Note that disabled children were generally ignored for resettlement, see Balint (2016).

55 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill to W. D. Allen, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 2.

56 TNA FO 371/101567, USR 1842/6 Letter 105/4/2/52 from C. D. W. O’Neill to W. D. Allen, 14 May 1952 (Confidential), p. 3.

57 TNA FO 371/77682, Letter from W. Barker, Moscow Embassy, to C. R. A Rae, Northern Department, Foreign Office, 20 January 1949, p. 3.

58 TNA FO 371/77682, Commentary to the file by F. A. Warner.

59 TNA FO 371/112645, Letter from N. N. Doods, Parliamentary Undersecretary, to Mr Nutting 7 September 1954, and enclosures.

60 The legal framework for the adoption of foreign children was introduced with the 1950 Adoption Act.

61 TNA FO 371/72080A, Letter WR 263/263/48 from Foreign Office to S. R. Walker, 26 January 1948.

62 On the Soviet criticism of this migration, see GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, ll. 65–70.

63 These 140 children must have been part of the 289 children from Latvian children’s homes reported in GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 67, l. 65.

64 Note, however, that the negative impact of Hollywood films was denounced both by US humanitarian workers for raising children’s materialist expectations about US life and by the Soviet authorities for morally corrupting them with their lurid content; see, respectively, Close (1953, p. 58) and TNA FO 371/94940, Letter 101.1/18/51 from British Embassy, Moscow, to Northern Department, Foreign Office, 1 June 1951, p. 13: encl. ‘I Want to Go Home, to My Native Land, to My People!’; Komsomol’skaya pravda, 31 May 1951. Children’s care placements were arranged by US religious organisations according to the religion of their parents (Close 1953, pp. 51–2); on the relation between US government refugee policy and their reliance on religious organisations, see also Nichols (1988).

65 IHRC 3033-21-60, p. 5, Letter from Members of the Central Advisory Council, Baltic Welfare, Education and Employment Organization, to Miss Pollack, Relief Services, UNRRA, BAOR, LEMGO, 7 September 1946.

66 IHRC 3033-21-60, p. 5, Letter from Members of the Central Advisory Council, Baltic Welfare to Miss Pollack, Relief Services, UNRRA, BAOR, LEMGO, 7 September 1946.

67 The other two pillars of American imperial power were a military with global reach and trade opportunities.

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Rosaria Franco

Rosaria Franco, School of International Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, 315100 Ningbo, People’s Republic of China. Email: [email protected]