By 1953 a total of five and a half million Soviet nationals had been repatriated. One in five of them ended up shot or dispatched to the Gulag. Many more were sent directly into Siberian exile or else assigned to labour battalions. Only in 1947 did forced repatriation cease, with the onset of the Cold War and a new willingness to treat displaced persons from the Soviet bloc as political refugees (the 50,000 Czech nationals still in Germany and
