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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.

"Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these feted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state"--

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has thrown the field of post-Soviet studies into upheaval, as scholars seek to strike a balance between expressing opposition to an aggressive war and maintaining scholarly neutrality and recognition of complexity. Against this backdrop, the study of Russia's memory of the Great Patriotic War—which has been invoked to justify the invasion of Ukraine—is particularly challenging. In this light, the author reflects on research of one of the most controversial aspects of the Great Patriotic War, the history and memory of the collaborationist "Vlasov Movement," in the current environment. This exercise reveals some important aspects of the current memory landscape in Russia and the conceptual problems faced by those who study it. In particular, scholars of the war as well as war memory face the difficulty of navigating an information space and scholarship in which history and memory are closely intertwined.

AbstractThis article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.

This article examines the role of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right organization of Russian exiles, in U.S. intelligence operations during the early Cold War. Drawing on declassified archival documents and émigré sources, the article discusses how the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the NTS in covert operations to undermine Communism in Europe. Early operations to penetrate Soviet borders failed, as NTS members who were sent into the USSR were quickly rounded up amid suspicions of internal betrayal. Following Soviet attempts to kidnap and assassinate NTS leaders in Germany in 1954, the CIA adopted a new approach, using the émigré organization as a tool of political and psychological warfare. Borrowing political strategies used by the exiles themselves, the CIA promoted a false image of the NTS as a powerful underground organization in order to provoke the Soviet state into costly and destabilizing countermeasures against it. As a result, the NTS became a mythical organization, and the intelligence agencies of both superpowers sought to manipulate it to their advantage.

After World War II, bilateral agreements within the Eastern bloc brought youth from the newly established satellite states of Eastern Europe to study in higher education establishments in the USSR. Designed to impart Soviet knowledge and practices in the countries of people's democracy as well as to create a sense of solidarity within the bloc, the training of East Europeans in the center of world communism proved a tension-filled affair. Spurred by the xenophobia and chauvinism of the Soviet home front during the early Cold War, Soviet administrators, faculty members and students related to the foreign students, despite their socialist credentials, as outsiders and sometimes as carriers of unwanted influences. For this reason, the educational agreements deepened the sense that fundamental differences existed between the Soviet Union and its client states in Europe.

What was Soviet patriotism? A definition of the term offered by the Soviet ideological apparatus in 1953—a "social, historically conditioned feeling of love for one's motherland"—raises more questions than it answers. Patriotism was a concept foreign to classical Marxism; indeed, the concept, along with the corresponding term "the Soviet people," entered mass usage only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet government moved away from class as the dominant paradigm for interacting with its society. The relationship of Soviet patriotism to nationalism, the predominant political identity in twentieth-century Europe, was also ideologically fraught. Patriotism was sharply distinguished from nationalism(natsionalizm)in the Soviet lexicon. The first referred to a healthy allegiance to a community that was consistent with universal values of enlightenment, justice and democracy; the second was a jingoistic and reactionary ideology utilized by the bourgeoisie to mislead the working class. Despite this distinction, Soviet patriotism was supra-national, not anti-national, as it "harmoniously combined" the national traditions of the different Soviet nations with "the common, fundamental interests of all working people in the USSR."