No Happy Childhood Behind the Iron Curtain: Cold War and Imperial Perspectives in the Anglo–Soviet Dispute Over Unaccompanied Baltic Children (1947–1952)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the postwar Anglo–Soviet dispute within the League of Red Cross Societies over unaccompanied children from the Baltic states, whose postwar Soviet citizenship Britain contested. It argues that the resolution of this dispute was prevented by the novel Cold War view, common to both the British and the Soviet governments, that children socialised by ideological enemies were future enemies. With reference to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s comparative study of empires, it also suggests that, while the proposed repatriation or actual resettlement of the children in former British settler colonies and the United States may have been influenced by Cold War rivalries, the citizenship offered to these children was also determined by the ‘politics of difference’ of the Soviet, British and even the US empires.