Emigre Politics and The Cold War The Nat

Contemporary European History (2019), page 1 of 16
doi:10.1017/S0960777318000590
ARTICLE
Émigré Politics and the Cold War: The National Labor

Alliance (NTS), United States Intelligence Agencies and
Post-War Europe
Benjamin Tromly
University of Puget Sound – History, Tacoma, Washington, 98416-0001, United States
btromly@pugetsound.edu
Abstract
This article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian
exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during
the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to
NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into
a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying
deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the
new geopolitical context of divided Europe.
In 1951 operatives of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations (OSO) in Germany reached an
agreement to pursue covert operations against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
with the leaders of a group of anti-communist Russian exiles, the Narodno-trudovoi soiuz
(rossiiskikh solidaristov), in English the National Labor Alliance (of Russian Solidarists), or NTS.
The basis for their agreement was ‘Petia-8’, a proposal submitted by the NTS designed to ‘prepare
the ground for revolution’ in the USSR by infiltrating agents from abroad across Soviet borders,
distributing propaganda to Soviet troops stationed in Germany and Austria and developing anti-
Soviet radio broadcasting. The CIA agreed to support ‘Petia-8’ without major modifications,
apart from lowering the NTS’s proposed budget.1
The CIA’s support of the NTS was one component of the United States’s plan to subvert Soviet
communism, a multi-pronged project in which émigrés from communist countries played crucial
roles. If the anti-Soviet passions of the early Cold War provided the context for the secret negotiations
in Germany, the two parties were nevertheless strange bedfellows. The newly established intelligence
apparatus of the democratic superpower was establishing ties with a group of far-right exiles that had
collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Even more perplexing were the
power dynamics involved in the 1951 negotiations. The NTS was a small group; in 1951, it included a
mere 643 members strewn across Europe, North and South America and Australia.2 Yet the CIA
took the NTS seriously as a political actor and negotiating partner, as shown by the CIA’s willingness
The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for Contemporary European History and participants in
‘From Hot War to Cold War: Transnational Trajectories’, a workshop at Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East
European Studies at Columbia University, who commented on an earlier version of this paper. Research for this article was
made possible by Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Columbia University Libraries, and University of Puget Sound.
1
Summary of Proposed Plan for Aerosol, 1–8, United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA),
Record Group (RG) 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Second Release, Entry ZZ-19 (Subject Files), 230/86/
25/03, box 24, AESAURUS/AENOBLE (henceforth AESAURUS), vol. 1, pt. 1; Su: REDBIRD/Summary of projects for
[redacted], 30 June 1951, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.
2
Otchetnyi doklad Predsedatelia Soiuza za trekhletie svoikh polnomochii, ot 24-1-1952 goda, 12, Georgetown University
Archives and Special Collections, Victor M. Baydalakoff Collection (henceforth Baydalakoff Collection), box 1, fol. 9.
© Cambridge University Press 2019
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 75.172.120.143, on 16 Jan 2019 at 05:50:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777318000590
2 Benjamin Tromly
to endorse the NTS’s prescriptions for collaboration (‘Petia-8’). In fact, the NTS leaders drove a hard
bargain with the Americans. The CIA initially sought to focus its collaboration with NTS on
traditional espionage activities, but the Alliance’s leaders refused, declaring that they were ‘not agents
collecting military intelligence for a foreign power, but members of a political organisation whose job
was to speed the day of revolution’.3 As a compromise, the two sides agreed that NTS agents sent
across Soviet borders by the CIA would be tasked with gathering ‘operational intelligence’ but not
with pursuing specific military or political targets.
This article examines the path by which a group of far-right Russian exiles became clients of
the CIA. What was the NTS and how did it rise from marginality and even disrepute to become
an instrument of US policy in fighting the Cold War? The wider context of the furtive nego-
tiations in Germany was the adoption of liberation as a goal of US and British foreign policies in
the late 1940s. After the first Berlin crisis governments in Washington and London became
convinced that the USSR was bent on spreading communism to areas of Western control. In
addition to measures to contain communism, the Western allies went on the offensive by
launching a series of covert operations, sometimes joint US–UK enterprises, designed to subvert
satellite countries (particularly Albania and Yugoslavia) and various parts of the USSR (including
the Baltic Republics, Transcaucasia and Ukraine).4 National Security Council (NSC) Directive
10/2, adopted in June 1948, authorised the US government to undertake ‘preventive direct action’
against the Soviet Bloc, ‘including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures’,
as well as ‘assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation
groups’.5 The British government undertook comparable covert operations aimed at liberating
communist lands, although Churchill’s conservatives, who returned to power in 1951, scaled
down these endeavours.6 For both countries, the populations of Soviet and East European citizens
displaced by the war and residing outside the Soviet sphere of influence made up the crucial human
material for these operations. As the famous Soviet spy Kim Philby commented, ‘both CIA and
SIS were up to their ears in émigré politics’ during the formative phase of the Cold War.7
The emergence of CIA–NTS cooperation suggests the limits of scholarly understanding of
the CIA’s foray into émigré politics during the early Cold War.8 Generally speaking, scholars
working on US covert operations have tended to focus on policy making in Washington rather
than on recruitment of foreign assets in the field, an approach that has yielded crucial
insights into the strategic and bureaucratic confusion surrounding liberation as a
foreign policy goal. Less understood are the particular ways in which intelligence operatives
interacted with the varied anti-communist movements in Europe they chose to support.9
3
Transmittal of Report of Meeting between CABOCHE 7, CACCOLA 2 [BLANK] to Chiefs of Foreign Divisions M and S
and Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, 4 Dec. 1951, 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.
4
The best account of the emergence of liberation policy is Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy
to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). See also Peter Grose Operation
Rollback: America’s Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); John Prados, Safe for
Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); Bernd Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus:
amerikanische Liberation Policy im Kalten Krieg 1947–1991 (Köln: Böhlau, 2002); Bennett Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation:
East-Central Europe in U.S. Diplomacy and Politics since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
5
National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, Washington, 18 June 1948, document 292, FRUS, 1945–
1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/
d292, (last visited 2 Jan. 2017).
6
Beatrice Heuser, ‘Covert Actions within British and American Concepts of Containment, 1948–1951’, in Richard J.
Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–1951 (London: Routledge, 1992), 77–8.
7
Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 152.
8
British involvement with NTS remains poorly studied, in part due to restrictions on archival access. See Benjamin Tromly,
‘The Making of a Myth: The National Labor Alliance, Russian Émigrés, and Cold War Intelligence Activities’, Journal of
Cold War Studies, 18, 1 (2016), 104 n. 113.
9
Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin; László Borhi, ‘Rollback, Liberation, Containment, or Inaction? U.S. Policy and
Eastern Europe in the 1950s’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 1, 3 (1999); Sarah-Jane Corke, US Covert Operations and Cold
War Strategy: Truman, the CIA and Secret Warfare (London: Routledge, 2007).
Contemporary European History 3
Insofar as scholars of the CIA touch on the agency’s interactions with émigré assets, they often
stress opportunism on the US side. As Christopher Simpson has argued, émigrés were cheap
currency in the Cold War, funded by the CIA ‘only insofar as it served short-term American
intelligence-gathering objectives, no more’.10 Only recently have scholars with training in the
national histories involved turned to the exile communities that entered the orbit of the CIA
in the post-war years.11 In the case of the NTS itself, recent scholarship has discussed the
outcomes of CIA–émigré activities from the standpoint of intelligence history, leaving largely
obscure the historical processes which brought Russian exiles into the front lines of the Cold
War in Europe.12
This article presents a new view of US émigré engagements in the Cold War by depicting them
as a product of complex historical trajectories and political relationships. The ‘Solidarists’, as the
NTS members were called following their ideology of ‘National Labor Solidarism’, played a role
in determining the form of their collaboration with US intelligence agencies. Utilising recently
declassified US government documents as well as previously untapped émigré sources, the piece
draws a picture of the Solidarists as highly capable and often unscrupulous political operators
who aggressively pursued contact with US centres of power in the first post-war half decade.13 In
particular, the NTS drew on a set of deceptive political practises derived from two decades of
anti-Soviet struggle in the Russian emigration, first in interwar Europe and then under German
auspices during the Second World War. When CIA operatives began to look for anti-communist
clients, the NTS was well positioned to make the case that it was an effective organisation capable
of influencing the Soviet population, while also presenting itself as carrying ideological com-
mitments and past affiliations that were acceptable to Western public opinion. The NTS’s rise to
relevance in the late 1940s, the conclusion will argue, speaks to the fluidity of political rela-
tionships in early post-war Europe.
