Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees

Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.

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Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S. Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees

Edited by Ieva Zake

anti-communist minorities in the u.s. Copyright © Ieva Zake, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60681-4 ISBN-10: 0-230-60681-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated to my husband.

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Contents Preface Ieva Zake

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Introduction: Ethnic Anti-Communism in the United States John Radzilowski

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I

The Cold War Warriors

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The Polish American Congress, Polish Americans, and the Politics of Anti-Communism Donald Pienkos

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Fighting Moscow from Afar: Ukrainian Americans and the Evil Empire Myron B. Kuropas

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The American Armenians’ Cold War: The Divided Response to Soviet Armenia Benjamin F. Alexander

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One Goal, Many Paths: Internal and External Struggles of the Hungarian Émigrés Judith Fai-Podlipnik

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3

4

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The Highs and Lows of Czech and Slovak Émigré Activism Prokop Tomek

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Multiple Fronts of the Cold War: Ethnic Anti-Communism of Latvian Émigrés Ieva Zake

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Small but Vociferous: Bulgarian Ethnic Anti-Communist Groups Vasil Paraskevov

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“The Voice of the Silenced Peoples”: The Assembly of Captive European Nations Anna Mazurkiewicz

II

The Struggle Continues: Facing Communism around the World

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“Better Dead than Red”: Anti-Communist Politics among Vietnamese Americans C. N. Le

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Hmong Anti-Communism at Home and Abroad Chia Youyee Vang

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Conflict and Cooperation: Cuban Exile Anti-Communism and the United States, 1960–2000 Jessica Gibbs and Alex Goodall

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189 211

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Conclusion Ieva Zake

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Preface Ieva Zake

The breakdown of the Soviet empire was enthusiastically celebrated not only in the former Communist countries, but also across the ocean among émigrés of Eastern European decent. It would not be appropriate to read history from the point of view of the victors and say that the end of Soviet Communist rule was their accomplishment. The émigrés themselves often lost faith in the probability of their success. However it is undeniable that for a sizable portion of American ethnic minorities, the struggle against Communism consumed a large part of their lives for half a century. Unfortunately, their often desperate efforts have remained unnoticed and unappreciated. This volume has an ambitious set of goals. It documents that what we know about American political and immigration history during the cold war era so far has been incomplete. It also demonstrates that important pieces have been missing from the story of American relations with Communism and anti-communism. It introduces the concept of “ethnic anticommunism” and tells the story of the cold war from the point of view of political refugees who had fled Communist regimes and found a safe haven in the United States after World War II. These groups became the anti-communist minorities who experienced the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the most intense and complicated way. There is little doubt that American anti-communism lost its battle already after the mid-1950s. Although pro-communism never won in the United States, a conviction that Communism was indeed evil and that the Soviet Union could not be a friend to Americans was becoming increasingly unpopular. Additionally, McCarthyism and anti-communism in general became highly tainted with the oppressive and the irrational. Historical revisionism began to flourish among intellectuals and

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academics. Domestic Communism was reinterpreted as a noble force that had nothing or very little to do with the Soviet regime, while the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were seen as merely “different” types of government. The ethnic minorities discussed here, however, refused to give up their belief that Communism was indeed inherently destructive and murderous. Many of them had lived under Communist utopias and were forced to leave, fearing for their safety. Having lost their homes and families, they believed that Communism was comparable to, if not worse than, Nazism. Such political convictions placed them in a difficult position vis-à-vis the American context, which had no tolerance for Nazism, but developed a certain level of acceptance toward Communism. The ethnic refugees persisted in their efforts to tell the West what they knew about Communism, but often ran into the danger of appearing as zealous fanatics or rightwing extremists. Often, they were led to excess. And frequently they were misinterpreted or, at best, ignored. Yet they continued their struggle using ethnic anti-communism as a way to assert themselves in their adopted country and to hold their communities together. Anti-communism was, and for some of these refugee groups, still is, not just a political ideology, but also a foundation of their group identity. Some of the minorities discussed here had an earlier history with Communist ideology before the cold war era. This book occasionally refers to these cases; however, the emphasis here is on the experience of postWorld War II refugees. They truly fought the cold war and subsequently became targets of political propaganda and manipulation from both the U.S. government and the Communist regimes. These groups experienced the cold war, as well as the 1970s and 80s, as a period of struggle between two belief systems and opposing ways of life. Their lives were organized around, and made dependent on, how the United States and the Soviet Union treated each other. Yet they did not remain inactive victims, but rather exercised their agency to the fullest by, for example, persistently seeking new ways to influence the U.S. government’s policies toward the Communist regimes in their home countries. For decades, the ethnic political activists discussed in this volume worked to convince the West of the deceptive and manipulative nature of the Communist regimes. Not always did they reach the right audiences and not always were their arguments and tactics appropriate or democratic enough. In recent years, new research on the cold war and American Communism has revealed that, indeed, there were grounds for worries about Communist espionage and subversion in the United States.

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Furthermore, Soviet documents that have since become available show that, indeed, statements by the Soviet Union should not have been taken at face value, as they often were in the West at the time. Considering the controversial and highly emotional nature of the subject matter, it is probably impossible to guarantee complete objectivity on the topic of ethnic anti-communism. However, every effort was made to provide as balanced and neutral of an assessment as possible of ethnic anticommunists’ ideas and activism. The essays included in this collection were all written with an intention of describing ethnic anti-communism in the United States in as informed and honest a way as possible. This volume strives not to take sides or judge or prove ethnic anti-communists right or wrong. Instead, it explores how the experiences of these groups were both similar and different in the context of their struggle against Communism. Although probably the most interesting part of this book is the uniqueness of each case, the chapters also deal with overarching themes as discussed in the conclusion. This book is also a valuable guide to the materials that were produced for intragroup use in the languages of the ethnicities, and have not been accessible to the English-speaking scholars and public. Following in the footsteps of the American historian Richard Gid Powers, this collection demonstrates that American anticommunism was a pluralistic movement of people who opposed Communism in a variety of ways and from diverse points of view. Importantly, the book uses terms “political refugees,” “exiles,” “political emigrants,” and “émigrés” interchangeably to talk about people who had been forced to flee their countries for political reasons. Thus, they are distinguished from “immigrants,” who tend to leave for economic or cultural reasons. I would like to acknowledge the support of Rowan University for this project. Some of the chapters were presented at the research symposium “The Cold War Warriors: Political Activism of Ethnic Groups during the Cold War in the U.S.” on April 1, 2008, which was enthusiastically endorsed and financially supported by the 1967 Hollybush Summit Commemoration Committee of Rowan University and the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Rowan University’s Non-Salary Financial Support Grant helped some of the initial work on this volume.

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INTRODUCTION

Ethnic Anti-Communism in the United States John Radzilowski

Since the collapse of Communism in Europe, scholars have begun to reexamine topics once taken for granted. There has been growing interest in American anti-communism. Although American anti-communism is popularly viewed through simplistic and often cartoonish stereotypes, scholars such as Richard Gid Powers have shown that it was a complex phenomenon.1 While some cold war American anti-communists were their own worst enemies and handed their foes the weapons that helped discredit anti-communism in the eyes of most intellectuals, artists, and opinion makers, a grudging consensus has emerged (based on declassified U.S. and Soviet documents) that on the major issues, the anti-communists were fundamentally correct. Communism was a murderous ideology detrimental to human freedom; the Soviet Union, Communist China and its allies murdered and enslaved countless millions; and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was indeed a willing tool of Moscow.2 Powers further shows that American anti-communists emerged from all sides of the political spectrum, and with a variety of motives. Despite all this, little attention has been paid thus far to the question of ethnic anti-communism. This is surprising since among of the most successful anti-communist organizations were the Assembly of Captive European Nations and the Captive Nations Committee, which were created by, and around, ethnic groups. Moreover, at particular moments during the early years of the cold war, ethnic voters were a critical grassroots constituency that forced U.S. foreign policy to respond to domestic political concerns. Ethnic communities were also the source for some, if

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not most, of the talent in one of America’s most effective cold war “soft power” tools—Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.3 An examination of the issue of ethnic anti-communism is needed to develop a proper understanding of the cold war domestic and international politics as well as opening new chapters in the histories of specific ethnic communities. This chapter seeks to define and outline the major issues in the study of the subject. What is Ethnic Anti-Communism? The term “ethnic anti-communism” is not widely used in either scholarly or popular literature, so a starting point for any discussion is a careful definition of this phenomenon.4 All Americans are ethnic, some more consciously so than others. Many, if not most, have been anti-communist to some degree. Yet, the term implies that one is anti-communist because of one’s ethnicity. One’s ethnicity—a shared culture and history—shapes how one responds or responded to the totalitarian menace Communism represented. Cultural factors may play a role in this response. For example, an ethnic group with a strong religious tradition would find itself directly at odds with Communism’s atheism and materialism, not to mention specific acts of repression by Communist regimes aimed at religious institutions or practices. The official stance of the leaders of one’s church toward Communism may also play a role in how a group responds. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, American Catholics heard an unwavering opposition to Soviet Communism from their bishops and pastors. Yet, by far the critical factor in defining and shaping ethnic anti-communism is the political experience of a group’s homeland. Ethnic groups who most opposed Communism, and who were most united in doing so, were those whose home countries had been overrun or taken over by communist regimes. Anti-communism was a function of a shared historical and political experience, whether experienced directly, as refugees or political exiles, or indirectly, as second-, third-, or fourth-generation descendants of immigrants. Their anti-communism was directly referent to events in the homeland but expressed in an American context. A concrete example may better illustrate this. Many Irish Americans were anticommunist. Ireland, however, was never under communist control nor was it ever directly threatened with invasion by an external Communist foe. Therefore, their anti-communism may have been shaped by American factors that influenced all segments of society regardless of race or

