“A Political Maze Based on the Shifting Sands”

Abstract

Chapter 2 examines Russian exile politics of the late 1940s, when anti-communist organizations emerged in the displaced-person camps of West Germany. The early efforts of White exiles to forge a right-wing movement went awry. The younger Vlasovites, Soviet subjects until the recent war, resisted pressure to take up the cause of historic Russia. A postwar Vlasov movement emerged but became mired in the murky espionage world of divided Germany. The exiles found backers in the Gehlen Organization, an intelligence outfit assembled from Hitler’s defunct military intelligence unit Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) which received funding from the US army after the war. However, the intermixing of anti-communist politics and espionage threw the Vlasov movement into chaos. The Gehlen Organization funded clashing exile clans, while Soviet intelligence stepped up efforts to paralyze the anti-communist circles through penetration agents and harassment—all of which virtually paralyzed the exiles’ nascent anti-communist agendas.