The Political Calamity of Russian Exiles

The postwar NTS must be understood in the context of the politics of Russian emigration. As
comparative literature points out, exile politics belong to the realm of international affairs, as
their very rationale involves the projection of power across borders. More specifically, exiles
always operate within a triangular relationship involving states and societies in both their host
countries and their countries of origin. Lacking money or rooted political constituencies, exiled
politicians are forced to seek the support of holders of power in their lands of sojourn in order to
pursue a change of regime in their homelands – a state of affairs that exposes them to disparate
and often disruptive cross-currents.14
10
This is from Christopher Simpson’s description of US exploitation of Ukrainian émigrés in Christopher Simpson,
Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 173.
11
See Simo Mikkonen, ‘Exploiting the Exiles: Soviet Émigrés in U.S. Cold War Strategy’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 14, 2
(2012); A. V. Antoshin, Rossiiskie emigranty v usloviiakh ‘kholodnoi voiny’ (seredina 1940-kh-seredina-1960-kh gg.)
(Ekaterinburg: Izd. Ural’skogo universiteta, 2008); the pieces collected in Katalin Kádár Lynn, ed., The Inauguration of
Organized Political Warfare: Cold War Organizations Sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe/Free Europe
Committee (Saint Helena, CA: Helena History Press, 2013).
12
Tromly, ‘The Making of a Myth’; David C. S. Albanese, ‘“It Takes a Russian to Beat a Russian”: The National Union of
Labor Solidarists, Nationalism, and Human Intelligence Operations in the Cold War’, Intelligence and National Security,
32, 6 (2017). As will become clear, the argument that Western governments deliberately fostered ‘hate-based nationalism’
is flawed. In Search of a Lesser Evil: Anti-Soviet Nationalism and the Cold War, PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2015,
12–3. See also Antoshin, Rossiiskie emigranty v usloviiakh ‘kholodnoi voiny’, 112–8, 205–13.
13
The main US government sources are files released in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and the Japanese
Imperial Government Disclosure Act, Second Release (RG 263), and Records of the Army Staff (RG 319), Army Intelligence
and Security Command (INSCOM), Records of the Investigative Records Repository (IRR), both located in NARA.
14
See Michael Reisman, ‘Governments-in-Exile: Notes toward a Theory of Formation and Operation’, in Yossi Shain, ed.,
Governments-in-exile in Contemporary World Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 239–41.
4 Benjamin Tromly
Twentieth-century Russian émigré communities provide a stark example of the exile’s

dependence on foreign interests as well as the dilemmas that follow from it. The wave of
humanity that fled the October Revolution in Russia faced almost insurmountable hurdles to
political action: statelessness, impoverishment, frequent isolation within the societies they
inhabited and, especially from the 1930s, an almost total severance of contact with life in the
USSR. The exiles were also badly divided internally, as the increasingly unlikely prospect of
return to the homeland opened the door to ‘the pressure of old issues, abrasive personalities, and
new movements’.15 Making matters worse, Russian exiles were targeted by the Soviet state, which
sought to discredit and demoralise them through elaborate measures of harassment and pro-
vocation.16 All these pressures meant that interwar Russian émigré politics was a brutal and often
tragic affair, marked by an inability to fight back against the hated Soviet regime, internecine
conflict and dependence on foreign interests.17
The NTS navigated the treacherous conditions of Russian émigré politics aggressively. At the
root of the NTS’s staying power and influence – at least, relative to other émigré groups – was its
ideological fervency. The founders of the NTS, established as the National Alliance of the New
Generation in Belgrade in 1931, belonged to the younger cohorts of the White emigration, the
conservative forces driven from Russia after their losses on the battlefields of the Russian Civil
War. The early Solidarists envisioned their movement as a forward-looking reaction to what they
saw as the weakness and archaism of their White elders.18 The young Russians’ search for a
muscular political ideology fit to counter Bolshevism led them to embrace the politics of the
ascendant European radical right. The NTS’s anti-Semitism and its quasi-imperial nationalism
placed the movement firmly in the context of the rightist movements of late imperial Russia.19 In
contrast, the NTS’s ideology of ‘national labor solidarism’ drew on several ideological compo-
nents of Italian fascism and German national socialism: national revolution, the transcendence of
class divisions through corporatist institutions, a cult of action and the forging of a new elite
tasked with moving the masses through history.20 The NTS also adopted much of the distinctive
political style of European fascism, as seen by its focus on mass mobilisation, organisational
hierarchy, symbols and songs.21
If radical politics placed the NTS on the map, so too did the fact that its functionaries became
adept practitioners of interwar émigré politics. In large part due to the hostile international
situation – many countries were wary of hosting, let alone backing, anti-Soviet groups – the NTS
was unable to earn sustained foreign backing in the interwar period, at least outside of its
headquarters in conservative Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the NTS entered the murky world of
intelligence agencies and interwar international intrigue with energy and resourcefulness. In the
1930s the Alliance gained backing from Poland, Japan and Romania for various operations
15
Robert C. Williams, ‘European Political Emigrations: A Lost Subject’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 12, 2
(1970), 142; Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 44; Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savický, Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora,
1918–1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xiii–xv.
16
Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 131–48.
17
Ryszard Wraga, ‘Russian Emigration after Thirty Years’ Exile’, The Eastern Quarterly, 6, 1 (1951), 24.
18
The history of the Alliance’s pre-Second World War origins remains poorly explored. See Liudmila Klimovich, ‘Narodno-
trudovoi soiuz rossiiskikh solidaristov: rannye stranitsy istorii’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 91 (May 2013), at http://www.
nlobooks.ru/node/4018 (last visited 1 Aug. 2015); A. F. Kiselev, ed., Politicheskaia istoriia russkoi emigratsii, 1920–1940
gg.: dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Vlados, 1999), ch. 6, pt. 1, at http://www.rus-sky.com/history/library/emigration/
index.htm (last visited 3 Aug. 2017); Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality
and Émigré Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 185–7; Robinson, The White Russian Army, 157–
64, 202–5.
19
Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
20
See Boris L. Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1955), 115–8. Dvinov’s account
might be biased by his identity as a Social Democratic opponent of the NTS, but his account is well sourced.
21
B. V. Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy (Silver Spring, MD: Multilingual Typesetting, 1986), 39–44, 113–8.
designed to penetrate the Soviet borders with propaganda and agents. The results were dis-
appointing. Most of the émigrés funneled across Soviet borders did not return alive, and the
NTS’s subversive activities had no noticeable effect on the USSR – that is, apart from lending
substance and credence to Stalin’s claims that hidden enemies threatened the Soviet state.22
Nevertheless, the motivation and cohesion of the Solidarists was impressive, at least in com-
parison to other Russian exile groups.
The NTS’s émigré activities gained newfound importance with the Axis invasion of the USSR.