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ethnicity, and may have been strengthened by the anti-communist message of the Catholic Church, of which many were members. But it was not referent in any way to Ireland or Irishness or their sense of being IrishAmerican. One could easily be an Irish American and remain ambivalent toward Communism.5 By contrast, it was very hard to be a Polish American and an active Communist. Although a few were, they were always on the margins of their own community. Most Polish Americans opposed Communist, and especially Soviet, domination of their homeland after World War II.6 While their opposition to Communism may have been reinforced and validated by the stance of the Catholic Church or by native anti-communism in the United States, it existed when those two factors were largely or wholly absent.7 Likewise, by the time Cuban and Vietnamese Americans became established in the United States, anticommunism was viewed with disdain in American academic, popular, and media cultures, yet significant majorities in both communities stood in opposition to Communism.8 Ethnic anti-communism is also largely inseparable from émigré nationalism but it was not necessarily a narrow or exclusive form of nationalism. A Ukrainian-American anti-communist may be highly sympathetic to the plight of Communism’s victims in China but his or her primary focus and motivation is Communist repression of Ukraine and his or her fellow Ukrainians. However, the Ukrainian-American anti-communist may feel a special bond or empathy for the Chinese victims of Communism precisely because of Ukraine’s historical experience. Thus, he or she may be able to clearly understand the deadly famines in Maoist China in the context of the Soviet-imposed terror-famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. The story of Communist repression in one’s own homeland provides a ready-made context and prism through which to understand Communist repression elsewhere.9 Last, but not least, ethnic anti-communism is an American (or North American) phenomenon. While it is inseparable from internal ethnic group politics and dynamics, a critical audience for ethnic anti-communism is the American public at large and American policymakers and legislators. Ethnic anti-communism allowed for a reasonably seamless synthesis between loyalty to one’s homeland and American patriotism. Ethnic anti-communists worked within an American political and cultural context. The appeal to Americans was important, both as a way of explaining the experience of immigration itself in a classically American way (a flight from the repression of the Old World to the freedom of the New) and as a way of mobilizing Americanized fellow ethnics, a category which

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might include an émigré’s own children or grandchildren. It thus allowed for the simultaneous expression of both forms of patriotism, which helped integrate immigrants into American society. Ethnic Anti-communism as a Layered Phenomenon Ethnic anti-communism is a highly complex phenomenon. It simultaneously exists as an issue within the cultural and political discourse of the group itself, as part of how the group relates to its homeland, how it approaches and relates to currents within the larger American political and cultural setting, and how it is viewed by the American mainstream. It also affects how homeland Communist regimes relate to the United States, both in terms of official diplomacy and as a matter of espionage actions directed at America (and often at the ethnic group itself ) and how the U.S. government conducts foreign policy toward those homeland regimes. Finally, ethnic anti-communism is strongly shaped by the nature of Communism itself. Of all the totalitarian ideologies attempted thus far in human history, Communism has proven the most successful in its ability to appear as a legitimate political alternative, and it has enjoyed the favor of more influential supporters in the West than any other totalitarianism. This success may be attributed to many factors. Communism is a stepchild of the Enlightenment, promising an earthly utopia, free of oppression and without the demands for personal accountability and repentance found in most religious traditions. As such, it has proven irresistible to most scholars, artists, and writers in the West. The attraction of Communism is also due to the fact that it is not an alien ideology. It is not an ideology from outside the Western tradition but one that came from within it, albeit as a mutation of sorts. Although Communist regimes have frequently sought to impose their ideology on others by force, and major Communist powers have been imperialistic by anyone’s definition, Communism’s greatest threat came from within, not from without. As a form of nihilism, it sought to dissolve the moral, cultural, and social bonds that allowed societies—indeed, civilization itself—to work at the most basic level. To use fashionable postmodern terminology, if Nazism constituted a radical assault on the “other,” Communism was a radical assault on the “self.” It was an act of self-mutilation, even suicide.10 Thus, the discourse of ethnic anti-communism in the United States is not merely directed outward—toward the homeland, the policies of the U.S. government, one’s fellow Americans—but also toward one’s own

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fellow ethnics. While Communists were a fringe faction in most ethnic communities, they did exist and were often articulate, well organized, and well funded. They broke or weakened the unified voice that so many ethnic leaders sought in speaking to those outside the community on issues of importance. This was critical since “outsiders” rarely understood the community’s internal dynamics and would have difficulty distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate spokespersons for that group. At best, the presence of rival Communist groups within the community, no matter their size, served to nullify efforts to explain one’s case to the world beyond the ethnic ghetto. To further draw out the comparison with Nazism, we may consider the case of the Jewish-American community in the 1930s and early 1940s. While there were significant differences in how to respond to the threat posed by Nazism, no segment of community argued on behalf of Hitler. In those communities that were the most unified in their anti-communism—such as Cubans, Poles, or Ukrainians— there was always the presence of a small group of Communists and proMoscow activists. Thus, it was always necessary to oppose Communism on three levels: within the community, within the American mainstream, and in the homeland. Ethnic anti-communism also had a mixed relationship with mainstream American anti-communism, which sometimes contained elements of xenophobia and dislike of anything “foreign.” This automatically excluded many ethnic communities whose own experiences of exclusion in the workplace, higher education, and the housing market were recent and painful.11 Additionally, until the Truman administration’s change of course in the late 1940s, anti-communism was most strongly articulated by the Republican Party, which was problematic for many blue-collar white ethnics who voted Democrat. Although there were significant defections from the Democratic ranks over foreign policy among Poles and related groups in the late 1940s, the defections were rarely permanent.12 For these reasons, ethnic anti-communists can always be found seeking validation and allies outside their communities. Voices from the American mainstream who take notice of the particular plight of their homeland are especially critical. Among Ukrainian Americans, for example, Robert Conquest’s groundbreaking research on the terror-famine of the 1930s had a huge impact. Likewise, when the former U.S. ambassador to Poland, Arthur Bliss Lane, published I Saw Poland Betrayed, he became an instant hero among Polish Americans. Of equal importance have been ethnic coalition groups such as Assembly of the Captive European Nations and the Captive Nations Committee. Both of these moved the

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claims of the ethnic anti-communists beyond the (often false) charge of narrow parochialism and elevated the plight of their homeland to a matter of national, and even universal, import, allowing them to speak more comprehensibly to the mainstream society, which otherwise knew little of their history or culture. Another important layer is the relationship between ethnic communities, the organizations that claim to represent them, and homeland Communist governments. Although undying hostility might appear to be the norm, a closer look reveals a far more complex picture and demonstrates the extent to which anti-communist impulses are as much an internal group struggle as an external matter. Following the Communist takeover in East-central Europe, and similarly, following Communist victories in Cuba and Southeast Asia, there was an initial period of intense hostility and ideological and physical conflict between the new homeland regime and the respective ethnic communities in the United States. The conflict was intensified by the arrival of refugees, many with harrowing, tragic personal experiences of Communist repression. After this initial period, however, the homeland Communist governments often began to change tactics. In the case of East-central Europe, this occurred after the death of Stalin and the 1956 “thaw” occasioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Soviet satellite regimes and their security services began to use a subtle approach toward anti-communist ethnic communities in the West, attempting to influence and divide these groups. Family contacts were allowed, as were more visits, to the homeland. As homeland regimes attempted to present a “human face” of socialism, ethnic communities were increasingly split over tactics. The 1956 “thaw” and the increasing ability of Americans to travel to the satellite countries gradually weakened the position of those anticommunist groups who sought to take the hardest possible line toward the homeland regimes. Some groups, while not relinquishing their opposition to Soviet domination, acquiesced to improving trade with the United States, even to the point of supporting Most Favored Nation status for the homeland.13 U.S. policy toward Cuba has not been nearly as “liberalized,” though Cuban-American opinions over U.S. policy toward the Castro regime remain mixed. In one poll, while many favored increased trade ties, 49 percent strongly supported the idea of U.S. military action to overthrow the aging dictator.14 Similar issues may be observed in the Vietnamese-American community, where it has been possible to travel with relative freedom to Communist Vietnam for a decade. Many have done

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so despite the continuing strength of anti-communism in their community, not merely among aging refugees but also among their children. Ethnic anti-communism thus existed and exists on several distinct layers, including: within elements of a particular community, between different ethnic communities, between the community itself and the mainstream anti-communism, between the community and the mainstream, between various elements of a diaspora community and the homeland, and between the homeland authorities and the United States. An Outline of Ethnic Anti-Communism The origins of ethnic anti-communism can be found in conflicts between various factions within immigrant communities in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the arrival of a relatively small group of radicalized refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, there was a degree of political polarization among these new arrivals. Although conditions varied in each immigrant group and among different geographic communities, early conflicts usually pitted small but generally educated and articulate, groups of radicals against the mass of more traditional economic immigrants. The latter often looked to clergy for community leadership, though conservative and moderate lay leaders increasingly came to the fore in the years prior to World War I. The former, by contrast, tended to be anticlerical or even militantly atheistic. Early immigrant radicals were a mixed bag of anarchists of varying persuasions, socialists, communists, and a plethora of self-styled freethinkers. These radicals spent as much time and effort battling each other as they did their conservative counterparts. It is, of course, impossible to affix precise percentages of how many members of any particular community sympathized with these radicals, let alone enrolled in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) or ethnic sections of any of these fringe parties. If anything, the current literature overestimates the size and strength of ethnic radicalism.15 At times, ethnic radicalism provided a catalyst for violent action, such as the Haymarket Riot of 1888, or radicals simply took advantage of labor unrest. Radicalism gained a significant foothold among German, Jewish, and Italians immigrants. Only among Finnish immigrants, however, did radical groups seem to achieve anything approaching a majority of the community’s support. East and East-central European groups, by contrast, had a much smaller radical factions.

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Communism and other radical movements failed to attract significant numbers of immigrants for three main reasons. First, most immigrants were fundamentally traditional and conservative people for whom religious faith and the “small worlds” of family and community had far greater value and resonance than theoretical ideals of working-class solidarity.16 The often-intense participation and solidarity of these groups in the labor struggles that periodically convulsed American industry between the 1880s and 1940s was a reaction to the abuses of factory system that stemmed more from a defense of their human dignity than a desire to overthrow the social order in favor of a socialist utopia. Second, radicalism failed as an economic proposition because, despite the hardships of life in industrial America, immigrants made steady material progress. Finally, both Communist internationalism and later Soviet imperialism denied the desire for freedom for the ancestral homelands of many immigrants and threatened the independence that was achieved in the years following World War I. Although this factor would emerge as the most important strand in ethnic anti-communism, it is important to note that radical political and economic alternatives had already failed to find many adherents in most immigrant communities even before the Russian Revolution. It was, however, the Russian Revolution that provided the major catalyst for the development of anti-communism, no less in the mainstream American discourse than in many immigrant communities. Among the most directly affected were those whose homelands lay within the sphere of Bolshevik domination or were in the path of the Red Army. This was especially keenly felt in communities whose homelands had recently achieved independence (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) or were attempting to gain independence (Ukraine and Armenia, in particular).17 In the case of each of these groups, anti-communism born from immediate concern over the fate of the homeland was reinforced by the American reaction against radicalism of any sort following the war and, more centrally, the role of the ethnic churches. For example, Polish Catholicism was a strong pillar of nationalism, and thus faith was at the forefront of any defense against a foreign Communist power. The Soviet Union was thus opposed because it was seen as an instrument of “ancient” Russian imperialism and as the standard bearer of a new and dangerous ideology that was not only atheistic but that systematically and brutally persecuted clergy and believers alike. Among other groups, interwar opposition to Communism surfaced during the 1930s among Catholic and conservative

