Posted 16 July 2007 - 19:59
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Count Nikolai Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (1935-) is a prominent and controversial Russo-British historian.
He is a great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy, and the current head of the Tolstoy and Miloslavsky families. His stepfather was the famed novelist Patrick O'Brian.
Tolstoy wrote a number of books about Celtic mythology and about World War II. Among them there were Victims Of Yalta (1977) and The Minister and the Massacres (1986) which criticised the British for the handling of post-war refugees from eastern Europe, the * Operation Keelhaul.
In 1989, Toby Low, Lord Aldington, previously a British officer and now an owner of Sun-Alliance, a company dealing with insurance, sued Tolstoy over war crimes allegations made by Tolstoy in a pamphlet distributed by Nigel Watts, a man involved with Sun-Alliance on an unrelated insurance matter.
Tolstoy lost and was ordered to pay two million pounds (1.5 million in damages and 500 thousand in costs), without the right to appeal. He appealed his case to the European Court of Human Rights and it ruled that the fine was excessive in the light of not being able to appeal.
In July 1995, the European Court of Human Rights concluded unanimously that the British Government had violated his rights in respect of Article 10 of the Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression).
* Operation Keelhaul.
Operation Keelhaul was a programme carried out in Austria by British forces in May and June 1945 that decided the fate of thousands of post-war refugees fleeing eastern Europe.
One of the conclusions of the Yalta Conference was that the Allies would return all Soviet citizens that may find themselves in the Allied zone to the Soviet Union. This immediately affected the Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Allies, but was also extended to all other persons.
The refugee columns fleeing the newly liberated eastern Europe numbered tens of thousands of people. They included assorted fascists, collaborationists, anti-communists and civilians, both from the Soviet Union and from Yugoslavia. The group included around 70,000 Cossacks from the Soviet Union and Ustaše from Yugoslavia; around 11,000 of them were women and children.
They were rounded up in Austria and forcibly repatriated to Stalin and Tito. Men, women, and children were forced into boxcars headed for the Soviet zone of Germany in the east, or for Slovenia in the south. Many of the refugees were summarily executed, sometimes within earshot of the British. The killings at the hand of the Yugoslav forces are known as the Bleiburg massacre.
Amoung those handed over were White Russians who hand never been Soviet citiens including the General Andrei Shkuro and Pyotr Krasnov, despite the British Foreign Office policy stated after the Yalta Conference that only Soviet citizens, after September 1, 1939, were to be compelled to return to the USSR.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn called this operation "the last secret of World War II". He contributed to a legal defense fund set up to help Nikolai Tolstoy who was charged with libel in a 1989 case brought up by Lord Aldington over war crimes allegations made by Tolstoy related to this operation.
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In October 1991, Nikolai Tolstoy joined a Conservative Monday Club delegation (see The Times), under the auspices of the Club's Foreign Affairs Committee, and travelled to observe the war between Serbia and Croatia, the first British political delegation to observe that conflict. Conservative MPs Andrew Hunter, and Roger Knapman, then a junior minister in the Conservative government (and now leader of the UK Independence Party), were also part of the delegation which, after going to the front lines in the Sisak region, was entertained by President Franjo Tudjman and the Croatian government in Zagreb. On October 13 the group held a Press Conference at the Hotel Intercontinental in Zagreb, which apart from the media, was also attended by delegates from the French government. A report on the Serbian aggression was agreed and handed in to Number 10 Downing Street by Andrew Hunter.
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Ono sto je meni bilo interesantno, kad je L. Tolstoy izgubio sudsku parnicu - bila mu je oduzeta biblioteka i predata Toby Low-u / Lordu Aldingtonu, s jednnim ogranicenjem, - morala je da se cuva u izvornom obliku, nije smela da se premesta / rasparcava / prodaje / bilo sta menja.
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