‘A matter that stirs strong feelings’: Britain and the Soviet Wives Affair, 1945-54

Historians tend to ascribe the onset of the Anglo-Soviet Cold War in the wake of the German defeat in 1945 to matters such as differences over Eastern Europe, but certain other influences have not received much attention. In particular, strains arose from how thirty-four Service and British Embassy personnel based in the Soviet Union during the Second World War and soon after married local women. The British authorities warned the intending husbands that the wives might not be able to leave, because doing so required either an exit visa or permission to relinquish Soviet citizenship. The former depended on consent from the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the latter from no less than the Supreme Soviet of the Presidium. A British regulation stipulated that, for security reasons, anyone marrying a Soviet citizen would be transferred home promptly, which obliged the husbands to leave their wives behind in the belief that they would soon be reunited in Britain. By the end of 1945, when Anglo-Soviet relations were still relatively favourable in the light of the common struggle against Nazi Germany, the Soviet government had accommodated British appeals by permitting eighteen wives to leave but over the next few years, against the background of the developing Cold War, refused all except one of the others. Furthermore, unless the wives unable to leave the Soviet Union spurned their British husbands they faced hostility and persecution from the authorities there. Two wives who left for Britain decided to return, which the Soviet government exploited zealously to emphasise the iniquities of British social-democracy and to discourage Soviet citizens from thinking that life might be better abroad. This article, which draws mainly on the records of the British Foreign Office, focuses on the period from the end of the war to 1954, when the Moscow government revealed that the last of the wives still in the Soviet Union had dissolved their marriages.