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elements but was often based on opposition to the involvement of American Communists in the labor movement and concern over their influence on the New Deal both nationally and locally.18 The Nazi-Soviet alliance in 1939, the Soviet invasion of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States, and the beginning of World War II in Europe marked the next stage in the development of ethnic anti-communism. The trauma of the war and the loss of independence of several countries (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Czechoslovakia) to either the Nazis or Soviets (or both) reinforced older patterns of response to homeland-related issues but also brought new problems. While American Communism was thrown into disarray by the Soviet alliance with Hitler, the German invasion of 1941 helped it recover and gain new ground. Thereafter, and especially after 1943, the Soviet Union could do no wrong in the eyes of many American leaders, and this was reinforced by strong pro-Soviet propaganda in which American Communists and fellow travelers played a prominent role. Voices that spoke against an uncritical embrace of Stalin were few and far between.19 The revelation of mass graves of Polish officers slain by the NKVD in 1940, Soviet conduct toward independent noncommunist anti-Nazi partisans in East-central Europe, and Soviet claims to territory gained under the Nazi-Soviet pact were rationalized or ignored. The Roosevelt administration turned a deaf ear to the pleas of Catholic leaders and Eastern European American Democratic voters to take a firmer line against Soviet claims. President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself was sufficiently aware of the potential political problems this might entail. In 1943, Roosevelt successfully kept Allied plans formulated at the Teheran Conference secret until after the 1944 presidential elections.20 The immediate postwar era was the most critical moment for ethnic anti-communism in the United States. In 1946, a rollback of Soviet power in East-central Europe still seemed possible. The end of the war and the death of Roosevelt had also opened a new chapter in domestic politics. The Republican Party, sensing an opportunity to break up part of the New Deal coalition, hammered the Truman administration over foreign policy, focusing special attention on the “Betrayal at Yalta.” Polish Americans and other Catholic working-class ethnics were the main focus of Republican rhetoric. Anger in the Polish community over Yalta and the loss of Polish independence—especially among community leaders—ran deep and the Republican message struck a responsive chord in this largely Democratic constituency. In late 1944, a leading Polish-language newspaper in Chicago had printed a huge front-page photo of President Roosevelt

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with the headline “Father of the Nation.”21 By 1946, community leaders were publicly stating that “any reason for loyalty which the people of Polish descent may have felt toward the Democratic Party no longer exists today.” The 1946 midterm elections were a major defeat for the Truman administration, and Polish districts in several major cities experienced a significant shift in voting patterns, with as many as 20 percent of voters crossing to the Republican side. As Robert Ubriaco, Jr., noted, the 1946 election and the attempt to hold the New Deal coalition together was the single most important factor in pushing the Truman administration into taking a hard line toward the Soviet Union. As stated by Ubriaco, “Bottom-up domestic political considerations helped shape the content and anti-communist rhetoric of U.S.-Soviet-Polish relations.”22 The Truman administration’s response to the 1946 losses helped staunch the political bleeding but the Republicans continued to pour resources into prying Catholic white ethnics away from the Democratic Party as late as 1952, primarily by appealing to anti-communism. Former Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane led the party’s effort, declaring that the “Republican Party need not be squeamish, as in the past, in bitterly criticizing Yalta . . . The Republican Party not only has a great opportunity to show its adherence to the Atlantic Charter . . . but at the same time can gain the votes of those American citizens who deeply resent the fact that the United States government sold their respective motherlands down the river to communism.” Despite some initial inroads, however, internal party divisions and lack of interest on the part of the party’s nominee, Dwight Eisenhower, frustrated Bliss’ efforts.23 One of the most important factors in ethnic anti-communism has been the presence of recent émigrés from the homeland. In the late 1940s and 1950s, this meant Slavic East-central Europeans, Balts, Romanians, and Hungarians (both immediately after the war and after the 1956 Revolution), as well as Chinese. Cubans were the next wave, arriving after Castro’s takeover in 1959 and continuing up to the present. Political exiles continued to trickle in from China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but the next major wave began in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the arrival of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They were joined by the “Solidarity” wave of Polish immigrants following the Communist crackdown in December 1981. Political exiles continue to arrive in varying numbers from Communist countries, especially from Cuba, China, and Southeast Asia. It is impossible to generalize about these groups, since some were purely political refugees and others left for a mixture of reasons. Nevertheless,

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these waves had several things in common. First, they had a relatively high proportion of better educated people; second, they were often strongly patriotic and highly motivated to work on behalf of a homeland and compatriots who were repressed by a Communist regime; third, in cases where an existing ethnic community was already in place, the arrival of the newcomers was fraught with intracommunal tension.24 Refugees from Communist terror helped to change the nature of the debate over Communism. This was just as true of the mass of displaced persons (or DPs) as of better-known exiles such as Hungary’s Josef Cardinal Mindszenty. Reports of the terror-famine of the 1930s were denied or buried, thanks to the work of effective pro-Soviet propaganda and the lack of eyewitnesses who could speak directly to the American public. In the immediate postwar years, not only was Soviet propaganda less effective, it also had to contend with the presence of living, breathing victims of Communist repression. This perhaps explains the scale of the effort undertaken by the Communist security apparatus to discredit political émigrés in the West. The new flow of émigrés also helped to mobilize ethnic communities to lobby hard on behalf of homeland interests and kept homeland-related issues in the forefront of the community’s consciousness. This mobilization occurred even before the arrival of the refugees, as ethnic communities worked to provide humanitarian aid for compatriots in Displaced Persons camps, cease the practice of forced deportation back to communist-controlled homelands, and ultimately to amend American immigration laws to allow their compatriots into the country. Although there were important differences between the new arrivals and their American-born counterparts, there was essential agreement on the need to lobby American leaders to respond to the Communist threat in general as well as the specific needs of the homeland. The effort to amend immigration laws on behalf of DPs and refugees was an important side effect of the growing importance of ethnic anticommunism during the late 1940s and early 1950s. To be sure, the work of the Jewish-American community on behalf of Jewish Holocaust survivors was a critical part of this picture but the desire to keep DPs from being deported to death or imprisonment in the Soviet Union or its newly occupied satellites was of equal importance.25 This wave of immigrants constituted the first major group of immigrants to the United States since the passage of restrictive laws in 1924, and thus paved the way for the 1965 revision of American immigration laws. Moreover, it reestablished the image of the immigrant in American public consciousness as a victim

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of repression fleeing to freedom in the New World, an image that had important historical resonance in the United States and that helped reinforce the contrast between the Communist powers and the free world. Another critical and underresearched effect of ethnic anti-communism was its role in shaping the anti-communism of the American labor movement. Throughout the cold war, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) were among the most consistent and forceful voices opposing Communist terror abroad and the Communist infiltration at home. Labor historians and activists have largely dismissed the unions’ role in opposing Communism merely as a matter of a leadership disconnected from its base, prostituting itself on behalf of American foreign policy.26 Yet, the base of the labor movement during the cold war was heavy industry, and the largest and most active supporters of labor in heavy industry were Slavic Americans, who were also intensely anti-communist. At the height of the labor movement, half of all workers in Detroit’s heavy industry were Eastern Europeans. A similar profile could be found among Pennsylvania coal miners, and steelworkers and meatpackers in the Midwest. Although much more research is needed on this topic, if labor’s support for anti-communism were merely a case of a disconnected and cynical leadership, it oddly dovetailed with the feelings of such a large body of its own members. Lobbying the U.S. Congress and the White House was the most consistent and important activity of ethnic anti-communists since the 1930s. In addition to the lobbies that sought to amend immigration laws to allow DPs and victims of Communism into the United States, ethnic anti-communists lobbied for a strong American foreign and defense policy in general, and for the human and political rights of their homelands (which, in some cases, included restoration or granting of independence). Among the more effective lobbying organizations was the Captive Nations Committee. Originally made up of Eastern European groups, the committee expanded to include captive nations from other parts of the world. Among its most effective tools was the celebration of annual Captive Nations commemoration day, which provided an annual opportunity to approach members of Congress, the White House, and other prominent Americans. It also provided an opportunity for politicians to create favorable press for themselves in a variety of ethnic communities. In addition, individual ethnic groups continued to lobby on behalf of specific homeland or the plight of political prisons. One example of the success of such efforts was the U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Katyn

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Forest Massacre conducted in 1952. This was the result of intensive lobbying efforts by Polish Americans, coupled with the desire of Republican leaders to find an issue on which to attack the Democrats in an election year.27 Following the Helsinki Accords in 1975, a variety of Helsinki monitoring groups sprang up to press for the release of dissidents held in Communist prisons. For example, in 1986, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group met with President Ronald Reagan to press for the freedom of dissident Yuriy Shukhevych.28 In the early and mid-1980s, following the repression of the Solidarity movement in Poland, scores of Solidarity support committees arose that drew support from a broad spectrum of political opinion, not merely the traditional anti-communists. Groups such as Cuban Americans and Southeast Asian Americans have mounted their own lobbying efforts, whose success has equaled and often exceeded that of the Eastern Europeans. The continuing U.S. embargo against Castro’s Cuba is perhaps the best example of how such lobbying can shape American foreign policy. Cuban Americans have developed impressive political fundraising abilities to support these lobbying efforts. Another important lobbying effort that paralleled the earlier effort on behalf of postwar DPs and refugees was organized around the Hmong Veteran Naturalization Act, passed in 2000. The act sought to provide U.S. citizenship for Hmong veterans who had served with great distinction alongside American forces in Vietnam and Laos. Although a relatively small community without a long tradition of political involvement, the Hmong community in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota was able to press its case with congressional representatives from both states as well as mobilize support from the local media and state and local politicians.29 Ethnic Anti-Communism and Cold War Intelligence At one time, the notion that the Soviets or their Communist satellite governments would be much interested in the activities of American immigrant communities or the internal affairs of relatively small émigré organizations that were generally outside of the American mainstream— politically, culturally and linguistically—might have seemed far-fetched. While, at times, Communist authorities pretended indifference to the actions of anti-communist émigrés, there is now ample evidence that they were not only deeply interested in overseas ethnic communities but expended considerable resources to monitor, infiltrate, and influence immigrant communities. In other words, when community newspapers

