Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Princeton University Press, 352 pages, $35
In 19th-century Russia, wealth was measured not by how many acres a nobleman owned, but instead by the number of serfs in his possession. In Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol’s satirical novel about this arrangement, the character of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov travels from estate to estate, bartering with local landowners to acquire their deceased serfs who are still listed in state censuses. Chichikov’s mortgaging of these “dead souls” allows him to artificially inflate his own status, acquiring more and more “wealth” through the calculated manipulation of a soulless bureaucracy. Gogol’s tale paints a bleakly comic picture of a world in which citizens are reduced to numbers on a balance sheet, exposing the absurdity and moral decrepitude of a corrupt, absolutist state.
A similar macabre accounting sets the stage for Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War. At the close of World War II, the Allied occupation administrations in Germany and Austria found themselves with a surplus of approximately 10 million souls. Prisoners of war, forced laborers, civilian refugees from the Eastern front, and those liberated from Nazi concentration camps, together designated as “displaced persons,” or DPs, posed an early challenge for postwar order. As the Allied powers organized the repatriation of these DPs, they quickly encountered a problem: More than a million of those in Germany who were claimed as Soviet property refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union. This mass refusal, protested by the Soviets as Western “theft” of its citizens, prompted one of the first disputes in the rapidly developing Cold War, providing a basis for the idea that popular agency was a factor in the polarization of great powers in the postwar era.
“Fitzpatrick’s account deftly balances state interests and individual agency.”
Fitzpatrick’s account deftly balances state interests and individual agency, acknowledging the imperatives of great-power politics while also explicating how international order can be shaped from below. The first third of the book addresses “the great-power story,” providing a history of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s early attempts to repatriate DPs in the immediate postwar years and the breakdown of East-West cooperation that followed from the mass refusal to repatriate eastward. The author then turns to life within DP camps, drawing particular attention to the construction of European national identities outside of their homeland and the interaction of those national projects with Cold War dynamics more broadly. The final third of the book examines how the shift from characterizing DPs as “victims of war and fascism” to “victims of communism” empowered the International Refugee Organization to resettle those who refused repatriation, resulting in a rare “success story” of refugee resettlement.
While Lost Souls is a valuable intervention into the historiography of the early Cold War, its contributions extend well beyond the minutiae of academic debates. Fitzpatrick makes a few half-hearted nods to contemporary refugee crises—“readers will have to decide for themselves if there is an encouraging moral lesson to be learned,” she writes—but her narrative of resettlement “success” mostly underlines the exceptional nature of postwar Europe and burgeoning American hegemony. More fascinating still is how the interaction between international bureaucracies and individual civilians shaped the character of European nationalisms, encapsulating the arbitrary sortition of individuals into legible categories, the active and intentional construction of national identities in exile, and the role of the mass rejection of the Soviet system in defining the bounds of political contestation in the 20th century and beyond.
Who were the “lost souls”? Fitzpatrick’s focus is on Soviet DPs—that is, those refugees from within the prewar bounds of the USSR or the territories annexed by Moscow during the war. While the majority of souls claimed by the Soviet Union repatriated—voluntarily or otherwise—a mass of Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russian émigrés, and Jews refused to return to their countries of origin. This refusal is, for Fitzpatrick, the first exercise of DP agency, in which the actions of vulnerable refugees set the course of the ensuing great-power competition. Fitzpatrick quotes Sir Robert Jackson, one of the chief administrators of the UNRRA, declaring: “It was over the displaced persons that we fought Stalin.”
Fitzpatrick’s second major act of DP agency is deception. Once it became clear which categories of “Soviet” citizens were less likely to be forcibly repatriated, those who didn’t qualify for UNRRA assistance began to register themselves with authorities as nationalities that did. Eastern or “Soviet” Ukrainians would pose as Western Ukrainians of prewar Polish citizenship. Soviet Russians falsified papers to claim prewar émigré status or claimed to be Polish, Yugoslav, or Ukrainian. While the Soviet Union decried this deception as part of the theft of its citizens, Western authorities tacitly condoned it. The manipulation of the identity categories imposed by an international bureaucracy offered an escape route for those fleeing communism.
Efforts to classify DPs by nationality led to the sorting of people into camps on that basis. While the term “internment camp” evokes a particularly dark picture for this period of history, Fitzpatrick explains that DP camps had significantly higher rations and better quality of life than the general German population. Although there was some mixing within the camps, the national character of each camp came to define the experience of DPs placed there. Although the UNRRA (and later IRO) expressly forbade “political activity” within the camps, it also insisted that the camps be ruled democratically by residents. This encouragement of self-governance was intended in large part to foster skills of democratic citizenship.