Documents from the German Foreign Office suggest that the NTS tried to court Nazi Germany
unsuccessfully in the late 1930s; the Gestapo commented that it did not object to the content of
the NTS’s newspaper but thought the Solidarists a ‘meaningless Russian émigré organisation’.23
However, in 1941 the Nazis’ need for Russian-speaking personnel during Operation Barbarossa
caused parts of the Hitler state to actively cultivate the NTS. Acting with the support of the Reich
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium), V. M. Despotuli, the pro-Nazi
editor of Berlin’s sole Russian newspaper, invited the NTS to relocate its headquarters from
Belgrade to Berlin.24 With the defeat of the Soviet Union seeming almost certain in 1941, NTS
leaders – with a few exceptions – cast their lot with Nazi Germany and, in a later West German
judgment, ‘pursued an unmistakably fascist course’.25 Several NTS activists took up employment
in bureaucracies active on the Eastern front, including Alfred Rosenberg’s above-mentioned
ministry, the Abwehr (military intelligence), the Anti-Comintern agency in the Propaganda
Ministry, the SS sabotage agency Unternehmen Zeppelin, and local police organs in occupied
Soviet areas.26 In these varying institutional settings, NTS activists spread Nazi propaganda to
Soviet collaborators and prisoners of war, contributed to anti-partisan warfare and, in some
cases, participated in the mass killing of the Holocaust.27
The Solidarists sought to utilise their positions under the Nazis to political advantage. Most of
the NTS members assembled in Germany hoped that Hitler, pressed by ‘the very logic of events’
on the Eastern front after Stalingrad, would embrace a new policy recognising Russian national
interests.28 In the meantime, the NTS activists sought to advance the organisation’s influence
through their institutional footholds, particularly as propagandists in POW camps and as
22
A perhaps surprisingly candid account appears in the memoirs of the NTS’s longstanding leader. V. M. Baidalakov, Da
vozvelichits’ia Rossiia, da pogibnut nashi imena: vospominaniia predsedatelia NTS: 1930–1960 gg. (Moscow: Avuar
Konsalting, 2002), 1–17.
23
Betr: National-Sozialer Bund der Neuen Russischen Generation, Geheime Staatspolizei to Auswärtiges Amt, 7 June 1938,
1–3, Auswärtiges Amt-Politisches Archiv (henceforth AA-PA) R-104377.
24
Georg Leibbrandt of the Ostministerium had approved of the invitation extended to the Russians. Baidalakov, Da
vozvelichits’ia Rossiia, 26.
25
Ausarbeitung über due russische Emigration (Stand März 1954), no author indicated, 34, AA-PA B12/455.
26
The best source on the organisation’s wartime plans is Boris Prianishnikov, a longstanding NTS member who supported
the alliance’s wartime activities but left the organisation after the war. Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy, 27–9. See also
‘NTS–The Russian Solidarist Movement’, 10 Jan. 1951, US Department of State External Research Staff, Series, 76, 1–5; G.
Chuev, Spetssluzhby Tret’ego Reikha, book 1 (Moscow: Neva, 2003), 254–73; Chuev, Spetssluzhby Tret’ego Reikha, book 2,
232–5 and 242–8.
27
Oleg Beyda and Igor Petrov, ‘The Soviet Union’, in David Stahel, ed., Joining Hitler’s Crusade: European Nations and the
Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 381–2; Dmitrii Zhukov and Ivan
Kovtun, ‘Boris Khol’mston-Smyslovskii i NTS: Istoriia sotrudnichestva i protivostoianiia’, in A. Martynov, ed., Istoriia
otechestvennoi kollaboratsii: materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow: Staraia Basmannaia, 2017), 297–33; Yuri Radchenko, ‘“We
Emptied our Magazines into Them”: The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Holocaust in Generalbezirk Charkow, 1941–
1943’, Yad Vashem Studies, 41, 1 (2013), 63–98; V. G. Makarov, ‘Poruchik SD. Nikolai Rutchenko-Rutych i ego
nepredskazuemoe proshloe’, Rodina, 3 (2007), 83–7; ‘Iz direktivy NKVD SSSR no. 136 ob aktivizatsii agenturno-
operativnoi raboty po prosecheniiu podryvnoi deiatel’nosti zarubezhnoi antisovetskoi organizatsii NTSNP, 19 March
1943’, in S. V. Stepashin and V. P. Iampol’skii, eds., Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi
voine: sbornik dokumentov, vol. 4, book 1, Sekrety operatsii “Tsitadel’”: 1 ianvaria-30 iiunia 1943 goda (Moscow: Kniga i
biznes, 1995), 311.
28
Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy, 158–9.
6 Benjamin Tromly
administrators or spies on occupied Soviet territory.29 As the only Russian political group that
was tolerated, or perhaps even informally sanctioned, by the Germans, the NTS won considerable
influence among the masses of Russians who had arrived in the Third Reich as prisoners of war,
forced workers or collaborators of various kinds, while also establishing temporary and scattered
footholds in occupied Soviet territories.30 While the topic is poorly studied, it is clear that some
Soviet citizens displaced by the war were drawn to the NTS’s stridently nationalist and anti-
Semitic ideology, while many surely joined the organisation as a means of escaping the deadly
conditions of German POW camps.31
The NTS’s pro-German position, however, became untenable toward the end of the war, when
Russians on both sides of the front reacted to the success of the Red Army by rallying to the
Soviet cause. In an effort to maintain influence, the NTS issued propaganda that stressed its
independence from German agendas but ran afoul of their German patrons in the process. The
Gestapo arrested over one hundred Alliance members in 1944, even as other Solidarists remained
at large and participated in the collaborationist Russian liberation movement of A. A. Vlasov.32
Against the wider backdrop of the Hitler state’s ruthless exploitation of its many collaborators, the
NTS’s political failure and near destruction by the Nazis was hardly surprising.33 More impressive
was what had preceded it. The NTS had expanded its influence by siding with a state in conflict
with the USSR and had done so by working behind a façade of loyal service. No less importantly,
the Russian exiles had witnessed how, in conditions of world war, this duplicitous strategy
had enabled them to make contact with co-nationals from their long estranged homeland.
The Fight for Survival in Germany

The immediate post-war situation formed a stark contrast to the Solidarists’ heady agendas of the
wartime years. Most of the Solidarists escaped the advance of the Red Army by fleeing West,
settling in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the US and British administered zones of Germany
and Austria. Once there the Russians still faced an immediate threat from the Soviet state, which
demanded that the Western allies extradite the NTS leaders as traitors and war criminals and
sought to secure the repatriation of the mass of Soviet citizens displaced by the war, as mandated
under the terms of the Yalta Agreements.34 Nor did the NTS seem well-situated to earn the
favour of Germany’s new American or British occupiers. The organisation had never had much
of a presence in the United States or the United Kingdom, and many of the Solidarists held a
decidedly negative view of the ‘Anglo-Americans’ – a product, no doubt, of the White emigra-
tion’s longstanding bitterness over its lot in Europe as well as the Alliance’s fascist influenced
disdain for liberal democracy.35 More immediately, in the chaos of 1945–6 a few NTS leaders
29
These activities remain poorly studied. For pro-NTS accounts, see ibid. 146–81; P. D. Il’inskii, ‘Tri goda pod nemetskoi
okkupatsiei v Belorussii (Zhizn’ Polotskogo okruga 1941–1944 godov)’, in K. M. Aleksandrov, ed., Pod nemtsami:
vospominaniia, svidetel’stva, dokumenty. Istoriko-dokumental’nyi sbornik (St. Petersburg: Skriptorium, 2011), 42–138.
30
See Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1957), 526; Antoshin, Rossiiskie emigranty v usloviiakh ‘kholodnoi voiny’, 206.
31
For the published memoirs of such wartime recruits of the NTS, see O. V. Budnitskii and G. S. Zelenina, eds., Svershilos’-
prishli Nemtsy! Ideinyi kollaboratsionizm v SSSR v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014). See
also O. V. Budnitskii, ‘The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42’, Kritika, 15, 4 (2014).
32
See excerpt from SI-05606 (1944), NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, CIA Name Files – 2nd Release, 230/86/23/04, box 77,
Viktor Larionoff (henceforth Larionoff), vol. 1. See also an NTS report from 1944 or 1945, seemingly genuine, that is
reproduced in S. A. Krivosheev, KGB Protiv NTS (Moscow: Trovant, 2015), 26–36.
