Soviet Repatriation in Postwar Politics and Private Life: Pro et Contra

Abstract

This article studies the Soviet repatriation policy after the Second World War referring to Soviet repatriation mission officers’ correspondence with the United Nations Relief and Reconstruction Administration (UNRRA), as well as Russian DPs’ ego-documents. The authors of the article raise the question about the fact that Soviet repatriation policy sparked an information war in the media in the second half of the 1940s, which has never been done by researchers previously. A variety of sources are used in the work, including the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace (Stanford, USA), the Bakhmetev Archives of Russian and Eastern European Culture at Columbia University (New York, USA), the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF, Moscow), as well as the UN Archive. The authors argue that discussions of Soviet repatriation policy should be placed within the context of the Cold War era, which began with the breakup of the Big Three alliance. The Soviet government used a variety of information, political, and intellectual resources to ensure the return of the maximum possible number of USSR citizens to their homeland. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that for the purposes of counterpropaganda, the anti-communist forces used the idea of repatriation by utilizing the potential of displaced people who had survived the Stalinist repression of the 1930s to oppose the existing political regime in the USSR. Considerable attention is paid to the position of UNRRA officials, primarily the heads of its mission in Austria. Several of them were highly critical of the activities of the Soviet repatriation authorities, believing that their behaviour often failed to help displaced people become interested in returning home.