New Book of Interest: Cold War Exiles and the CIA ©

A recently published book of interest:

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia byBenjamin Tromly, which

·      Examines the US strategy to utilize emigres from the USSR as a weapon in the Cold War

·      Explores the psychological warfare and espionage operations that emerged from this strategy

·      Adopts a transnational approach by linking Russian emigres to the wider Cold War contexts of U S policy and divided Germany

·      Draws extensively on recently declassified CIA documents and emigre sources that are not in wide scholarly use

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

Author Information

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.

On September 25, 2019,  Benjamin Tromley will be speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.

"During the early Cold War, the United States government backed exiles from the Soviet bloc as part of an effort to subvert communist power from abroad. In his new book, Cold War Exiles and the CIA, Professor Benjamin Tromly tells the story of the involvement of Russian exiles in US political warfare and espionage programs in the 1950s. He will explain how officials and spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain became entangled with the internal struggles of the Russian diaspora in Europe. He will also analyze exile politics as a sub-front of the Cold War in Europe that involved the marshaling of proxies and non-state actors."

Moderator 

Eric Lohr

For more information, visit https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/book-talk-cold-war-exiles-and-the-cia