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like Svoboda complained about Communists in their own ranks, they were essentially correct.30 When this effort began is unclear. As the decoded Venona intercepts show, however, a modest network of Soviet agents was in place by 1943. At that time, the Soviets were particularly interested in the activities of the Polish-American community, which was working with the representatives of the legitimate and non-communist government in exile in London. Efforts to organize a national lobby on behalf of an independent Poland were monitored by pro-communist émigrés, such as Professor Oskar Lange of the University of Chicago (who later became the first Polish Communist ambassador to the United States).31 The Venona archives also show efforts to monitor the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and activities of anti-communist (White) Russian émigrés.32 Efforts were made to influence the selection of bishops in the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States and to infiltrate other Eastern-rite churches.33 Lastly, Venona provides evidence of Soviet efforts to infiltrate postwar Baltic refugees and to monitor or stop the escape of Estonian “forest brothers” to Sweden.34 After the establishment of Communist regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe, primary responsibility for monitoring the activities of anti-communist ethnic groups in North America usually fell to the newly established (but tightly controlled) security services of the respective satellite regimes. The story of how Soviet intelligence funneled lavish subsidies up through the 1980s to the leadership of the CPUSA, and to Gus Hall in particular, is well known, but similar efforts were used to prop up communist periodicals and organizations in ethnic communities even when the actual number of living, breathing Communists had dwindled to a mere geriatric handful.35 Throughout the cold war, Communist security services made continuous efforts to influence, or even control, ethnic community organizations as a way of mitigating anti-communism.36 The arrest of Cuban American spies working on behalf of the Castro regime in recent years indicates that the threat of spying from the few remaining Communist powers is still real.37 Lastly, when possible, Communist spy agencies have sought to make use of ethnic connections to penetrate U.S. security and steal important political or military secrets. Although ethnic spy networks are uncommon, as the case of the Chinese nuclear espionage has demonstrated, they can be highly effective and devastating to American interests.38 On the opposite side, American intelligence did make occasional use of anti-communist ethnic groups, especially recent émigrés.39 The

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CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom was one example, but émigré anti-communism also made for ready recruits for more dangerous intelligence work.40 In the immediate postwar era, the Counterintelligence Corps of the U.S. Army, and later, the CIA, attempted to make use of right-wing anti-communist refugees from East-central Europe who had served under American auspices as “Labor Service” guard companies in occupied Germany. The full extent of their use is unknown and further complicated by accusations from Soviet sources that these groups were “fascists” and “Nazi collaborators.”41 Perhaps the best known instance of using anti-communist exiles was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, which did a great deal to harm the reputation of the CIA and the struggle against Fidel Castro’s regime. Yet, the instances of ethnic anti-communists being actively used by American intelligence seem to be, as far as available documents indicate, relatively infrequent. There are two possible reasons for this that are not mutually exclusive. First, American intelligence officials were often nativeborn Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans for whom ethnic communities were terra incognita filled with people who looked, thought, and acted in ways that seemed alien. Second, there was a fear that such communities, and especially recent émigrés and refugees, might be infiltrated by Soviet agents. As noted above (and as Bay of Pigs amply demonstrated), such a fear was not without foundation. Conclusion Ethnic anti-communism remains a poorly understood phenomenon. The unwillingness of scholars to get beyond their own ideological blinders explains only part of this lacuna. Ethnic anti-communism’s grassroots nature and its sheer diversity are also daunting. Many important sources exist only in languages unknown to most American historians. Ideology aside, those who study anti-communism in the United States are rarely specialists in ethnic history. Those who study ethnic and immigration history are rarely interested in anti-communism or treat it as a kind of embarrassment. Even fewer American scholars are even remotely versed in the nuances of the history of the homeland politics of ethnic anticommunists and the history of Communist espionage efforts involving diaspora communities. In many cases, ex-communist bureaucrats continue to block release of important documents so that, in some cases, anything approaching a complete history of these topics may not even be possible. Scholars outside the United States who do have a good grasp on

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the homeland side of the picture rarely understand the American implications of the subject. Scholars who venture outside their narrow areas of expertise are unlikely to challenge the dominant paradigm or longstanding stereotypes. It is also not likely that any significant interest in the topic will emerge out of the communities among which ethnic anti-communism is so critical. Communities whose homelands remain under Communist control (e.g., Cuba and Vietnam) are too involved in the struggle. Those for whom the Communist scourge has been lifted face other problems. Anticommunism and the desire to free the homeland was a critical organizing principle for many ethnic communities and their leading organizations. It provided a central point of reference and a cause around which to rally communities that are themselves diverse in interests, regions, backgrounds, and relations to the homeland and to the American context in which they exist. After the fall of Communism in their respective homelands, many of these groups have struggled to fill the void that anti-communism once filled.42 One such way may be to provide assistance to other groups struggling with issues related to Communism.43 Yet, the importance of ethnic anti-communists cannot be denied. Never before had relatively small ethnic communities, often far outside the mainstream and marginalized in American society, had such an impact on American foreign policy, one of the areas of governance least susceptible to grassroots lobbying. Their role was important enough to influence the foreign policy and intelligence gathering of numerous countries within the communist bloc, and was often a matter for concern at the highest level of those governments. Within American politics, up until Vietnam, ethnic anti-communism played an important role in the calculations of both major parties. It was also a factor in sustaining the strong anti-communism of the mainstream American labor movement. Moreover, it played an important but unacknowledged role in the evolution of American immigration policy in the years after World War II. Ethnic anti-communism will, to some extent, remain in the shadows of our historical consciousness because Western intellectuals have not yet come to terms with Communism itself. Ideas that promise earthly utopias remain endlessly seductive, especially for those for whom ideas matter the most. In this sense, the study of ethnic anti-communism provides a kind of antidote to beautiful but lethal utopias. It shows us how recent immigrants—many with a limited command of English—and those outside the American mainstream can mobilize and advocate for unpopular but

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ultimately noble causes, reaffirming a faith in the wisdom of democracy and the common folk who are its greatest allies. Notes 1. See Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 2. Among the most important of the American document collections have been the Venona archives, now available online at www.nsa.gov. See also Herbert Rommerstein and Eric Briendel, Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Chicago: Regnery, 2001). Russian authorities have released very few documents on overseas espionage activities, though what has emerged is significant. See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999). On the general nature of Communism in the twentieth century, see Stephané Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), and Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003). 3. Matthew Kaminski, “A Voice for Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2007. Numerous émigré writers and artists, many of considerable talent, performed on the broadcasts. Choirs from the Polish Singer’s Alliance of America gave monthly performances on the Polish broadcasts of RFE. See Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Choral Patriotism: The Polish Singers Alliance of America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 101. 4. Powers uses the term “ethnic anti-communism” only once in his book. See also Athan G. Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970). Although Theoharis got Yalta and Communism wrong. and had a stereotypical view of Polish Americans, his work was the first to emphasize the importance of the ethnic anti-communist vote in elections between 1946 and 1952. As others have pointed out, the real Yalta mythology is altogether different. See John Radzilowski, “The Real Myths of Yalta,” available at http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/roundup/entries/11904.html. 5. Here, I stand at odds with Powers’ otherwise excellent work. Powers seems to view ethnic anti-communism through only two groups—Jewish Americans and Irish Americans, both of which I would exclude from this term. As Powers’ own work shows, opposition to Communism among Irish Americans was led and shaped by Catholic clergy. Irish Americans were anti-communist to the extent they were Catholic. As the Catholic Church weakened its stance toward Communism in the late 1960s and 1970s, no distinctively Irish American anticommunism remained behind, quite unlike Polish Americans. The Jewish case is more complex, since a distinct Jewish-American constituency arose behind the effort to aid Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, the majority of Jewish-American anti-communists that Powers profiles came to anti-communism as disillusioned leftists, not as Jews per se. Ideological and

18

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

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personal conflicts with Communists, rather than a sense of Jewishness, was the determining factor. To be sure, there were many in the mainstream of the Polish-American community who favored some type of accommodation with the Warsaw authorities after 1956, but this never equated supporting Communism and did not alter the underlying attitude of the community as a whole. See John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 140 passim. There has been a tendency to view post-World War II expressions of ethnic “heritage” and American patriotism as ways for ethnic communities to emphasize “American” values in the face of the Soviet threat, and thus insulate themselves from nativist prejudice. This not only overestimates postwar nativism, but as John Bodnar has shown, the debate over how to publicly express ethnic heritage predated the war. See Richard N. Ostling, “Discord in the Church,” Time, February 4, 1985. Both groups were also heavily Catholic (at least the earliest Vietnamese refugees were), but by the 1970s, the Catholic Church had significantly softened its stance toward the Soviet Union. Although Catholic anti-communism was revitalized by the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, it largely disappeared from the agenda of the American bishops. By the 1980s, more than a few American Catholic leaders were openly disdainful of John Paul II’s anti-communism. One spokesperson for the Denver archdiocese described him as “horrendously” biased due to opposing Communism. Nevertheless, the common bond of anti-communism was rarely strong enough to overcome existing resentments and conflicts among groups. It did not bring together Romanian and Hungarian émigrés or heal festering resentments among Poles and Ukrainians. This theme is further developed and illustrated in John Radzilowski and Marek J. Chodakiewicz, eds., Disintegration: The Communist Secret Police in Poland since 1944 (forthcoming). See Michael Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Thaddeus C. Radzialowski, “View from a Polish Ghetto: Reflections on the First 100 Years in Detroit,” Ethnicity 1 (1974): 125–50. See David M. Oshinsky, Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976). Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Politics and Polonia,” in Polish Americans and their History: Community, Culture, Politics, ed. John J. Bukowczyk (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 144. Florida International University, 2000 FIU Cuba Poll, available at www.fiu.edu/ orgs/ipor/cuba2000/3samples.htm. See John Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross (New York: Columbia University Press/Eastern European Monographs, 2003). There are a variety of reasons for this. Radicals produced a significant amount of literature for later historians to study, proportionally far more than the conservative and moderate majority whose energies were largely focused on work, family, church, and community.

