Patrons, Partners, and Proxies in Political Warfare

Abstract

The history of U.S. collaboration with Russian exiles in opposition to governments in Russia and the Soviet Union is long. In the late nineteenth century (to cite the first of several instances), journalist George Kennan and other U.S. activists worked with Russian exiles to launch a movement for a “free Russia” that publicized political, religious, and ethnic repression in the tsarist empire.1 After the Bolshevik-led revolution of October 1917, the Woodrow Wilson administration collaborated with the ambassador of the deposed Russian provisional government and his aides to send massive amounts of military supplies to anti-Bolshevik armies fighting against the Soviet regime. Meanwhile, Russian exiles and their American friends cooperated in propaganda campaigns in support of White forces and against the Reds in the civil war.2 In Cold War Exiles and the CIA, Benjamin Tromly, a professor of history at the University of Puget Sound, focuses on a later phase, from the late 1940s through the 1950s, when U.S. officials worked with Russian exiles in Western Europe and the United States on covert action and propaganda campaigns against the USSR. Drawing on very impressive research in Russian, German, and English-language sources, Tromly describes a wide range of operations that “bore few tangible results” (13). U.S. efforts to unify the feuding monarchist, neo-fascist, liberal, and socialist exiles in a single political center and U.S. attempts to bridge the sharp divisions between Russian and non-Russian exiles both failed. An institute for the study of the USSR established in Munich was “of questionable usefulness” as a propaganda agency (152). The infiltration of agents into the USSR was a “complete failure,” with almost all of the agents quickly seized by Soviet security services (169). Efforts to induce Soviet defections “had negligible results” (292). Pervasive Soviet penetration “nearly paralyzed the exiles’ activities” (65).