33
For a useful overview, see Jan T. Gross, ‘Themes for a Social History of War Experience and Collaboration’, in István
Deák et al., eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 15–35.
34
The best overall account remains Mark R. Elliot, Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in their Repatriation
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
35
For NTS criticism of the ‘cacophony’ of liberal democracy, see A. Kolin, ‘Strategiia Solidarizma’, Volia, 2 (1949), 19.
were taken into custody and underwent interrogation by US and British security forces before
being released – a move that placed the émigré organisation in the sights of military occupation
authorities.36
The NTS activists confronted the difficult terrain of occupied Germany with skill and even
creativity, drawing on the political practises they had developed in the past years. From the outset
the NTS’s contact person with the Americans was Konstantin Vasil’evich Boldyrev, a charismatic
White émigré who had learned fluent English while working at a British firm in Yugoslavia
before the war. By courting military government (the Office of Military Government, United
States or OMGUS) officials, Boldyrev secured permission to establish a DP camp at Mönchehof
near Kessel, where NTS members settled en masse.37 Mönchehof quickly came under the pro-
tection of the local US military administrators, who were impressed by the orderly, hardworking
and conservative Russians who had fled communism.
The NTS exploited the support offered by OMGUS for its own political gain, employing a
deceptive strategy vis-à-vis their patrons that was a direct throwback to the Alliance’s wartime
activities. While convincing the Americans that they were refraining from political activity –
which was technically illegal in DP camps – Mönchehof’s administration quickly set about
rebuilding the NTS at the camp. Boldyrev and the other NTS leaders located and reassembled
Alliance leaders strewn across the different zones of Germany and Austria, bypassing the ubi-
quitous checkpoints in a German medical truck with ‘Typhus’ written on the sides.38 The NTS
leaders also used their Mönchehof fiefdom to initiate publication of the newspaper The Sowing
(Posev), which passed through military censorship in 1947. Under its savvy and controlling editor
Evgenii Romanovich Ostrovskii-Romanov, a wartime émigré who had worked in Russian-
language propaganda in Berlin during the war, Posev became the most widely published Russian-
language newspaper in post-war Germany as well as a crucial source of funds for the post-war
NTS.39
Boldyrev also used his US ties to shield Russian DPs, and most of all those under his
authority at Mönchehof, from mandatory repatriation to the USSR. Along with other exile
leaders, Boldyrev sent a memorandum to Dwight D. Eisenhower, then military governor of the
US occupation zone, which drew a tragic picture of the fate that awaited the DPs in the
USSR.40 His efforts bore fruit: when Soviet repatriation officers visited Mönchehof, a US army
representative was there to confront them. Major Philip Steers refused to hand over the camp’s
inhabitants, ignoring the Soviet officers’ threats to report the incident to Moscow or even to
36
V. D. Poremskii, who had worked under the Germans as an instructor of Russian propagandists during the war, was
arrested by US military government but quickly released in 1945. There is no evidence that US authorities ‘instructed’
Poremskii to reorganise the core of the NTS, as a later German state security report alleged. Information zu der
Emigrantenorganisation NTS, no author indicated, 19 Feb. 1968, 4 in Zentralarchiv des Bundesbeauftragte für die
Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Federal Commissioner for
the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic-Central Archive, BStU-ZA), MfS
AFO 1187, 000084. On the detention and interrogation of N. F. Shits by British field police in 1946, see NARA, RG 319,
IRR, XE065662, Sheets, Nikolai, obtained through FOIA request.
37
The creation of this camp followed a dramatic evacuation to the West from Thuringia when the territory was handed over
to the Soviets in a planned territorial revision. A work on the camp by a former resident and NTS member is S. V.
Tribukh, Menkhegof—lager’ russkikh DiPi, 1945–1949 (US: n.p., 1986), Hoover Institution Library and Archives (HILA),
Constantin W. Boldyreff Papers (henceforth Boldyreff Papers), box 3.
38
Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy, 226.
39
Like many Soviet wartime exiles, Ostrovskii took on a new surname (Romanov) in order to avoid repatriation to the
USSR. See B. V. Prianishnikov, ‘O revoliutsionnoi deiatel’nosti Natsional’no-trudovogo soiuza’, New York, 1957, 33,
HILA, Boris V. Prianishnikov papers, box 5, fol. 13.
40
Memorandum re. Repatriation of Russians, M. F. Iuriev, A. V. Lampe, General Daniloff, General Meandrov and C. W.
Boldyreff to General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander in Chief, Allied Expeditionary Force, 16 June 1945, Boldyreff
Papers, box 7. The list of signees includes at least two prominent military collaborators (white general A. V. von Lampe
and Vlasovite M. A. Meandrov).
8 Benjamin Tromly
resort to force.41 When the camp passed to the jurisdiction of the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Steers instructed the organisation’s staff at the camp
to not be ‘too exacting’ about the registration of the DPs – aware, no doubt, that the Russians
were doctoring their paperwork by claiming to have been citizens of the interwar Polish or the
Baltic states, which brought exemption from mandatory repatriation.42 Boldyrev had saved the
Russians from a vindictive homeland, in the process expanding the influence of the NTS
among the Russian DPs.
The NTS also utilised its control of Mönchehof to enlarge its base of power in the dis-
placed Russian population. A common theme of scholarship on DPs is the apathy and
demoralisation that dominated everyday life in the camps, a product of the unclear futures
faced by uprooted populations, harsh camp conditions, dependence on international relief
agencies and the hostile attitude of the surrounding German society.43 In contrast, Boldyrev
established Mönchehof as a ‘working camp’ that contracted labour to US military units, an
arrangement that provided a degree of material comfort and a sense of purpose to the DPs.
Like some other DP camps, Mönchehof also housed a rich communal and cultural life,
featuring an Orthodox Church and a Russian-language school and theatre.44 At the same
time, Mönchehof placed its residents firmly in the orbit of the NTS. Boldyrev ran the camp as
‘a kind of dictator’, American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigators reported. DPs
quickly ‘found out that they live better by becoming members of the organisation’, while
opponents of the NTS might find themselves expelled from the camp or barred from admission
in the first place.45 The combination of privilege and pressure toward DPs at Mönchehof
amounted to a calculated strategy for creating a post-war political cadre for the NTS.
The NTS’s activities were part of a wider political mobilisation among DPs in Europe. The DP
populations in Germany of Baltic peoples, Jews, Ukrainians and Poles, all greater in size than that
of the Russians, gave rise to highly active anti-communist (or, in the case of the Jews, Zionist)
organisations.46 What was distinctive to the NTS was its use of elaborate political strategies, such
as courting US military men and using Mönchehof as a false front for its political activities. These
machinations constituted a redeployment of political practises deriving from the Russian emi-
gration and from collaboration during the Second World War.
Ideological Facelifts and Usable Pasts

The NTS’s leadership viewed its regrouping at Mönchehof as the first step in a much more
ambitious enterprise. As during the Second World War, the Solidarists saw the courting of a
great power patron as a means to pursue revolution in Russia. Instructions from the NTS office
in Paris to rank-and-file Solidarists in 1948 provide a clear view of the organisation’s agenda. The
41
Boldyrev’s file at the Hoover Institution contains his CIC and FBI files. Major Philip Steers, Jr., QMC, contacts with
Russian Liaison Officers, Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Investigation, George N. Liske to Kassel CIC Subdistrict, 29
Sept. 1945, Boldyreff Papers, box 7. Steers had been ‘instructed in person on the 17 July 1945 (sic) by General Woods, of
General Eisenhower’s Staff, to permit the Russian Liason (sic) officers to visit only certain parts’ of Mönchehof. Mem-
orandum for the Officer in Charge, Seymour Milbert, Sp. Agent, 1 Aug. 1945, Boldyreff Papers, box 7.
