Cold War Exiles and the CIA Plotting to Free Russia

by Tromly, Benjamin

• ISBN13: 9780198840404
• ISBN10: 0198840403
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2019-11-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA's Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA's patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.

Author Biography

Benjamin Tromly, Professor of History, University of Puget Sound

Benjamin Tromly is Professor of History at University of Puget Sound, where he teaches Russian and European History. He is the author of Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I: The Many Faces of Russian Anti-Communism
1. A Fissile National Community: The Political World of Russian Emigres
2. 'A Political Maze based on the Shifting Sand': the Vlasov Movement and the Gehlen Organization in postwar Germany
3. Socialists and Vlasovites: War Memories and a Troubled Cross-Continental Encounter
Part II: The Transnational Quest for Russian Liberation
4. American Visions and Emigre Realities: The American Project to Unify the Russian Exiles
5. Builders and Dissectors: Emigre Unification and the Russian Question
6. Reluctant Chieftains: The Ascendance of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism
Part III: The CIA Operational Front
7. From Revolution to Provocation: The NTS and CIA Covert Operations
8. Spies, Sex, and Balloons: Emigre Activities in Divided Berlin
9. The Real Anti-Soviet Russians? Soviet Defectors and the Cold War
Part IV: The End of the Affair: The Decline of Emigre Anti-Communism
10. 'All will be Forgiven': The Soviet Campaign for Return to the Homeland
11. Unreliable Allies: The German Crucible and Russian Anti-Communism
Conclusion