Victims of Yalta was first published in Britain in 1978. Over ensuing weeks, the scandal it provoked filled the press, and resulted in numerous radio and television interviews. Among media and public alike, the reaction was one of almost universal horror and disgust at what could only be regarded as major war crimes.

Particular obloquy was directed against the then British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and his underlings in the Northern Department of the Foreign Office. The generally reluctant role played by British troops in despatching hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, to what Harold Macmillan blithely anticipated as ‘slavery, torture, and probably death’ at the hands of the Soviets, was viewed with mingled dismay and compassion.

Feeling ran so high, that before long a committee was formed of members of the three principal political parties and both Houses of Parliament, to raise funds for erection of a monument to the memory of the victims. The only opposition of note came from the Foreign Office, which expressed concern in a letter to the Appeal’s secretary, the Hon. John Jolliffe, that the memorial be not erected in central London. A few years earlier, the Foreign Office had successfully lobbied for a memorial to thousands of Allied Polish officers, massacred by the Soviets in 1940 at Katyn and elsewhere, to be banished to an obscure corner of a West London cemetery.

This time, however, matters did not go as the mandarins desired. Jolliffe enclosed with his reply a copy of a recent letter containing a generous donation. ‘I think you might be interested to see this’, he wrote. It came from one Margaret Thatcher, resident at 10, Downing Street. The Foreign Office recollected that it had always sought a prominent location for the Memorial, and promptly dropped its objection.