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

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Since the 1970s, historians emerging from the New Left, especially students of the “New Ethnicity,” focused sustained attention on ethnic and immigrant radicals and dissenters of various stripes while largely ignoring the majorities in ethnic communities. See Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross, 87–91. See also Arthur Irwin Imhoff, Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). Emily Weidenhamer, “Disillusionment on the Grandest of Scales: Finnish-Americans in the Soviet Union, 1917–1939,” Vestnik: Journal of Russian and Asian Studies, no. 3 (2005), 27–50 describes one exception, which was the American Finnish community, where there was significant pro-Soviet sentiment. This led some to make the tragic decision to move to the Soviet Union with their families in expectation of enjoying the benefits of the worker’s paradise. Most ended up in Soviet Gulags, accused of being American spies, and many lost their lives. See, for example, June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride and American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other New Immigrants in the Interwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 187–89. Among these voices were the American Catholic press and a few old-line conservatives. See Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 273–74. In October 1944, Roosevelt met with Polish American leaders and used a map showing the pre1939 boundaries of Poland as a backdrop to give the impression that he supported these boundaries when, in fact, he had already acquiesced to Soviet control over a large portion of eastern Poland and the Baltic states. Naród Polski, November 2, 1944, 1. Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Bread and Butter Politics or Foreign Policy Concerns? Class versus Ethnicity in the Midwestern Polish-American Community during the 1946 Congressional Elections,” Polish American Studies 51, no. 2 (1994): 5–32. See also Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Cold War Political Culture, Polish-American Politics, the Truman Doctrine, and the Victory Thesis,” Polish Review 51, no. 3–4 (2006): 263–81. Robert Szymczak, “Hopes and Promises: Arthur Bliss Lane, the Republican Party, and the Slavic-American Vote, 1952,” Polish American Studies 45, no. 1 (1988): 12–28. There are a couple of valuable works that deal with the political and social tensions among immigrant waves within a single group (as opposed to generational tensions). See Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), and Mary Patrice Erdmans, Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). See also an undergraduate project, Ashley Garfield, Sean Estok, and Matthew Pianko, “The Cuban American Immigration Experience,” available at www.umich.edu/~ac213/student_projects05/ci/. See, for example, Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel, 358–67. Former Soviet POWs and Soviet citizens used as slave laborers by the Nazis were almost invariably

20

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27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

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sent to long prison terms in the Gulag. Severe repression or death was also the fate of veterans of the Polish army in exile who returned home. The role of UN agencies and Allied military personnel to conduct such deportations was subject of ferocious criticism by anti-communists in the United States and Canada. The deportations were often carried out quite brutally and sometimes assisted by Soviet troops who, on occasion, summarily executed the unwilling victims in the presence of Allied personnel. See, for example, Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War (New York: International Publishers, 1989); Fran Koscielski, Divided Loyalties: American Unions and the Vietnam War (New York: Garland, 1999); and Edmund F. Wehrle, Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). This opportunity was present since the Roosevelt Administration had been well aware of Soviet complicity but had publicly followed the Soviet line that the Germans had committed the massacre. See Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, The Katyn Forest Massacre: Final Report, 82d Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952). Myron Wasylyk, “10th Anniversary of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group: The Campaign for Yuriy Shukhevych,” Ukrainian Weekly, November 9, 1986. See, for example, the statement of Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold in Senate Judiciary Committee Executive Business Meeting, “Statement of Senator Russ Feingold on the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act (H.R. 371),” May 18, 2000, available at http://judiciary.senate.gov/oldsite/5182000_rf.htm. The level of spying and manipulation conducted by Communist regimes is incomprehensible to the average American. Even in a “moderately” repressive regime, such as post-1956 Poland, the security services were ubiquitous. One Solidarity activist-turned-scholar noted that out of twenty-five members of an opposition prayer group that met in a Gdańsk church in the early 1980s, seventeen were police informants. Security service agents often ran or created opposition groups. Among these was the Free Trade Unions of the Coast organization, which was the nucleus for the famous Solidarity movement. When the shipyard strikes of August 1980 broke out, the security apparatus lost control of their own creation and Solidarity went on to help topple the very regime that had sown the seeds. See Radzilowski and Chodakiewicz, Disintegration. See the reports of Lange and Bolesław Gebert of May 17, 27, and 29, 1944, as well as April 18 and July 29, 1943, available at www.nsa.gov/venona/venon00017 .cfm. On Lange, see Robert Szymczak, “Oskar Lange, American Polonia, and the Polish-Soviet Dilemma during World War II: I. The Public Partisan as Private Emissary,” Polish Review 40, no. 1 (1995): 3–27; idem “Oskar Lange, American Polonia, and the Polish-Soviet Dilemma during World War II: II. Making the Case for a ‘People’s Poland,’” Polish Review 40, no. 2 (1995): 131–57. Venona reports of July 18, 1943, and September 15, 1944, available at www.nsa .gov/venona/venon00017.cfm. Ibid., January 20; March 10 and 23, 1945.

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34. Ibid., June 26, 1945, and January 8, 1946. 35. See, for example, Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Polska Ludowa i Polonia amerykańska (1944–1956),” Przegląd Polonijny 22, no. 1 (1996): 9–41. 36. Sławomir Cenckiewicz, Oczami bezpieki: Szkice i materiały z dziejów aparatu bezpieczeństwa PRL (Kraków: Arcana, 2006). Reviews of this important work can be found in English in Sarmatian Review, April 2007, available at http:// www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/407/272books.html, and Michael Szporer, “The Security Forces and Polish Communism: Reclaiming History from Myth,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 1 (2007): 88–95. One example of this phenomenon was when the Warsaw regime made successful overtures to the dissident Polish National Catholic Church (PNCC) both to use the church and its lay organizations as an agent of influence in the Polish-American community, and in hopes of developing missionary efforts in Poland itself as way of weakening the Catholic Church. See Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Cold War Ethnic Politics: The Polish National Catholic Church, the Polish American Congress, and People’s Poland: 1944–1952,” Polish American Studies 55, no. 2 (1998): 5–24. This effort ended when Communist authorities took direct control of the Polish see of the church and forced it to break its ties with the American mother church. American-born PNCC Bishop Joseph Padewski was arrested, tortured, and killed by Communist security forces. See Theodore L. Zawistowski, “On the Death of Bishop Padewski in a Communist Prison,” Polish Review 48, no. 3 (2003): 347–65. 37. See for example, “US Arrests Cuban Spy Suspect,” BBC News, May 31, 2002, available at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2018052.stm; “Spy Suspect Not Offered Immunity,” St. Petersburg Times, August 24, 2006, available at www.sptimes.com/2006/08/24/State/Spy_suspect_not_offer.shtml; “Florida Professor Admits He Was a Cuban Spy,” CNN, December 20, 2006, available at www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/19/professor.spy/index.html. A collection of press articles on the damaging Ana Belen Montes is available at www.latinamerican studies.org/montes.htm. 38. See Norta Turlock, Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal, 2nd ed. (New York: Encounter Books, 2004). 39. These efforts were often tied to language skills, but not always. There was an early Office of Strategic Services’ effort to create a special unit of Polish Americans for use in occupied Europe, but seems to have been abandoned by 1943. 40. On the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989). See also Halina Stepan, “Polish Émigré Writers in New York in the Files of the FBI: Lechoń, Wierzyński, Wittlin,” Polish Review 51, no. 1 (2006): 41–53. The famous Jan Karski, who tried to warn the British and Americans about the Holocaust and later became a professor at Georgetown University, was hired by the U.S. State Department to conduct international speaking tours about the nature of Communism and related topics. This is indicative of the caliber of émigrés on which the American educational effort could call. See E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław Jankowski, Karski: How

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One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: John Wiley, 1994), 244–50. It is significant that Karski developed close ties to Fr. Edmund Walsh, regent of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. Fr. Walsh was one of the leading Catholic anti-communists in the United States. 41. I have been able to find sources only on the Polish and Latvian contingents, though many other nationalities were involved. See David and Todd Morgan, “The Anabasis of the Holy Cross Brigade Reflected in the Documents of the United States Government, 1945–1950,” Glaukopis: Pismo SpołecznoHistoryczne, no. 5/6 (2006): 242–74; Andrew Ezergailis et al., Nazi-Soviet Disinformation about the Holocaust in Nazi-Occupied Latvia: Daugavas Vanagi: Who Are They?—Revisited (Rīga, Latvia: Latvijas 50 gadu okupācijas muzeja fonds, 2005), 177–78. The issue of alleged Nazi collaborators among postwar east European refugees is immensely complicated. Two things are clear: that there were collaborators and that the Soviets deliberately used “active measures” to spread the notion that all such refugees were pro-Nazi as a way of neutralizing anti-communist elements in the West. Soviet measures included the release of false documents and/or the withholding of exculpatory evidence. The John Demjanjuk case is a good example of the murky nature of the claims and counterclaims made by interested parties on all sides. 42. I discuss this in greater detail elsewhere. See John Radzilowski, “Last Casualties of the Cold War: Diaspora, Identity, and Politics among Polish and Other East Central European Americans,” Glaukopis: Pismo Społeczno-Historyczne, no. 2/3 (2005): 278–87. 43. See Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “Into the Future” (paper presented at the Roundtable Discussion on “The Polish Transition: Lessons for Cuba” at the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, February 13, 2006), available at http://www.iwp.edu/news/newsID.259/news_detail.asp.

PART I

The Cold War Warriors

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CHAPTER 1

The Polish American Congress, Polish Americans, and the Politics of Anti-Communism Donald Pienkos

Over the past one hundred years and more, Polish immigration to the United States has made up, by far, the largest of all such population movements from Eastern and East-central Europe to this country. The greatest number of immigrants entered between the 1870s and 1914 and, together, they created a dense network of church, fraternal, cultural, and social institutions and associations that eventually came to be known as the Polonia, or Polish American community. Into this community arrived smaller but significant later migrations of Poles in the years between World Wars I and II (1918 to 1939), after World War II, from 1945 into the 1960s, and, most recently, from the 1970s on. The result of these movements was a diverse Polish American population that has come to number at least nine to ten million in all. Indeed, throughout America’s history over the past century, the Polish population in the United States has comprised at least half of all those persons originating from Eastern and East-central Europe. Most Polish immigrants to the United States have settled in this country out of a desire to find work and to improve their economic conditions. At the same time, in the ranks of every wave of Polish immigration

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have been individuals whose aim was to work for Poland’s independence in America by forming patriotic organizations to unite the community behind this goal. Their efforts came in response to the destruction of the Polish state at the end of the eighteenth century at the hands of imperial Russia, Austria, and Prussia. They led to the creation of a succession of Polonia organizations that linked the independence cause with the ideals of American freedom and democracy. These organized actions helped, in a real way, to bring about Poland’s restoration at the end of World War I. Indeed, when World War II broke out, a strong “collective action” tradition in Polonia already existed in support of both Poland’s independence and its people’s material needs.1 World War II began on September 1, 1939, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and the country’s occupation by Germany and its de facto ally, the Soviet Union. On December 11, 1941, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call for a declaration of war against Germany’s ally, Japan, after its attack at Pearl Harbor. Polish American Congress and the Teheran Summit The Polish American Congress was born in Buffalo, New York, at the beginning of June 1944 at a giant gathering at which more than 2,600 delegates, elected from Polish ethnic, fraternal, church, veterans, cultural, business, and labor organizations from across the country took part. They were joined by scores of sympathetic public officials. After its founding, the organization continued as a political lobby under the name of Polish American Congress (PAC) or Kongres Polonii Amerykanskiej.2 The congress was the product of the work of two groups of activists. One was the émigré-led National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (Komitet Narodowy Amerykanow Polskiego Pochodzenia, KNAPP), which was centered in New York City. The second included the leaders of the many Polish American fraternal insurance benefit societies and a number of churchmen of Polish heritage. From the start, the key PAC figure on the fraternal side was the Pennsylvania-born attorney and president of the Polish National Alliance, Charles Rozmarek. He was elected PAC president in Buffalo and remained in this office until 1968. The timing of the PAC’s founding was notable for several reasons. Only a week after it adjourned, the United States and its Allies launched the decisive Normandy invasion of France. A year later, World War II was over in Europe. By this time, the fate of Poland had also been decided,