42
Tribukh, Menkhegof, 38.
43
Tomas Balelis, ‘Living in the DP Camp: Lithuanian Refugees in the West, 1944–1954’, in Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron,
eds., Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25–47.
44
Tribukh, Menkhegof, 24–33. For the building of community life among DPs as a whole, see Mark Wyman, DP: Europe’s
Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Philadelphia & London: Associated University Press, 1988), 106–30.
45
Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, CIC Special Agents Robert H. Swezey and William K.
Russell, 5 May 1948, 1, 6, Boldyreff Papers, box 7.
46
See Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 120–52; Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States &
Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
NTS leaders defined their immediate goal as securing the trust of Germany’s Western occupiers,
which would allow them to operate openly and expand their activities to other Western coun-
tries, including the United States. Rising West–East tensions in Europe, the Solidarists predicted,
would aid their efforts at legitimisation.47
While seeking to secure recognition as an active political force in exile, NTS leadership
planned – and, perhaps, hoped – for a hot war in Europe between the USSR and its recent allies.
Such a new conflagration, much like the last one, would allow the NTS to pursue a direct
‘military-political struggle’ against Soviet power. As the same 1948 document reasoned, the
outbreak of hostilities would bring the quick takeover of the European continent by Soviet
troops, after which the Solidarists would create a revolutionary underground. Located at the
‘meeting point of two warring worlds’, the instruction explained, the wartime NTS would be well-
positioned to become an ‘ally’ of the Anglo-American powers – and, ultimately, to emerge as a
central player in the reconstitution of Russian statehood should war end in a Soviet loss or
revolution in Russia.48 Clearly, the NTS viewed the Cold War through the prism of their Second
World War project of transforming war and occupation into a Solidarist led national revolution.
As is often true with émigrés, schemes for a speedy return to the homeland proved far-fetched –
and not just because the envisioned war in Europe never broke out. As its leadership understood,
the NTS’s political fate depended on establishing relationships with US and British intelligence
agencies, which alone possessed the technical and financial means to undertake operations against
Soviet power. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, the US intelligence establishment
had limited interest in Russian émigrés. The already mentioned CIC, a counterintelligence agency,
gathered information on the NTS and other Russian exile groups in Germany, in part in order to
locate Soviet espionage agents presumed to be located in their midst. However, for several years
after the war the US foreign intelligence apparatus was largely inactive among the exiles.
The refusal of US intelligence agencies to undertake anti-Soviet work with the NTS or other
Russian émigré groups had several sources. A downsizing of the US intelligence establishment at
war’s end limited the scope of operations in Germany.49 More fundamental were foreign policy
considerations: colluding with the sworn enemies of the Soviet state would poison the already
badly deteriorating relations between the two erstwhile allies.50 Just as important was the
Americans’ low opinion of the Russian emigration and its value for intelligence gathering. In
1946 a Munich-stationed agent of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the predecessor of the CIA,
proposed to infiltrate an undercover agent into the NTS in the hopes of exploiting the exiles’
planned operations across the Iron Curtain. (In question was an evidently stillborn plan to
penetrate Soviet Ukraine via Czechoslovakia).51 But headquarters rejected the idea. Any security
breaches would make it difficult for US intelligence to disassociate itself from the NTS’s radical
political agenda, Washington warned. The SSU also assumed that the Soviet agents had pene-
trated the NTS to some extent and even exercised ‘a certain amount of control’ over it.52 In any
case, the SSU leadership added, ‘so-called White Russian operations’ had proven ‘almost com-
pletely valueless’ in the past.53
Without support from intelligence agencies, the NTS remained exposed in Germany. In par-
ticular its strident anti-communism and recent record of collaboration proved distinct liabilities.
47
Biulleten’ P. P., 1, 4 Mar. 1948, Paris, 5, in Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen, 01-098
Tarasova, kor. 5.
48
Ibid.
49
Jeffrey Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
215–7.
50
Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 134–6.
51
Gull’s Operational Possibilities, 19 July 1946, 2–3, Larionoff, vol. 1.
52
Front Saint to Saint, AMZON, 12 Aug. 1946, Larionoff, vol. 1. On the impact of interwar cases of Soviet penetration of
émigré organisations, see Wraga, ‘Russian Emigration after Thirty Years’ Exile’, 26.
53
SC, FBM to SC, AMZON, 22 Jan. 1947, Larionoff, vol. 1.
10 Benjamin Tromly
Threats to the émigrés came from the Soviet state most of all, but also from OMGUS and from
international relief bodies administering the DP populations in Germany and elsewhere. In 1946
OMGUS arrested Boldyrev and his assistant Irina Vergun, who were charged with carrying out anti-
Soviet activity and having collaborated with the SS during the war.54 Both charges were eventually
dropped for lack of evidence, even though both were probably true. CIC investigators discovered
that Boldyrev had headed a construction firm called Erbauer, which operated first in occupied
Minsk and then, after the German retreat, took up work under SS supervision at the infamous
V2 rocket factory in Niedersachswerfen in Thuringia.55 Some DPs interviewed by CIC agents
claimed that Boldyrev had actively collaborated with Himmler’s police force, while Boldyrev and his
subordinates countered that Erbauer’s ties to its employers were purely economic in nature. While
CIC officials were unable to determine the precise nature of the Russians’ relationship to the SS, they
nevertheless remained suspicious of Boldyrev and the NTS, which had ‘flourished under the Nazis’,
a CIC agent noted in 1948. Recent scholarship identifies Erbauer as cover for the espionage outfit
‘Ingvar’, formed in 1944 under by the SD Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS).56
The US investigation ultimately came to nothing, in no small part due to intervention by
Boldyrev’s protectors in OMGUS. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cameron, whom one CIC agent
thought ‘deeply biased’ in Boldyrev’s favor, offered testimony that cleared the latter’s name.57
CIC investigators also suspected that the NTS applied pressure on DPs in Mönchehof to dissuade
them from divulging information about Boldyrev’s wartime activities.58 Clearly, Boldyrev’s
exoneration demonstrated the effectiveness of his personal diplomacy and, more broadly, of the
NTS’s survival strategies at Mönchehof.
Having fended off US military law, the NTS next faced a challenge from international relief
organisations, namely the UNRRA and its successor, the International Relief Organisation (IRO).
The NTS’s modus operandi of manipulation and deception was better suited to US military per-
sonnel – powerful men concerned with maintaining order – than it was to international relief
workers, civilians of far-flung national origins who had a more professionalised and technocratic
connection to life in the DP camps.59 A protracted conflict emerged between the local UNRRA
chapter and the secretive and fiercely independent NTS enterprise at Mönchehof. According to a
CIC officer, the core issue was the émigrés’ position that the ‘UNRRA should do nothing in the
camp except furnish the materials needed for the operation’.60 In early 1947 many other NTS
leaders were stripped of DP status during a UNRRA screening as ‘collaborators with the Germans’
– a verdict that, while true enough, was surely connected to the turf wars at Mönchehof.61
54
Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, 2–3.
55
See collated information from CIC document marked ‘Internal Review Slip’ on Boldyrev, 22 Aug. 1946, Boldyreff Papers,
box 7. The NTS has never explained adequately the anomaly of a construction firm in occupied Soviet territory and Nazi
Germany headed by a Russian émigré. Years later, Boldyrev claimed that he had taken over the firm from white émigré A.
I. Ermolov, who benefitted from a friendship with ‘a young German captain’, perhaps Hans Guderian. See Boldyrev’s
response to Blowback by Christopher Simpson, n. d., Boldyreff Papers, box 7.
56
Zhukov and Kovtun, ‘Boris Khol’mston-Smyslovskii i NTS’, 325; Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin
Boldyreff, 8.
57
See Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Seymour Gilbert, Special Agent of the 75th CIC Department, 2–3 Aug. 1948,
7, Boldyreff Papers, box 7.
