Winston Churchill called the sailors of the Arctic Convoys, on the Barents Sea, ‘the bravest men afloat’. Between 1941 and 1945, they ran the gauntlet of U-boats and Luftwaffe with supplies of food and munitions critical to keeping Russians alive and in the war.

The men were brave, certainly. While a regular WW2 soldier faced a 1 in 33 chance of meeting his fate, it was just 1 in 5 for a merchant seaman. So those that finally made it to Archangelsk and Murmansk naturally hoped for a stiff drink and a pretty Olga to warm their frostbite.

‘The Red Army girls were really pretty. But they knew there was a line they could not cross.’

Olga at war

Exactly what kind of Russian hospitality the heroes received is now disputed. Some suggest that brothels, staffed by glamorous NKVD agents, were provided under a secret agreement between Churchill and Stalin. The houses were known locally as ‘Churchill Houses’ or ‘Interklubs’.

Survivors, on the other hand, remember really struggling to have a lads night out in Murmansk in 1941. Quote:

‘Murmansk itself appeared virtually to have closed down. There was one restaurant that was open, where the food was not as good as we could get aboard ship, and a small club, where we could buy iced tea and some kind of soft drink.

The girls in the club were quite friendly, but when we tried to chat them up outside they kept casting worried eyes at two uniformed men watching at a distance.

One evening some of us trudged through the snow to a local dance. It was the only time I have ever been to a dance in sea boots, but then all the Russians, male and female, were wearing similar footwear. We soon sensed we were tolerated rather than welcomed and left.’

A veteran who went ashore at Archangelsk fared little better.

‘On reaching the landing-stage, we were met by a good-looking Russian girl and our first impression was that we were being picked up by one of the locals. However, it did not take us long to realise that she was a KGB (or whatever it was then) agent and that she had been detailed to escort us to a café where she stood us some insipid lager.

The afternoon did not develop into any jolly night-life, because there wasn’t any, and we returned to the ship without having met any genuine Russians.’

So, it would seem that His Majesty’s Ships met a fairly cold front reaching Archangelsk. Often the ice had to be scraped off by the crew to prevent vessels from capsizing.

Such contemporary accounts did not deter Russian director, Aleksei Uchitel, from conceiving a film about the Churchill Houses. The storyline is based on recently declassified Soviet Naval Records. Alexei says:

‘The documents reveal that the official army nightclubs were in fact Russian bordellos. They were staffed by highly educated, English-speaking Russian women, especially trained by the NKVD to minister to the sexual needs of the Allied sailors.’

Through whatever agency, there were indeed many recorded affairs between the dashing foreigners and the beautiful women of northern Russia. Olga Golubtsova, a journalist from Severodvinsk, researched the love stories of 14 wartime couples. She writes:

‘The girls of Arkhangelsk liked courteous British gentlemen. They were not impudent. They were well mannered. They had serious intentions. They made presents and were good dancers. In the evenings, again and again the girls were dragged to Interklub, which was a kind of oasis in the middle of dark gloomy town. But in these years, one had to pay for making friends with foreigners, let alone marrying them.’

The discrepancy in the eye-witness accounts could simply come down to the time frame. In 1941, when the lease-lend convoys started, foreigners were unknown in Russia’s northern ports. But by 1943 they were a common and welcome sight.

Everyone agrees on one thing, though. All the girls who had affairs were reported to the NKVD and sent to the gulag. You couldn’t keep a secret in Murmansk or Archangelsk. One girl was informed upon, arrested and sent to labour camp as late as 1951. Another who had a child by an English radio operator received 10 years hard in Siberia. Prostitutes or not, all paid the price of Soviet-British love in grim and fateful ways.

Olga writes again:

‘For many years the people in Russian North have been telling a legend about the girls who went to Interklubs and made friends with foreigners. They say that all of them had been put on a barge, and sunk in the White Sea. Such legends are born from silence. Now we start to speak . . . but until now there is no answer, whether this barge really existed or not. ‘

Below: Old Houses in Archangelsk. Could one of them have been a ‘Churchill House?’