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both on the battlefield and in the meetings of the leaders of the anti-Axis Alliance—Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the communist party of the Soviet Union. In November 1943, the “Big Three” held their first joint summit in Teheran, Iran. There, Roosevelt and Churchill each privately agreed to Stalin’s demands for the revision of Poland’s prewar eastern borders at Poland’s expense. They justified their moves as a way to bolster Soviet Russia’s commitment to continuing its massive military campaign against Hitler on the eastern front. But their actions were taken without informing the Polish exile government in London, despite the fact that it was a loyal ally and significant military contributor in the war. Indeed, FDR asked Stalin to keep their understanding secret because he did not want to risk losing the votes of millions of traditionally supportive Polish Americans in his contemplated candidacy for an unprecedented fourth term in office the following year.3 Three months after, in January 1944, the Soviet Red Army advanced into territories Stalin had not seized in 1939 following the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland. With it came a Polish communist-run political group (“the Lublin committee”) that was submissive to Stalin. This group would comprise the core ruling element in Poland after the war. Significantly, before 1944, America’s Polonia had not mobilized politically in support of Poland. True, a substantial humanitarian Polonia-wide effort had been launched in 1939, led by Marquette University Law School Dean Francis X. Swietlik, Censor, or chief judge, of the Polish National Alliance. Known as the Rada Polonii Amerykanskiej, or “American Relief for Poland,” this federation of fraternal, social, and church groups had been required to be apolitical—at first, because the United States was neutral in the conflict; later, because it benefited from substantial U.S. relief assistance through a government sponsored agency, the National War Fund. Its sole political position was one echoing the broad principles of the “Atlantic Charter” agreed to by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941. That eight-point statement, which was later to serve as the wartime rationale of the entire anti-Axis United Nations Alliance, included opposition to imposed or undemocratic territorial changes by any state and respect for the right to self-government for all peoples. Thus, in a roundabout way, the charter seemed to express America’s and Britain’s general commitment to Poland’s prewar territorial integrity and its postwar sovereignty.4 As noted, KNAPP was one of the two key elements in the founding of the PAC. Created in 1942 in New York City, KNAPP was led by

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several exiled officials from the prewar Polish government, most notably Ignacy Matuszewski, and enjoyed the support of a number of wellinformed Polonia activists.5 But, initially, it was a marginal factor due to its unpopular criticisms of the policies of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of the Polish exile government in London. To KNAPP, Sikorski was a lightning rod for many reasons. Most important was his willingness to work with Stalin against Hitler following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, despite that state’s aggression against Poland just twenty months before. But after Pearl Harbor, FDR embraced Sikorski as an ally—so did American Relief for Poland. As a result, KNAPP was vilified in much of Polonia.6 Things only began to change in 1943, following the Nazis’ discovery of the corpses of thousands of Polish military officers in Russia’s Katyn forest,7 Sikorski’s mysterious death at Gibraltar in July, and the disquieting rumors over Roosevelt’s concessions about Poland’s future at the Teheran summit. At the same time, following the forging of the U.S.-British-Soviet alliance, another political organization came into being—the American Polish Labor Council. Headed by the veteran socialist and American union leader, Leon Krzycki, the APLC was linked to the American Slav Congress, a federation led by pro-communist and pro-Soviet activists. Both groups claimed to represent millions of Slavic American working people in their support of President Roosevelt and his alliance with Soviet Russia. Both denounced the activities of KNAPP, especially after its leaders succeeded in meeting with Charles Rozmarek and his fellow fraternalists in planning the Polish American Congress.8 PAC and Roosevelt At the PAC’s founding meeting in Buffalo in June 1944, its organizers’ aim of working for Poland’s postwar reconstitution as an independent state was combined with a reaffirmation of Polonia’s support for President Roosevelt and the American war effort. This was effected by Rozmarek to prevent the Slav Congress and its critics in Washington from claiming that the new PAC federation was less than patriotic, or at least myopic, in its concern for Poland. The critics were persons of great influence, as it later became apparent.9 But the PAC’s leaders were not immediately aware of Roosevelt’s, and Churchill’s, secret acceptance of the revision of Poland’s eastern borders. Ominously, they were unable, despite their repeated attempts, to gain an audience with FDR to present him with the patriotic resolution adopted by the delegates at the the June congress.

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Upon the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis on August 1, 1944, the PAC’s call for greater U.S. support of the freedom fighters’ cause went nowhere.10 At last, on October 11, 1944, FDR met with Rozmarek and the PAC top leadership in the White House, but only for a ceremonial gathering to mark the anniversary of the death of the American Revolutionary War hero, Casimir Pulaski. There he welcomed the delegation seated before a large map of prewar Poland. No mention was made of his earlier discussion with Stalin at the Teheran summit the year before, where they had secretly agreed to the radical redrawing of Poland’s postwar borders. On October 28, 1944, FDR was in Chicago for a massive parade of Democratic Party enthusiasts to promote his reelection to a fourth term in office. After the event, FDR met with Rozmarek in his private train car. There he won Rozmarek’s personal pledge of support for his reelection. When he did so, FDR’s supporters immediately publicized his words as reflecting Polonia’s endorsement.11 Unaware of FDR’s actual position on Poland at Teheran, about 90 percent of Polish voters backed Roosevelt, who was reelected over the Republican Party candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, by a 432 to 99 electoral vote. But his popular vote margin was surprisingly modest—2.5 million ballots or 53 percent of the two party turnout. Ten states with substantial Polish American populations were crucial in his victory: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin. FDR won eight of them for a total of 177 electoral votes, losing only in Wisconsin and Ohio. Except for New York, his margin of victory in the others was very narrow.12 At their February 1945 summit in the Soviet Crimean town of Yalta, FDR and Churchill accepted the realities of a Stalin-supported Polish provisional government. Following the president’s return to the United States, he spoke on March 1, 1945, to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. There, just six weeks before his own death, FDR, at variance with the political realities that had become crystal clear at Yalta, pronounced the “Big Three” discussions about Poland a success: One outstanding example of joint action by the three major Allied powers . . . was the solution reached on Poland. The whole Polish question was a potential source of trouble in postwar Europe—as it has been sometimes before—and we came to the Conference determined to find a common ground for its solution. And we did—even though everybody does not agree with us, obviously. Our objective was to help to create a strong, independent and prosperous nation. That is the thing we must always

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remember, those words, agreed to by Russia, by Britain, and by the United States; the objective of making Poland a strong, independent, and prosperous nation, with a government ultimately to be selected by the Polish people themselves. To achieve that objective, it was necessary to provide for the formation of a new government much more representative than had been possible while Poland was enslaved. There were, as you know, two governments—one in London, one in Lublin—practically in Russia. Accordingly, steps were taken at Yalta to reorganize the existing provisional government in Poland on a broader democratic basis, so as to include democratic leaders now in Poland and those abroad. This new, reorganized government will be recognized by all of us as the temporary government of Poland. Poland needs a temporary government in the worst way . . . This new Polish provisional government of national unity will be pledged to holding free elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and a secret ballot.

Roosevelt went on to discuss, at some length but with much vagueness, the compromises that involved Poland’s changed borders. He also failed to mention that these compromises had already been made fifteen months earlier at the Teheran summit. Of course, there was no mention of the offhanded way in which the bargain with Stalin had been made. Roosevelt concluded his comments on Poland by saying, “I am convinced that the agreement on Poland, under the circumstances, is the most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish nation.”13 The response of the Polish American Congress to the speech, publicized just fifteen days later, was nothing less than extraordinary, especially given Roosevelt’s general popularity, the very positive initial public response to the Yalta decisions, and the great support for FDR among Polish Americans. The PAC stated: An injustice was committed against Poland at the Yalta conference. But an injustice was also perpetrated against the United States, since American principles adopted by our government with respect to . . . the Atlantic Charter were brutally trampled there. American wartime aid, whose objective had involved the making of a just peace with freedom and independence to all nations . . . was betrayed. Here in America Poland has been victimized in an unheard of campaign of slander at the hands of the communists, both self-proclaimed and covert. The Polish government in exile, comprised of individuals who were the first to fight Nazi Germany, has also been continually labeled “fascist” and “reactionary.” We further protest the unjust decisions that were made at Yalta . . . the windfall transfer of Polish territories to Russia . . . and the shameful determination of a new

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Polish government without any consultation with any of its true representatives. Our Polish ally has been deprived of even the rights that criminals are afforded in defending themselves. It is surely a profane tragedy that in our President’s first decisions as they related to Europe’s future he would ratify the fifth partition of Poland and cooperated in the fashioning of a Polish puppet regime manufactured in Moscow.14

Heroic Period of Political Activism From this point on, the PAC entered into a period of extraordinary, even heroic, political activity on behalf of the cause of a free Poland. In May 1945, Rozmarek and several close advisors attended the founding meeting of the UN in San Francisco.15 There, they did their utmost to present Poland’s case to the assembled leaders of the world, rigorously condemned Soviet behavior toward its emerging satellite, and called on the U.S. Secretary of State to support the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Polish exile government in London and to repudiate its connection with the Soviet-dominated provisional regime. Following FDR’s death in April 1945, the PAC unsuccessfully urged his successor, Harry Truman, to insist on stricter guarantees of Poland’s future parliamentary elections. It condemned the U.S. decision in September 1946 to reconsider its commitment to backing the Yalta agreement on Poland’s new western and northern borders. This action, announced by U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes in a speech in Stuttgart, Germany, meant, ironically, that only the Soviet Union, the very state that had taken substantial Polish eastern lands, backed Poland’s new borders with Germany. The PAC never wavered from denouncing this U.S. position, one that only changed in 1975 with Washington’s approval of the multistate Helsinki Final Accords.16 In August 1946, Rozmarek and several key colleagues traveled to Paris, where they lobbied, once again, for Poland at the foreign ministers meeting there. They also used their time in Europe to visit some twenty refugee camps in Germany, where thousands of Polish Displaced Persons were struggling in difficult and demoralizing conditions. The PAC group returned to the United States to launch a series of fierce attacks on the policies of the U.S.-run United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the leadership of Secretary of State Byrnes. Byrnes resigned soon after and was replaced by General George Marshall.17 On January 19, 1947, parliamentary elections were at last held in Poland. They pitted the democratic Polish Peasants Party (PSL) against the Communist-controlled state and their allies in the security police.