58
Ibid.
59
On the professionalisation of post-war international relief workers, see Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s
Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 58–78; Sharif Gemie, Laure Humbert
and Fiona Reid, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936–48 (London: Continuum,
2012), 198.
60
Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, 7.
61
Ibid. Andrew Janco argues that screenings removed NTS members for their role in hiding Soviet DPs from repatriation.
Andrew Janco, Soviet ‘Displaced Persons’ in Europe, 1941–1951, Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012, 231–4. The
screening of DPs is discussed in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 35–57.
The NTS managed to survive the eviction of its leaders from Mönchehof, and actually retained
power through its remaining cadres in the camp. Nevertheless, renewed questioning over the
organisation’s record during the war demonstrated the limits of the NTS’s aggressive political
tactics in Germany. Until the late 1940s the NTS saw its future in the US and Britain, ‘the centres
of world politics’ where the prospects for an organisation opposing the Soviet state seemed
brightest.62 The NTS undertook a characteristically crafty manoeuvre with the goal of moving its
cadres out of Europe in the late 1940s. Somehow Boldyrev secured a position as IRO repre-
sentative for North Africa, which he used to arrange for the exit of hundreds of DPs from
Mönchehof and environs to Morocco as contract labourers – an effort that ended in scandal
when it turned out that some 160 purported engineers arriving in Morocco were in fact
untrained NTS activists.63 While the scheme failed, it showed the eagerness of the émigrés to flee
Europe. In fact, the NTS only reconciled itself to the need to maintain its headquarters and cadres
in Germany after the Berlin crisis, when the entry of CIA and MI6 into Russian émigré affairs
created new opportunities for anti-Soviet work.
The NTS’s conflict with the UNRRA underscored the Alliance’s need to solidify and validate
its place in the West. Accordingly, the post-war NTS undertook a massive public relations
campaign designed to obscure its collaborationist and semi-fascist past. According to a new NTS
historical myth, the Alliance had been a ‘Third Force’ that had fought against both the USSR and
Nazi Germany for the duration of the war.64 The NTS pointed to the arrest of some of its
members by the Gestapo as incontrovertible evidence of the Alliance’s anti-German wartime
position. To the extent that NTS had collaborated with German power structures, NTS members
claimed, it was only with anti-Hitler military professionals who opposed the brutality of Nazi
racial warfare in the East and were sympathetic to the Russian national cause.65 If this line had a
kernel of truth – some of the NTS’s protectors were indeed anti-Nazi military leaders – it
nevertheless obscured the breadth and depth of Solidarist collaboration with the Hitler state.
Complementing the Alliance’s new presentation of the past was its simultaneous ideological
transformation. Soon after the war ended, the NTS sought to redefine its doctrines in such a way
that the organisation might be allowed to operate in an occupied Germany, and more broadly a
post-war West, that was dominated by US-style liberal democracy. Starting with its 1946 pro-
gramme, the NTS began purging its doctrinal statements of fascistic and anti-liberal terminology
(plans for ‘national dictatorship’ and condemnation of ‘the comedy of parliamentary elections’)
and anti-Semitism (the demand that Jews either leave Russia without capital or settle in a
‘territory specially designated for them’).66 According to the post-war party line, Solidarism was –
and always had been – a moderate doctrine that opposed totalitarianism in both its fascist and
Marxist variants.67
62
“V srede soiuza’ in Tsirkuliar Ispol’nitel’nogo Biuro Soveta (‘Dorogoi drug’ ot 18 ianvaria 1948 g’), Sbornik reshenii soveta
NTS, 1946–1957 (Frankfurt / Main: Izdanie soveta soiuza, 1985), at http://ntsrs.ru/content/sbornik-resheniy-soveta-nts-
1946-57 (last visited 14 July 2013).
63
Memorandum, CIC special agents William K. Russell and Robert H. Sweeney, CIC Region III (Sub-Region Kassel), 7 Jan.
1948, 2, Boldyreff Papers, box 7; Janco, Soviet ‘Displaced Persons’, 227.
64
Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov, ‘“Stiller als Wasser, Tiefer als Gras”: Zur Migrationgeschichte der Russischen Displaced
Persons in Deutschland Nach Dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Arbeitspapiere und Materialien–Universität Bremen, 68, For-
schungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen, 2005, 42.
65
For an expression of the post-war NTS party line on the Second World War, see Aleksandr Artemov, ‘NTS i osvobo-
ditel’noe dvizhenie vremen voiny’, Posev, 3 (1999), at http://www.posev.ru/files/nts-about/ne7006.htm (last visited 15
Aug. 2014).
66
See the sixteenth chapter of ‘Skhema natsional’no-trudovogo stroia 1942’, at www.ntsrs.ru/content/programmnye-
dokumenty.nts (last visited 24 Apr. 2013). Post-war efforts of NTS members to attribute this demand for the deportation
of Russian Jews to Nazi pressure seem unconvincing given the numerous anti-Semitic references found in pre-war
Alliance writings. Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration, 139–40, 157–67.
67
For one example of how the Solidarists constructed the right and left as external and equidistant entities, see Kolin,
‘Strategiia Solidarizma’, 25.
12 Benjamin Tromly
The NTS’s post-war political facelift – both its obfuscation of wartime collaboration and its
instrumental adoption of democratic slogans – was hardly out of place in post-war Europe in
general or among displaced populations in particular.68 For instance, the dominant Ukrainian
party in the DP milieu, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera Faction, underwent a
similar transformation from integral nationalism and intermittent collaboration with the Nazis
to a post-war embrace of democratic language – an ‘opportunistic adjustment to the conditions
of the Western occupation’, its Ukrainian émigré opponents alleged.69 It is nevertheless striking
how deliberately the NTS sought to transform its image to fit prevailing political realities in the
post-war West. As early as 1946 the CIC reported on the holding of a ‘press conference’ at
Mönchehof at which R. N. Redlikh, who had been an NTS liaison to the brutal SS Division of B.
V. Kaminskii during the war, delivered a talk on the need to ‘destroy the Soviet form of
government and install liberal democracy’ (emphasis added).70 And while the NTS conveyed a
democratic image to the outside world, a different language dominated in its closed-door dis-
cussions and internal publications, where ‘parliamentarianism’ and ‘liberal democracy’ remained
pejorative terms.71
The calculated nature of the Alliance’s ideological revision was particularly clear with regard
to the NTS’s anti-Semitism, as a 1949 discussion at the NTS Council made clear. G. S. Okolovich,
the head of NTS secret operations, defended the organisation’s traditional anti-Semitism on the
grounds that ‘the Jews have not defined their relationship to Bolshevism’.72 However, his col-
league Redlikh justified the Alliance’s post-war position of avoiding anti-Semitic statements by
arguing that the dominant role of the United States in world anti-communism required a retreat
on the ‘Jewish question’. Ironically, Redlikh resorted to anti-Semitic stereotypes in justifying the
new party line. ‘International Jewry’ controlled ‘the Russian question’ in US politics, he claimed;
crossing these forces could only harm the Alliance’s prospects.73 Clearly, the NTS’s post-war
ideological development was yet another manifestation of its tactics of using mimicry and
misinformation for political gain.
Revolutionary Simulation
The tensions brought about by the first Berlin crisis and then the Korean War transformed the
prospects of anti-Soviet organisations in the West virtually overnight. The adoption of the above-
mentioned NSC 10/2 authorised covert operations on a wide scale, setting the stage later in 1948
for the creation and rapid expansion of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a covert
operations and psychological warfare directorate within the newly created CIA.74 From the
outset, displaced persons from the Soviet Bloc appeared as valuable and even indispensable assets
for these operations. George F. Kennan, who was an architect of the OPC while serving in a
leadership position in the State Department, lionised displaced persons from the East as
unparalleled sources of information on the Soviet order and also as promising recruits for
68
Post-war suppression of memory is discussed in Tony Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar
Europe’, in Deák et al. The Politics of Retribution in Europe, 293–324.
