The categories of "defectors" were different - collaborators ("Vlasovites" and other accomplices of the Nazis) were awaiting trial and the Gulag (at best) in their homeland, and many prisoners of war who did not even cooperate with the Germans had a similar fate. And the "Ostarbeiters" did not want to return to the Soviet Union because they had time to appreciate the advantages of Western life - even as forced laborers.
Was 5 million abroad?
These are data on the number of Soviet citizens, including those driven away for forced labor ("ostarbeiters") and prisoners of war, from the declassified archive of the head of the USSR SNK's repatriation officer, Philip Golikov. Most of those to be repatriated (3 million people) were in the Allied-controlled zone. Of the total number of those liberated from the Nazis, 1.7 million were prisoners of war, among whom were collaborators (often family, who left with the Germans during the retreat and received the status of "displaced persons").
According to F. Golikov's department, there were initially 6.8 million representatives of these categories of potential repatriates - the rest either died or were destroyed by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War by the end of the war.
So how much is left?
Historians Mikhail Geller and Alexander Nekrich, citing in their book "Utopia in Power" data on 500 thousand "potential repatriates" who remained in the West after the Great Patriotic War, wondered why in the declassified official data of Philip Golikov's department, the numbers of repatriated people differ so much from the number " forcibly displaced citizens of the USSR [to Germany and the satellite countries during the war]”indicated by the same department?
According to research by the staff of the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences Vladimir Poletaev, Yuri Strizhkov and Vladimir Telpukhovsky, such a "discrepancy" in the statistics of the repatriated is caused by the fact that Soviet citizens who were not local residents were massively exported from the satellite countries of Nazi Germany - these people could be there at all not because they were at one time forcibly "driven away" (captured).
The figure of 500 thousand Soviet citizens remaining in the West is also confirmed by the Russian historian Viktor Zemskov, pointing out that this number is optimal for the possibilities of receiving such a contingent by Western countries.
It is noteworthy that approximately the same data are set forth in the declassified statistical calculations of the Soviet Department for Repatriation Affairs (with a difference of minus 50 thousand people). According to this official information, we are mainly talking about Soviet Germans and residents of the western regions of the Soviet Union - they, in the opinion of Philip Golikov's department, made up the backbone of the "defectors". According to the management, over 80 thousand people of them settled in West Germany, and most (over 100 thousand) in England. The largest diasporas who did not want to return to their homeland chose Australia (over 50 thousand people) and America (over 35 thousand former USSR citizens) for their new place of residence.
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Nikolay Syromyatnikov