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Former Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, General Sikorski’s successor in the London exile government, had returned to Poland in June 1945 to lead the democratic forces there. He had gambled that FDR and Churchill would insure the “free and unfettered” elections they and Stalin had agreed to at Yalta. Instead, his supporters were crushed in a campaign of violence, with the falsified results manufactured in Moscow. Soon after, Rozmarek and the PAC helped create the Committee to Stop World Communism, a group headed by former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane, who had resigned in disgust over Washington’s acceptance of the wildly fraudulent results of the January exercise.18 These events signaled the PAC’s and Rozmarek’s decision to transform their protest against the Soviet domination of Poland into a struggle against Communism as such. Heretofore, their emphasis had been against Russian control over Poland, then opposition to Soviet domination, then opposition to American appeasement of Soviet Russia, sometimes, if increasingly, mixed with opposition to the Communists and their drive for total power in Poland. But by this time, the Polish American Congress had been joined by many other organizations, whose combined political influence was proving to be significant. These included a newly formed coalition bringing together the many groups representing Americans of East and Central European origin, a number of trade unions, leaders in the Roman Catholic Church, and most importantly, the Republican Party. The potency of this anti-Soviet coalition became evident in the November 1946 Congressional elections that resulted in Republican majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since 1930. President Truman interpreted the Democrats’ defeat as requiring his administration to adopt a sharply critical approach to Soviet expansionism. He articulated this new approach in his memorable address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on March 12, 1947. There, less than two months after the Communists’ parliamentary “triumph” in Poland, Truman called on the U.S. government to offer military aid to Greece and Turkey. Both were located on the fringes of the Soviet realm, and Greece, in particular, was faced with a serious threat to its internal stability from a powerful Communist insurgency. But Truman went further than calling for aid to these two states and declared, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”19 The response in Polonia and elsewhere was very positive to Truman’s speech. The widely read

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Chicago-based Polish language daily Dziennik Zwiazkowy, operated by Rozmarek’s Polish National Alliance, immediately praised the speech as offering “life saving hope” to the peoples of Eastern Europe and rejecting Roosevelt’s duplicitous policies at Teheran and Yalta.20 The destruction of the PSL and the Communists’ reliance on all manner of repression against its democratic opponents drove Mikolajczyk to flee Poland for his life in October 1947. Soon after, Rozmarek met with him and won the Polish American Congress’ approval of a tie with Mikolajczyk in the ongoing effort to press the United States into stronger opposition to the Polish Communist regime. The connection was controversial within the PAC leadership and was soon terminated. But Rozmarek’s aim had been clear—to keep the public aware of the PAC’s stance against the Polish regime by linking its objectives with those of an internationally known opponent of Communism. Building Connections to American Anti-Communism A succession of PAC actions that all carried the spirit of unrelenting opposition to Soviet domination in Poland and Communism soon followed. Moreover, in 1948, Rozmarek backed the Republican Dewey in his second try for the presidency. This was a belated recognition that KNAPP had been right in 1944 when its leaders complained over Roosevelt’s rumored “sellout” of Poland to Stalin at the Teheran summit. President Truman and his supporters stepped up their own reelection campaign to hold on to the Polish and East and Central European vote after his “Truman Doctrine” speech in March 1947. In addition to stressing Truman’s anti-Soviet posture, his backers put together a major propaganda effort, underscoring his support for special immigration legislation to enable thousands of Polish Displaced Persons and former soldiers in Poland’s armed forces in Europe to enter the country under special dispensation. Moreover, every effort was made to reassert the Democratic Party’s “New Deal” commitment to the economic concerns of ethnic working class voters, among them, voters of Polish and East and Central European origins. The result was a narrow Truman victory, won with the help of Polish Americans, who voted by a four to one margin for the president. After the election, Truman further enhanced his standing in Polonia and the East European communities by backing the creation of Radio Free Europe in 1949.21 But it is instructive to note that six of the eight most heavily Polish American states won by Roosevelt in 1944 were carried by Governor

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Dewey in his narrow and surprising defeat. In 1948, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Maryland all switched to Dewey, while Truman won only Illinois and Massachusetts. This time, however, Truman carried Wisconsin and Ohio—states Roosevelt had lost four years earlier. In 1950, the PAC championed a congressional investigation of the Katyn Massacre of 1940. In fact, a special committee of the House of Representatives was established to make the investigation. Playing a key role in this exhaustive inquiry was a Chicago Sun Times reporter, Roman Pucinski, who was a special counsel in the proceedings. The final report found the Soviet Union responsible for the crime and blamed FDR for closing his eyes to the atrocity. While the devastating investigation was buried by Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, its findings were corroborated forty years later by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.22 Pucinski went on to enjoy a celebrated career in the House of Representatives and in Chicago politics. He remained a close Rozmarek associate and was later a vice president of the PAC. The anti-communism of the Polish American Congress remained its hallmark throughout the remaining years of Charles Rozmarek’s tenure as its president. On countless occasions, Rozmarek spoke on the issue around the country to Polonia groups and other audiences. He joined with like-minded politicians in both parties to present the PAC position and was a tireless advocate for Poland before the platform committees at the national conventions of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Rozmarek and the PAC backed the idea of liberating Poland and its sister satellites in East and Central Europe from Soviet power in the 1950s. This lasted at least until the events of 1956, when the violent Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising made it clear that the U.S. government would not intervene in the region. He and the PAC supported the creation of the Assembly of Captive European Nations in the early 1950s and backed the annual observance of Captive Nations Week from its inception in 1959. But Rozmarek was also a realist and reluctantly went along with an interim U.S. foreign aid policy to wean the Polish regime from Soviet domination and gain greater autonomy from Moscow after 1956. Nevertheless, he never ceased in his opposition to Communist rule. Perhaps the zenith of PAC influence as part of the cold war anti-communist coalition came in the 1960 presidential elections. In the campaign between Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate, and the Democrat, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both men vigorously voiced their opposition to Soviet expansionism and

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their identification with the idea of a free and independent Poland. Both came to Chicago, the “capital” of the Polish American community, and spoke to assemblies organized by Rozmarek. President Eisenhower also appeared in Chicago to address the national convention of the PAC.23 Rozmarek’s successor, Aloysius Mazewski, continued the uncompromising PAC line throughout his twenty years as president of the congress from 1968 to 1988. Indeed, thanks to Mazewski’s close association with the Republican Party at a time of Republican dominance in presidential elections, the PAC perhaps enjoyed an even greater degree of access to the Oval Office than Rozmarek’s efforts had achieved. For example, it was Mazewski who was photographed with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush on the front page of the New York Times on December 21, 1981, just a week after martial law aimed at destroying the Solidarity trade union movement had been declared in Poland. Significance of the Polish Vote in U.S. Elections The question of the actual impact of the Polish vote in U.S. presidential elections from 1944 to the end of the cold war remains to be explored further. Over the years, the subject has received relatively little academic attention. It should be noted that the very size of the Polish vote and the strategic location of substantial Polish American communities in states whose electoral vote was essential to victory in presidential elections is a subject that deserves detailed analysis. These states included Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Maryland. In their World War II statements, both FDR and Rozmarek spoke of 6 to 7 million Polish Americans. This implies about 3 million persons of Polish origin who could vote, approximately 4 to 5 percent of the electorate at the time. These figures remained fairly constant over the next forty years. Before World War II, Polish voters had become overwhelmingly inclined to the Democratic Party, due to their appreciation of FDR’s New Deal leadership in the Depression era. The Polish American identification with the Democrats was also linked to their connections with influential pro-Democratic groups, most notably the growing labor union movement and the Catholic Church. Thus Roosevelt’s concern over the Polish vote prior to the 1944 elections was understandable. There is also the question of the salience of Roosevelt’s actions at Teheran, and especially at Yalta, and the impact of the appeasement policy he chose to follow, one in conflict with the aims of the Atlantic Charter of

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which he continually spoke. How influential were these failures in weakening Polish support for Democratic Party candidates after the war? To answer this, it is important to distinguish between those persons who were Polish-born and more likely to be influenced by their reading of the Polish language press of the time, and those who were younger and American-born. The latter were more apt to read the English language press, and more likely to stick, at least at first, to their Democratic Party loyalties. By the early and mid-1950s, the postwar Polish immigration of perhaps 200,000 Displaced Persons and former Polish military personnel was also beginning to have its impact in Polonia.24 Many, if not most, of these voters were deeply affected by the Teheran and Yalta decisions in their opposition to the Democrats. Their growing involvement in the PAC sharpened its tilt toward the Republicans, especially when former Ambassador Lane and his allies began emphasizing the idea of liberating Poland and Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. This position was inserted into the Republican Party platform at its 1952 national convention. That year, the traditionally Democratic party-oriented Polish vote swung significantly to support the Republican Dwight Eisenhower, with 49 percent backing his candidacy.25 In 1960, both presidential candidates took almost identical hard-line positions against Communism and expressed strong sentiments praising Poland, its people’s love of liberty, and their right to freedom and independence. So did President Eisenhower. All three spoke to major events sponsored by the Polish American Congress in Chicago. Such acts of homage impressively underscored their recognition of the importance of the Polish vote in the coming election. In November 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic of Irish ethnic ancestry, won the presidency by carrying the heavily Polish states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut, losing only Wisconsin and Ohio. While he won the popular vote by only 120,000 out of over 68 million that were cast, Polish Americans voted for him by a four to one margin. In the 1976 presidential election campaign, the Polish issue came up again, but this time in an unexpected way. This was due to President Gerald Ford’s amazing gaffe in his debate on foreign policy with the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. There, he confounded millions of viewers by denying that Poland was under Soviet domination. Despite the Herculean efforts of his ally, President Mazewski, to persuade Ford to apologize for his mistake, he went down to a narrow defeat. Carter received 60