69
Volodymyr Kulyk, ‘Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria after the Second World War’, in Reiner
Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, eds., European Encounters: Migrants, Migration, and
European Societies since 1945 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 226.
70
Extract from Russian Reactionaries, Hq 3rd USA Ac/S G-2, 5 July 1946, NARA, RG 319, IRR, D246511,
Victor Baidalokov, obtained through FOIA request. On Redlikh and Kaminskii, see Dvinov, Politics of the Russian
Emigration, 190–1.
71
Protokoly s’ezda Soveta NTS v dekabre 1950 goda, 19, Baydalakoff Collection, box 1, fol. 1.
72
Protokol zakliuchitel’nogo poslevoegennogo zasedaniia 16.1.1949, 2, Baydalakoff Collection, box 1, fol. 1.
73
Ibid.
74
National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, Washington, 18 June 1948, document 292, FRUS, 1945–
1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292
(last visited 2 Jan. 2017).
espionage and covert operations against their homeland.75 In the following years the CIA
extended support to many anti-Soviet exile groups. Its goal was to create ‘disaffection’ among the
Soviet population, which would sap Soviet strength and buck further Soviet expansionism in ‘a
cold-war situation’, while also presenting ‘a fruitful field for exploitation’ in case a future hot war
broke out.76 Just as the NTS leadership had anticipated, the growing tension between West and
East created a new opening for its brand of anti-communism.
Washington’s turn to the exiles provided the context for the political rehabilitation of the NTS
in occupied Germany that had previously proved elusive. CIA and especially OPC officials were
eager to fight the Cold War, extremely well-financed and also largely ignorant of the DP political
scene in Germany. Not surprisingly, they proved far more willing to accept the NTS’s depictions
of its own history and ideology than the CIC and the UNRRA had been. In 1950 an OPC report
conveyed the NTS’s ‘Third Force’ rendition of its war record uncritically, going so far as to report
that ‘apparently NTS had some success in organising several anti-Soviet and anti-German par-
tisan groups’.77 A report from the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, which had responsibility
for espionage operations, took a more sceptical view of the NTS’s purported democratic trans-
formation, attributing the Russian organisation’s adoption of a program ‘more acceptable to the
world in general’ to the influence of ‘US occupation forces and other countries (sic)’.78 Never-
theless, the CIA decided to offer large-scale support to the Russian organisation in 1951 following
receipt of the Solidarists’ above-mentioned blueprint for revolution, ‘Petia-8’.
The CIA’s lack of concern regarding the NTS’s political coloration requires explaining.
Scholars have stressed the role of US ideas and ‘missionary spirit’ in liberation policy, which
expressed the goal of remaking the world according to US democracy and capitalism.79 Not
surprisingly, then, the US did pay some attention to the ideological commitments of their émigré
assets, as disagreements with the British over patronage of Ukrainian groups showed.80 Some
CIA agents in Germany found the Solidarists’ wartime activities distasteful; at a secret training
camp for NTS cadres, the organisation’s case officer rebuked the Russians with the comment that
‘reading “Mein Kampf” alone should have been enough to dissuade the Solidarists from seeking
an amicable agreement with Nazism’.81 Nevertheless, the context of the early Cold War meant
that the CIA was more concerned with a potential asset’s perceived potential to contribute to
espionage and covert operations than it was with its ideology or wartime past. The agency’s
priorities found expression during 1951 talks between representatives of the CIA, MI6 and US
and UK diplomats on coordinating the two services’ expanding welter of covert operations.
‘Viewed objectively’, an unidentified CIA official opined, ‘not one of the émigré groups could be
unequivocally labelled democratic’. Therefore, while trying to ‘moderate the expression of . . .
75
On Kennan’s role in reevaluating the Russian emigration, see Grose, Operation Rollback, 1–8, 87–99. Although details are
sparse, it seems likely that the British began to back the NTS’s operations in 1949, in part by funding German nets to aid
propaganda distribution in the Eastern zone and helping it establish the ‘Hamburg Committee for Aid to Russian
Refugees’ which sought to encourage Soviet personnel to defect to the West. Narrative Summary of AIS Relationship with
NTS, n.d., 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.
76
CIA (OSO & OPC)/State Department Talks with SIS/Foreign Office: VI. Russian Emigre Groups, 24 Apr. 1951, 1–2,
NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ-19, 230/86/25/02, box 13, vol. 20, AERODYNAMIC: OPERATIONS.
77
Project Outline, 4.
78
The confusing formulation was followed with the more baffling comment that the economic program of the NTS was
‘exactly like the Communist Party program today’, a clear sign of the limits of agency knowledge on the exiles. NTS
(National Labor Union), 9.
79
On US ideology and liberation policy, see Heuser, ‘“Covert Actions within British and American Concepts of Con-
tainment’, 67–8; David S. Foglesong, ‘Roots of “Liberation”: American Images of the Future of Russia in the Early Cold
War, 1948–1953’, The International History Review, 21, 1 (1999).
80
See Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War
(Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 2010), 78–83.
81
Cited in Albanese, ‘“It Takes a Russian to Beat a Russian”’, 785.
14 Benjamin Tromly
political views’ by the NTS and other rightist groups, one should also take a ‘bluntly realistic
approach’ toward them.82 Obviously, the speaker took ‘realism’ to mean a willingness to overlook
the fascist-influenced past and ideology of the NTS and other émigré groups.
On the face of things the CIA’s modus operandi of valuing operational expediency over
principle in its marshalling of European intelligence assets would not seem to work in the NTS’s
favour. As CIA documents show, in the 1950s the NTS possessed a limited capacity to operate in
Eastern Germany but had virtually no presence in the Soviet Union.83 To obscure the NTS’s lack
of accomplishments in the revolutionary struggle, the Alliance made false claims to US and other
intelligence services about its ability to penetrate the Iron Curtain. NTS activist Nikolai Shits-Siz
claimed to CIC officials that ‘if any country will back our ideology, the NTS can raise 10,000 men
within 30 days to work for it’.84 Moreover, the NTS claimed that it had left operatives behind in
West Russia when it was reconquered by the Red Army, dangling before the US spies the
prospect that it possessed operative agent networks on Soviet soil. In fact, the Soviet secret police
had effectively rolled up remaining NTS operatives.85 When CIA officials questioned Romanov
about how NTS headquarters in Germany communicated with its agents in the USSR, the émigré
offered a creative answer. While admitting that the NTS lacked a courier system to communicate
with the Solidarist underground in Russia, Romanov explained that one was not needed: ‘the
aims of the members were so intense that in any event demanding action or decision, one
member could be sure of the actions of other members without establishing liaison’.86
Such obfuscations, however craftily conveyed, did not mislead intelligence officers who were,
after all, trained in exposing them. For this reason the NTS also sought to obscure the gap
between its boasts and its actual abilities by undertaking anti-Soviet activities in occupied Ger-
many. Already in 1946 the NTS claimed to operate a rudimentary intelligence service that
gathered information from ‘occasional agents in the Soviet occupied zone, German black market
dealers from the Soviet zone, German P[O]W repatriates, and liaison with Yugoslav and
Ukrainian elements in Germany which have their individual sources of information’.87 If an
intelligence operation based on such haphazard sources probably produced little of interest to the
Americans, it nevertheless drove home the message that the Solidarists were organised and eager
to act. Also designed to make an impression on US spies were NTS propaganda operations in
East Germany. The NTS’s distribution of anti-Soviet leaflets and literature in the Soviet zones of
Germany and Austria were small-scale undertakings.88 The crude distribution methods the
Solidarists employed – stowing copies of Posev or leaflets in Soviet military trains, mailing them
directly to military units, handing them to Soviet military personnel attending Orthodox church
services in West Berlin and ‘assigning elderly, inconspicuous Germans to carry and distribute
copies’ – meant that very little of the subversive paper ever reached its target.89 If these shoestring
propaganda activities did little to challenge the communist enemy, they served the ancillary goal
of winning US patronage. As V. D. Poremskii commented while describing the NTS’s German
activities to his fellow Solidarists, ‘the path to Washington lies through the occupied zone’.90
82
CIA (OSO & OPC)/State Department Talks, 2.
