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(s): Benjamin Tromly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 352
Tags: United States: Central Intelligence Agency: History: 20th Century, Russians: United States: History: 20th Century, Cold War: Influence
Acknowledgments......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
List of Figures......Page 11
List of Abbreviations......Page 13
Note on Transliteration and Russian Names......Page 17
Introduction......Page 19
Part I: The Many Faces of Russian Anti-Communism......Page 39
1. A Fissile National Community:
The Political World of Russian Émigrés......Page 41
2. “A Political Maze Based on the Shifting Sands”: The Vlasov Movement and the Gehlen Organization in postwar Germany......Page 66
3. Socialists and Vlasovites: War Memories and a Troubled Cross-Continental Encounter......Page 90
Part II: The Transnational Quest for Russian Liberation......Page 111
4. American Visions and Émigré Realities: The American Project to Unify the Russian Exiles......Page 113
5. Builders and Dissectors: Émigré Unification and the Russian Question......Page 139
6. Reluctant Chieftains: The Ascendance of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism......Page 162
Part III: The CIA Operational Front......Page 185
7. From Revolution to Provocation: The NTS and CIA Covert Operations......Page 187
8. Spies, Sex, and Balloons: Émigré Activities in Divided Berlin......Page 210
9. The Real Anti-Soviet Russians?: Soviet Defectors and the Cold War......Page 235
Part IV: The End of the Affair: The Decline of Émigré Anti-Communism......Page 259
10. “All Will Be Forgiven”: The Soviet Campaign for Return to the Homeland......Page 261
11. Unreliable Allies: The German Crucible and Russian Anti-Communism......Page 284
Conclusion......Page 307
Bibliography......Page 319
Index......Page 339