Most prominent in Fitzpatrick’s account, and perhaps the most straightforward case, are the prewar citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania who didn’t recognize the Soviet claim to the Baltic states resulting from the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. These individuals refused repatriation as they considered their homelands to be under enemy occupation. This rationale was relatively easy for the Western Allies (except France) to accept, as Washington and Westminster also didn’t recognize the 1939 pact as a legitimate legal seal. The Soviets protested, naturally, on the basis of their annexation of the Baltic states, but also asserted that Baltic DPs were in large part Nazi collaborators. While this was certainly true of some segment of the Baltic population—various Baltic divisions of the Waffen SS were eventually granted formal DP status—the DPs themselves claimed such activities were coerced, rather than voluntary.
In Slavic, Baltic, and Russian émigré camps, Fitzpatrick writes, “the elected leadership tended to come from anticommunist, nationalist cliques,” drawn from émigré or wartime partisan networks. Nationalism was also dominant in the Jewish DP camps in the form of Zionism, although the anticommunist orientation was largely absent. For many Eastern European nationalities, the camp experience provided an opportunity to demonstrate their national distinctiveness to Western audiences. Fitzpatrick describes how displaced Latvians played down their cosmopolitanism and committed to a project of expressive folk nationalism in an effort to appear as a “homogenous national identity” to the outside world. National banners, traditional dress, folk songs, and so forth were not only adopted within DP camps, but were also in large part created by the refugees. Tradition, writes Fitzpatrick, “was not something that had been handed down over the centuries,” but was, instead, “something that had been invented, as part of a nation-building project.”
More controversial were claims of an independent Ukrainian nationality. “Ukrainians, unlike the citizens of the Baltic states, could not point to an actually existing prewar sovereign state to legitimate their nationality claim,” notes Fitzpatrick. Prior to the war, Eastern Ukrainians lived within the Soviet Union and were considered Soviet citizens, while Western Ukrainians had resided within prewar Poland. In the absence of a history of independent Ukrainian nationhood, the Western Allies were initially uncertain how to classify Ukrainians, leading to an active nation-building campaign among displaced Ukrainians in Germany.
This campaign was remarkably successful. Fitzpatrick emphasizes that “Ukrainian nationalism as represented in the camps had a strong paramilitary aspect.” This was in part due to the robust pre-existing organization of the Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Europe and its leading role in the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Fitzpatrick notes that due to far-right Banderite dominance within Ukrainian camps, and therefore the Ukrainian national movement more broadly, Eastern “Soviet” Ukrainians were marginalized due to the suspicion that they were “tainted by communism” and “insufficiently nationalistic.” Particularly memorable is Fitzpatrick’s account of Ukrainian Mykola Lebed, a commander within the Bandera faction of the OUN responsible for the slaughter of approximately 100,000 Polish and Jewish civilians in Western Ukraine. Following the war, Lebed worked within Ukrainian underground resistance networks in close concert with American intelligence, culminating in his classification as a “displaced person” and resettlement to the United States in 1949.
“That competition was prompted by the actions of the DPs themselves.”
In short, the camp system was an incubator of 20th-century nationalisms. Influences on the character of these nationalisms included not only the DPs themselves, but also pre-existing émigré and paramilitary networks and international benefactors, particularly US intelligence organizations. While these external forces were driven in large part by geopolitical competition between the capitalist and communist worlds, that competition was prompted by the actions of the DPs themselves. Fitzpatrick credits the agency exercised by these million DPs—first as refusal, then as deception—with initiating the “ownership struggle between the Soviet Union and the Allies that was one of the foundational conflicts of the Cold War.” Given the original mandate of the UNRRA to repatriate specifically “victims of fascism,” the surplus of souls claimed as Soviet property who wished to remain under the care of an international organization instead of returning to their prewar homelands prompted a new problem for postwar order. With the “hard core” of a million DPs refusing repatriation, their continued presence in Germany and Austria demanded a new strategy.
After the shuttering of the UNRRA in 1946 and its replacement by the IRO, international policy concerning DPs shifted from “repatriation” of displaced persons to the “resettlement” of the million of remaining refugees in Western countries. Initially a slow and disorganized process, resettlement operations accelerated in mid-1948 due to two significant breakthroughs: the establishment of the State of Israel and the passage of the Displaced Persons Act by the US Congress. While Fitzpatrick doesn’t spend too much space recounting the creation of the Jewish state—a topic has already received considerable attention from historians—she does provide a compelling outline of the Jewish struggle for national recognition in the wake of the Holocaust.
Jewish DPs included not only those liberated from concentration camps, but also Polish Jews who fled eastward into the Soviet Union and who had been allowed to return to Poland. Upon encountering the destruction and continued anti-Semitism within their home country, many of these exiles chose to continue onward to Germany or Austria. These Jewish refugees fleeing westward, termed “persecutees” by the American occupation authorities and “infiltrees” by the British, were eventually accepted as DPs within a new category of “Jewish nationality” that hadn’t been broadly accepted prior to the war. As with the other displaced nationalities, the camp experience and connection to external nationalist lobbies played an integral role in the construction of what became Israeli national identity. Fitzpatrick notes that while Jewish DPs can’t be left out of this story, their refusal to repatriate to their country of origin was because those countries had already rejected them. “In the case of the Slavic and Baltic DPs claimed by the Soviet Union,” she writes, “it was not that the Soviet Union rejected the DPs but that the DPs rejected the Soviet Union.” The State of Israel ultimately became the third most popular destination for resettlement, behind only Australia and the United States.