83
AEROSOL/Implementation of Project CARCASS, Chiefs of Foreign Divisions S and M to Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, 21
Aug. 1951, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1. See also an account by Ryszard Wraga, a close observer of the exiles with many NTS
contacts. NTS, report (evidently for French intelligence), 11 Oct. 1951, HILA, Ryszard Wraga Papers, box 4, fol. 6.
84
Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, 52.
85
Cf. Iz direktivy NKVD SSSR no. 136, 308–12.
86
NTS (National Labor Union), 11.
87
Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Su: Interview of White Russian Leaders, 25 Apr. 1948, NARA, RG 319, Entry
134A (Security Classified Intelligence and Investigative Dossiers - Impersonal Files), 22348387, 270/84/20/02, box 68
(henceforth Vlassow Group), fol. 1.
88
Evgenii Romanov, V bor’be za Rossiiu: vospominaniia (Moscow: Golos, 1999), 106. NTS’s activities in East Germany are
examined in Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus, 524–36.
89
NTS (National Labor Union), 12.
90
Protokol utrennogo zasedaniia, 12-go ianvaria 1949 g., Baydalakoff, box 1, fol. 1.
The NTS’s strategy of combining carefully disseminated mistruths with symbolic deeds bore
fruit. To be sure, the CIA did not accept uncritically the NTS’s claims made in the foreign-
language press about the existence of a ‘dozens’ of secret cells of Solidarists in the USSR,
scrawling the NTS trident symbol on ‘walls and fences’ to communicate with one another.91
However, CIA officials were evidently willing to overlook the NTS’s public dissimulation in the
hope that the organisation possessed at least some capacity to act against the Soviets. An early
OPC evaluation described the NTS as a ‘tightly integrated anti-communist organisation com-
manding strict allegiance of its 1200 members’ – notably, a statement that exaggerated the outfit’s
membership by almost a factor of two.92 And despite its disingenuousness and chequered
reputation, the Alliance seemed to be able to mobilise its members for what very few Soviet exiles
would risk undertaking: ‘illegal’ agent missions to the USSR.93 The NTS’s potential to produce
agents was ‘very good’, and as many as one hundred agents might be recruited in a year, an
unidentified American intelligence official who was consulted by OSO officials in Germany
asserted.94 At the very least, the NTS had proved to the Americans that it was ‘the best organised
and the most active in anti-Communist work of all the Russian émigré organisations’, as a 1950
OPC memorandum opined.95
Why did CIA operatives develop such an inflated estimate of the NTS’s abilities in the areas of
both espionage and political warfare? The CIA’s sanguine evaluation of the NTS showed how
eager, or perhaps desperate, the agency was to establish intelligence assets in the USSR during the
early Cold War. However, there is every reason to believe that the NTS’s longstanding efforts to
prove its own political effectiveness and active connection to the estranged homeland tipped the
scales in its favour – especially given the CIA’s apparently poor level of knowledge on the exiles.96
As in the rewriting of its past and present political commitments for external consumption, the
NTS proved adept at crafting its own image in the West – in this case, by creating the myth of its
prowess as a revolutionary organisation.
Conclusion
During the bloodshed of 1944 and 1945 the NTS narrowly avoided destruction, first at the hands
of the Nazis and then the Soviets, only to find itself under siege in occupied Germany. Six years
later the émigré organisation had become an instrument of the CIA and MI6 in the Cold War. In
the process, the exile operatives effected an unlikely transformation from a group of far-right
collaborators to Western-backed spies, revolutionaries and even politicians with international
reputations. While the breakdown of relations between the superpowers and the CIA’s courting
of exiles was the essential framework for explaining this development, the NTS was also a crucial
actor in the story. Starting soon after the war, the NTS activists employed an effective set of
political strategies toward intelligence agencies and other holders of power in the West, drawing
on the Solidarists’ experiences of fighting Soviet communism in the interwar years as well as
under the aegis of the Nazis during the Second World War. In the post-war years they befriended
US military officials while operating behind their backs, spread disinformation about their past
91
Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus, 523–4.
92
Project Outline, 4, 28 Aug. 1950, NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ-19 (Subject Files, Second Release), 230/86/26/01, box 58,
QKDROOP; Otchetnyi doklad Predsedatelia Soiuza, 12.
93
In espionage argot, an ‘illegal’ agent is one operating without official cover. Discussions with Mr. Angleton and [ ]
regarding NTS, a report sent to Chief, FDS, 14 Sept. 1950, 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.
94
Memorandum from SR/West to Chief, SR Division, 7 Jan. 1952, 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.
95
Recommendations on Utilization of the Russian Emigration, 26 Apr. 1950, 4, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: Cold
War History Project e-Dossier, 32, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive (henceforth Radio Free Europe and
Radio Liberty), at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/104/radio-free-europe-and-radio-liberty (last visited 9
Sept. 2017).
96
Grose, Operation Rollback, 179–87.
16 Benjamin Tromly
and ideology to gain political respectability, propagated the fiction of their political influence in
the homeland and, eventually, drove hard bargains with the CIA.
Two conclusions emerge from examining the trajectory of the post-war NTS, one relating to
US intelligence practises and another to the post-war period more broadly. The post-war
activities of the NTS underscore that émigré operations during the Cold War were multi-
directional encounters. As a rich literature has uncovered, the CIA’s ‘false front’ operations
during the Cold War took unpredictable political directions, as the agency struggled to exert
control over the disparate anti-communist organisations it funded.97 In a somewhat similar
fashion, the CIA’s émigré-based covert operations in Europe involved the merging of superpower
agendas with the political interests of organisations such as the NTS and, by extension, those of
the émigré communities in which the latter were rooted. The émigrés’ ideas, memories, cultures
and – especially important in the case of the NTS – political practises were meaningful variables
in their encounters with the new and relatively inexperienced US intelligence establishment.
In a wider sense, the post-war metamorphosis of the NTS reflected the specific time and place
of occupied Germany and, more broadly, of post-war Europe. Historians have bracketed off the
first five post-war years in Europe as a distinct sub-period marked by crisis and upheaval, a time
that pointed backward to the war as much as forward to the Cold War bipolarity and cross-
continental economic expansion of the following decades. As Tony Judt stressed, the early post-
war conjuncture was marked by the destruction and moral collapse of the war years, the massive
displacement of peoples aimed at matching demography to post-war borders, a short burst of
post-war political justice and the end of wartime political idealism.98 This was a climate in which
the NTS – skilled in the art of collaboration, armed with deceptive political techniques and
willing to improvise in the face of geopolitical developments – was well-suited to operate. In this
sense the political relevance of a marginal group of exiles and former Axis collaborators
underscores the disarray of first post-war years in Europe and the political possibilities it enabled.
Cite this article: Benjamin, T. 2019. Émigré Politics and the Cold War: The National Labor Alliance (NTS), United States
Intelligence Agencies and Post-War Europe. Contemporary European History X: 1–16, doi:10.1017/S0960777318000590
97
See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008) and the scholarship gathered in Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford eds., The US Government, Citizen Groups and the
Cold War: The State-Private Network (London: Routledge, 2012).
98
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (NY: Penguin Books, 2006). See also Mark Mazower, Dark Continent:
Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1999), 182–249.

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Contemporary European History (2019), page 1 of 16

Émigré Politics and the Cold War: The National Labor

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The Political Calamity of Russian Exiles

Twentieth-century Russian émigré communities provide a stark example of the exile’s

The Fight for Survival in Germany

Ideological Facelifts and Usable Pasts

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