Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia

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: Benjamin Tromly
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/25/2019
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780198840404

About the Author

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.