For four years, they survived some of the harshest conditions of World War II to get crucial supplies through to their besieged Russian allies, facing ceaseless bombardment, repeated U-boat attacks and some of the bitterest temperatures on Earth.
Winston Churchill called the sailors on the Arctic convoys ”the bravest souls afloat”. But now shooting is about to start on a controversial new film that depicts them as enthusiastic patrons of military brothels — and the survivors are furious.
Later this year, Aleksei Uchitel, one of the leading post-Soviet era directors and an Oscar nominee, will start shooting the film, based on documents recently unearthed from Soviet naval archives.
”The documents reveal that the official army nightclubs, affectionately known as ‘Churchill clubs’, were in fact Russian bordellos,” said Uchitel. ”They were set up in an extraordinary secret pact between Churchill and Stalin to provide high-class prostitutes for British sailors after their epic 1 600-mile [2 560km] voyage to Murmansk.
”The clubs, also referred to as doma druzbi or ‘friendship houses’, were staffed by highly educated English-speaking Russian women, especially trained by the KGB to minister to the sexual needs of the Allied sailors.”
Joseph Fiennes and Jacqueline Bisset, both long-standing friends of Uchitel, have expressed an interest in starring in the film, which will be the first Russian production to be made in English. John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Russia’s most famous actor Evegeny Mironov have also been approached to appear in the film — which has a working title of The Churchill Houses.
Uchitel refuses to say which characters the actors might play but admits the plot is already proving controversial.
”I have received a number of complaints from war veterans but the film is not intended to offend in any way: my story does not question the fact that all these people were fighting heroically against Hitler,” he said.
The script was written by another Russian, Aleksander Rogozhkin, who uncovered the story while studying Soviet navy archives eight years ago.
”As far as I know, this is the first time this information is going to be revealed to the public,” said Uchitel. ”The information was kept a secret until now because many of the witnesses were still alive — but now so few survivors are left the situation has relaxed.”
Uchitel’s film centres on two fictitious love affairs at the real-life international Churchill House, or Interklub, in the main square in Murmansk. One romance is between a British naval officer and a 16-year-old girl working at the club, while the other involves a Russian submarine captain and an older prostitute.
However, a number of people who lived or worked in the Russian port during the war are disputing the claims to be made in the film, arguing The Churchill Houses is a lurid story with no grounding in fact. ”This is sick fantasy,” said Olga Golubtsova, author of a book about wartime romances between British sailors and Russian women, who said more than 100 girls who worked in the clubs were arrested and sent to the Gulag from Murmansk, accused of spying for British intelligence. ”I don’t understand how one can produce a film like this when all the witnesses alive deny that anything of the sort happened,” she said.
But according to Uchitel, although the authorities tried to disguise what was happening in the building, its true purpose was well known. ”It was officially called a ‘house of friendship’,” he said. ”But every day, the words ‘Churchill Brothel’ would appear on the fence as the locals knew very well what went on there.
”The women who worked at the Churchill House had to fulfil strict criteria. They were chosen according to questionnaires. They were required to be beautiful and to know foreign languages.” The film will pull no punches, promises the director. It will depict the girls as forced into lives of humiliation, poverty, violence and disease.
Uchitel is an established and respected director in his country. His previous works include His Wife’s Diary, which was Russia’s entry for the best foreign film Oscar in 2000. His latest film, Dreaming of Space, which stars Mironov, won Russia’s prestigious Golden St George prize in Moscow and was screened at the London Film Festival last month.
The Arctic convoys, which transported four million tonnes of supplies and munitions to Russia between 1941 and 1945, were instrumental in keeping the Red Army in the war and were key to the Allies’ ultimate victory.
Last month veterans of the convoys won a major victory in their long campaign for a medal recognising that their voyages were among the most difficult and dangerous naval missions of the war, taking the lives of almost 3 000 British seamen.
After talks with John Reid, the British Defence Secretary, veteran Eddie Grenfell announced that his comrades would be able to wear the Arctic Star, which he has designed himself. Grenfell, who spent time in Murmansk after his ship was destroyed on one of the convoys, called Uchitel’s claims ”disrespectful bloody nonsense”.
”We were allowed to dance with the Russian girls but that was it,” said the 85-year-old former commander, who now lives in Portsmouth. ”It was very difficult to have any close relations with them: they were watched by Russian officers, who they were very afraid of. They knew there was a certain line they couldn’t cross.”
Grenfell, then a radar operator, said it was true that the women employed at the club had clearly been picked for their beauty and ability to speak English.
”I met many Red Army girls and they were all delightful, university-educated women who spoke good English,” he remembered. ”And my goodness, they were some of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen.”
But Uchitel maintained: ”The basis of the film is a true story. You have to understand that many details came from the author’s mind because it’s not a documentary but I know that institutions like this really existed.”
Soldiers and the sex trade
Alarm about the involvement of United Nations peacekeepers in sex trafficking became widespread during the Nineties, when investigators found soldiers were generating an estimated 80% of the income in Bosnian brothels. The UN’s department of peacekeeping in New York has acknowledged that ”peacekeepers have come to be seen as part of the problem in trafficking, rather than the solution”.
An estimated 2 000 women have been coerced into sex slavery in Kosovo since the arrival of Nato peacekeepers in 1995, with pimps supplying the thriving industry of forced prostitution by abducting local girls or trafficking women into Kosovo, mainly from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia.
Much of the blame for the explosion of prostitution in Cambodia in the early Nineties has been laid at the door of the 22 000 international troops and staff of the United Nations interim administration. More than 3 000 UN soldiers caught sexually transmitted diseases between December 1991 and May 1993.
In East Germany during the Cold War, male prostitutes as young as 12 were used by the Stasi secret police to spy on Western diplomats. Around 95% of East Berlin’s estimated 3 000 prostitutes had links with the secret police and routinely provided information about Western clients.
The ”moral laxity” of British women during World War II was considered to be so degenerate that it strained relations between Britain and the USA. Thousands of American troops were stationed in or near London in 1942, and wrote home in such colourful terms about being propositioned by prostitutes and ”good-time girls” in the West End of London that the US military demanded action be taken to curb the ”debauchery”. – Guardian Unlimited Â