The process of resettlement to other countries was more grotesque. Fitzpatrick’s “lost souls” became commodities to be traded by the Western states. While none of the Western powers was particularly enthusiastic about integrating large masses of foreign nationals into its citizenry, postwar labor shortages outside of Europe made such a prospect more agreeable. Fitzpatrick quotes the London Times’s observation that the resettlement process had “a whiff of the slave market” and The New Yorker’s comment that “what is wanted is the pounds of flesh—young, strong, male, and single.”
Criteria for resettlement based on age, education, and family status created new incentives for deception, leading DPs to misstate their age, deny familial ties, and abandon their university degrees to make themselves more appealing for resettlement. Those desperate for resettlement would often leave their families behind in DP camps, while others would pragmatically marry for the purpose of gaining more “acceptable” national ties for resettlement. Nationality once again played a significant role: In general, the recipient countries preferred Balts to Slavs, and Jewish DPs were listed as the least desired by all countries—except Israel.
Western countries accepting refugees had different processes for approving resettlement. DPs required sponsorship to ensure they didn’t become “public charges.” In the United States, sponsorship was offered through civil-society initiatives organized by ethnic and religious lobbying groups, with Catholic dioceses and Jewish organizations playing an outsized role. For Australia, acceptance of DPs was part of a broader state-driven project of social and economic revitalization. In Canada, sponsorships were granted by business interests: Canadian industrial interests, rather than civil society or the state, would place “bulk orders” for DPs that listed particular skills that were in demand in specific industries, generally logging or mining. Canada’s first such “order” was for 100 girls to work at a spinning mill.
Despite the dehumanizing overtones of the bidding process, the IRO’s resettlement mission was undeniably successful. Fitzpatrick credits much of this success to a narrative shift concerning the DP problem, particularly in the United States. The initial refusal of Soviet DPs to repatriate, with some going so far as to commit suicide rather than return to the Soviet Union, contributed to both the diplomatic breakdown between the two superpowers and drew wider public attention to the horrors of really existing socialism. Widespread public sympathy for refugees from totalitarianism changed how both Western governments and their citizens viewed the matter of postwar displacement. As the narrative changed from DPs as victims of a defeated fascist state to DPs as urgently requiring rescue from an increasingly hostile Stalinist regime, governments and citizens both became more willing to mobilize for their support.
Fitzpatrick, despite using the phrase “rebranding” throughout the book to refer to this change of perspective, admits that “there is no foundational document to mark the shift,” and no “Machiavelli emerges from the archives” to provide evidence of a cynical creation of a new narrative. Instead, she concludes, “the ‘victims of communism’ template seems to have emerged spontaneously”—a roundabout way of admitting that states and publics came to recognize the suffering inflicted on these masses by Stalin’s regime and changed their views accordingly. This shift culminated in the passage of the Displaced Persons Act by Congress in 1948, providing both funding and sanctuary for the displaced victims of communism.
Fitzpatrick’s account isn’t without its flaws. In early chapters, she seems to uncritically accept that the Soviet Union was principled with regard to identifying and purging Nazi collaborators in Central and Eastern Europe while Western states were more blasé. In practice, the Soviets were often happy to outsource their terror to existing fascist organizations, exchanging clemency for loyalty. One might also take issue with the author’s relatively uniform treatment of DP behavior: For all of her talk of agency, her subjects are generally portrayed as “sacks of potatoes” that blindly follow material incentives. There is little attention paid to the social or ideological entrepreneurs among Soviet DPs, whose initiative and innovation influenced behavior both within and without the DP camps.
“Lost Souls is an invaluable and provocative history of the postwar DP crisis.”
These faults notwithstanding, Lost Souls is an invaluable and provocative history of the postwar displaced-persons crisis. Fitzpatrick neatly demonstrates the multidirectional interaction between local, state, and international actors, as well as the causal connections between postwar displacement and contemporary European nationalisms.
“The DP history told in this book,” writes Fitzpatrick, “is an anomaly in the annals of refugee management: a success story.” For international agencies to have resettled more than a million refugees in wealthy countries within about five years of the war seems inconceivable to anyone observing the failures and dysfunctions of contemporary international organizations. While a superficial glance at the rescue of Soviet DPs might suggest that institutions such as the United Nations are capable of solving such humanitarian crises, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that it was the ideological conflict of the Cold War, and not idealistic international cooperation, that enabled the successful resettlement of postwar DPs. Perhaps most striking, therefore, is how little this history has to tell us about resolving the refugee crises that continue to proliferate around the world.