On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:40:35 +0100, "William Black"
wrote:

Has HM Government actually come out and said this sometime in the past
decade?

2005 I seem to remember.

Sixty years after the end of the war.

All the files retained are now in the Public Record Officeand are numbered

Something like sixty files are not available to the public.
Have the documents referred to by Tolstoy (in The Last Secret)
concerning the children of Russian nationals who were NOT Soviet
citizens but were nonetheless deported to the Soviet Union (usually to
either immediate execution or long stretches in labor camps which
often amounted to the same thing) by both Britain and the United
States ever been declassified?

All the Don Cossack and similar stuff held by the UK was released years ago,
HMG did withdraw some in 1991 when they were hanging Tolstoy and a crooked
property developer called Watts out to dry, but it's all back on the shelf
now.

Thatcher unveiled a memorial to them over twenty-five years ago, it's
across the road from the Natural History Museum.

No idea about the US stuff but I think all the US files from WWII have now
been released.

Tolstoy's book wasn't called 'The Last Secret', that's a term used by well
know Nazi sympathiser and holocaust denier David Irvine.

Tolstoy's book, the one that got him sued, was 'The Minister and the
Massacres'

Hmmmm. I could have sworn that was the title. My copy (which is buried
under literally close to a ton of other books) was a silver colored
Penguin edition with a Cossack on the cover. A quick check on
Penguin's site doesn't locate it (or ANYTHING by any Tolstoy other
than Leo) so it's clearly out of print.

I have not to my knowledge EVER read anything by Irving except a dust
jacket so it's got to be the Minister and the Massacres.

How's that for a 'cite from Hell'?

It didn't actually get him sued either. Watts was passing out nasty
leaflets that used Tolstoy's book as a source and when he got sued Tolstoy
decided to get himself named as 'co defendant' along with Watts who'd tried
to destroy Lord Aldington's life.

The whole sordid story is related here.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/polit...563440,00.html

Now I'm not a man who would normally defend a Tory banker, but it seems to
me that Tolstoy was on the wrong side and got what he richly deserved.

I knew the story of his feud with Aldington and I agree with your
assessment. Any wrongdoing was at a considerably higher level than
Aldington - probably Churchill himself at Yalta.

Thanks for the info.