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percent of the Polish vote, a jump of 47 percent from 1972, when Nixon had won reelection in a landslide.26 In the presidential elections of the 1980s, the issue of Poland’s freedom remained a powerful one, especially with Ronald Reagan. Still, Polish Americans, while sympathetic to his anti-communism, and bolstered greatly in their hopes for Poland by the words and actions of Pope John Paul II and the Solidarity movement, remained slightly attuned to the Democratic hopefuls. By then, anti-communism had become central to the nation’s mainstream politics and so the Polish voters, 95 percent of them American-born, no longer constituted so salient a force in the national foreign policy debate.27 It could be said that Polish Americans and the Polish American Congress had indeed won the debate by that time, although few in the government, media or academia were around to say so in public. Conclusion A close review of the record of the activities and mission of the Polish American Congress from the time of its creation in 1944 indicates that its position on behalf of Poland evolved in two stages: from one emphasizing the defense of Poland and opposition to Soviet Russian aggression to a policy that recognized the importance of opposing Communism as a threat to both Poland’s freedom and the security of the United States. It was via this evolving perspective that the Polish American Congress became an important element in the anti-communist coalition in American politics after 1948. In this fashion, the PAC made its great contribution to Poland’s liberation from Soviet domination, which was at last achieved in 1989. As Solidarity’s Lech Walesa put it when he spoke to a joint session of the Congress of the United States of America on November 15, 1989, only five and one-half months after its extraordinary election victory over the Communists: “Your support was always priceless to us.”28 Notes 1. Donald E. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863–1991 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1991), 20–72, and passim; Andrzej Brozek, Polish Americans 1854–1939 (Warsaw: Interpress, 1985). Early examples of Polish American involvement in support of Poland’s independence include the activities of the Polish National Alliance after its founding in Philadelphia and Chicago in 1880, the holding of the first Polish National Congress in Washington, D.C., in 1910, the creation of the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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Polish Defense Committee in Pittsburgh in 1912, and the forming if the Polish National Department in Chicago in 1916. Richard C. Lukas, The Strange Allies: The United States and Poland, 1941–1945 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 107–27, and Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 107–16. Both provide descriptions of the creation of the Polish American Congress. Roosevelt’s conduct is alarmingly reported by Charles Bohlen, later a U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and FDR’s translator in his conversation with Stalin at Teheran, in his extraordinary memoir, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 156–60. In Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1942–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 283–84. The work by this major presidential historian—like that of another widely respected authority on the presidency, James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970)—fails to draw explicit conclusions from Roosevelt’s failure to honor the Atlantic Charter in his dealings with Stalin over Poland. Dallek notes that at Teheran Roosevelt declared that Poland’s “1941 frontiers are as just as any.” There, he also expressed his lack of sympathy for the Polish government in London (“I am sick and tired of these people”), despite the seeming cordiality of his meetings with its leaders. This general approach continues to be followed by later authors, for example, by Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendesvous with Destiny (New York: Little Brown, 1990), and Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007). Matuszewski (1891–1946) had served until 1939 as Poland’s Treasury Minister. Two other notable Polish émigrés active in KNAPP were Henryk Rajchman (a former Minister of Industry and Trade), and Waclaw Jedrzejewicz (a former Minister of Culture). The two key leaders in Polonia were Max Wegrzynek, editor of the New York Nowy Swiat daily, and Frank Januszewski, editor and publisher of the Detroit Dziennik Polski. During his December 1942 visit to the United States, General Sikorski declared that “whoever criticizes my understanding with Russia is an agent of Goebbels.” Matuszewski was a special target of the General’s wrath (Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 106, 511). On the tragic story of the murder of more than 10,000 Polish officers on Stalin’s orders, see Janusz Zawodny, Death in the Forest (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1962). Robert Szymczak, “Oskar Lange, Polonia, and the Polish-Soviet Dilemma in World War II,” The Polish Review 40, no. 1 (1995): 2–38 and no. 2 (1995): 31–57. Piotr S. Wandycz, The United States and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 283–84, 305; see also Lukas, The Strange Allies. As planning for the Polish American Congress continued, the American Slav Congress and its Polish members sharply attacked the event as a meeting of the “Polish Fascist Congress.” A resolution signed by eighty prominent individuals who took part in a Detroit gathering held to coincide with the Buffalo conclave, chaired by the

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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leftist labor leader Stanley Nowak. It asserted that what was most needed was not a Polish American Congress but “unity on the war effort and opposition to fascism at home and abroad” (Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 514). The most severe recent criticism of Roosevelt’s failure to pressure Stalin to support the Poles in Warsaw is that of Norman Davies, Rising ’44 (New York: MacMillan, 2003), 619–37 and passim. See also Wandycz, The United States and Poland, 287–89. For American historians on the tragedy, see Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 466, and Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 534–35. Peter Irons, “‘The Test is Poland’: Polish Americans and the Origins of the Cold War,” Polish American Studies 30, no. 2 (1973): 5–65. Rozmarek’s impulsive, if understandable, gesture infuriated New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, because Rozmarek had earlier assured him of his support. See Edward Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland (New York: Wiley, 1958), 324. In mid-October 1944, Churchill, accompanied by Polish Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, was in Moscow for talks with Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. There, Molotov shocked Mikolajczyk by noting FDR’s secret concession of Polish territories to Stalin at Teheran the year before. Mikolajczyk was then pressed by U.S. Ambassador Harriman to keep silent on the matter, again because of the impending U.S. presidential election. Rozmarek was not made aware of Roosevelt’s actual position on the border matter until after the election. See Wandycz, The United States and Poland, 281, 290, 291, and Jan Karski, The Great Powers and Poland, 1919–1945: From Versailles to Yalta (New York: University Press of America, 1985), 544–51, 561–62. For example, FDR carried Michigan by only 22,000 votes out of more than 2.2 million that were cast. In New Jersey, his margin was 26,000 out of nearly 2 million. In Illinois, he won by 140,000 out of more than 4 million votes, and in Pennsylvania, by 105,000 out of 3.8 million (Lukas, The Strange Allies, 126–27). Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 275–78. Roosevelt is said to have returned from Yalta in a very optimistic mood regarding the agreements on Poland (Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 579, and Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 515). Yet, this observation is contradicted by FDR’s exchange with his confidant, Admiral William Leahy, where they agreed the deal was worthless (Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 515). Some conclude that the Yalta agreement over Poland was inevitable, given the decisions made by Roosevelt at Teheran (Wandycz, The United States and Poland, 297–99). Moreover, much has been made of Roosevelt’s March 29, 1945, cable to Stalin, just days before his death, where he pleaded, without effect, that the Soviet despot did not carry out their Yalta agreements on Poland (Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 584). Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 119, 279, 516. A March 10, 1945, Gallop Poll reported that 61 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of the Yalta conference; only 9 percent did not.

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15. Rozmarek was accompanied by his secretary, Frank Dziob, PAC vice presidents Frank Januszewski and Ignace Nurkiewicz, Matuszewski, and historian and activist Oskar Halecki. 16. President Rozmarek’s statement to the press in Paris, September 12, 1946, in Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 283–87, and his “Memorandum to the Hon. James F. Byrnes, Secretary of State,” in the Polish American Congress Bulletin, February 1947, 3–11. 17. Rozmarek’s criticisms of UNRRA are detailed in Polish in the pages of an official history of the Polish National Alliance. See Adam Olszewski, Historia Zwiazku Narodowego Polskiego, vol. 6 (Chicago: Alliance Printers and Publishers, 1967), 85–140, and Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 122–24. 18. On the elections in Poland, see Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 131. Mikolajczyk declared his party had won as much as 90 percent of the popular vote. The regime gave 10.3 percent to his PSL. On the amazing falsification of the results, see Ewa Toranska’s interview of Jakub Berman, the top Polish Stalinist figure in Poland at the time, in Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1987), 275–81. 19. George F. Kennan was one of many who thought the speech went too far in its sweep. However, and significantly, in his memoir, he lamented his own failure to even mention Soviet control of Eastern Europe in his celebrated 1947 Foreign Affairs article, which became identified with the U.S. containment policy of the Soviet Union. See George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 333–41, 376–78. 20. Robert D. Ubriaco Jr., “Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Cold War Political Culture, Polish American Politics, the Truman Doctrine, and the Victory Thesis,” The Polish Review 51, nos. 3–4 (2006): 273. 21. Ubriaco, “Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due,” 278; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 683–84, 713. 22. Robert Szymczak, “A Matter of Honor: Polonia and the Congressional Investigation of the Katyn Forest Massacre,” Polish American Studies 41, no. 1 (1984): 25–65. 23. Kennedy’s remarks to the fifth national convention of the Polish American Congress in Chicago on October 1, 1960, are in Jan Wszelaki, ed., John F. Kennedy and Poland (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1964), 89–101; see also Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 142, 315–19, and Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 361–63. In May 1960, Vice President Nixon addressed some 100,000 people at the annual Polish Constitution Day ceremonies in Chicago. 24. Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004); Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Old and New Polonias: Tensions within an Ethnic Community,” Polish American Studies, 38, no. 2 (1981): 55–83. 25. Data on the Polish vote in all presidential elections from 1944 to 1980 is cited in Donald Pienkos, “Polish-American Ethnicity in the Political Life of the United States” in America’s Ethnic Politics, ed. Joseph Roucek and Bernard Eisenberg

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(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 287. In 1952 and 1960, Eisenhower carried all ten states with large Polish American populations. See Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). 26. Carter carried the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Maryland for 128 of the 297 electoral votes he won. Ford won only his home state of Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois for 72 electoral votes. On the impact of Ford’s gaffe, see Thomas De Frank, Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-The-Record Conversations With Gerald R. Ford (New York: Putnam, 2007), 54–55, 61; Robert Novak, Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years of Reporting in Washington (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), 275–77, 292–97; Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 169–71, 355–60. 27. Reagan won nine of the ten most heavily Polish states in 1980, losing only in Maryland to Carter. He won all ten in 1984. George H. W. Bush carried seven of the ten most heavily Polish states in 1988 in winning the Electoral College vote 426–111. Only Massachusetts, the home state of his opponent, New York, and Wisconsin went to the Democratic Party candidate. Polish American voting in the three Reagan-era elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988, are based on unpublished estimates by the author and those of John Kromkowski of the Catholic University of America. See also Donald E. Pienkos, “Polish Americans in Congressional Politics: Assets and Constraints,” The Polish Review 48, no. 2 (2003): 185–94. The Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1968 was a Polish American, Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. In that year’s election, it was Nixon who captured Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio for 90 of his 301 electoral votes in narrowly defeating Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The Polish Democratic vote dropped to 56 percent from 80 percent in 1964. 28. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 417.

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CHAPTER 2

Fighting Moscow from Afar Ukrainian Americans and the Evil Empire

Myron B. Kuropas

Anti-communism among Ukrainian Americans has a long history. It began soon after Ukraine was invaded by the Bolshevik Red Army in 1918. It ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. In the United States, the Ukrainian anti-communist campaign was constant and unremitting. Representing the largest captive nation within the Soviet Union, Ukrainian Americans were also the largest, best organized, and most vociferous of all anti-communist ethnic groups. This ethnic group was closely tied to Ukrainian nationalism, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union but remained alive and well in America. Rise and Fall of the First Ukrainian Republic For centuries prior to World War I, the Ukrainian people suffered under various foreign occupations. Following the collapse of the Czarist Russian Empire in 1917, however, Ukraine became an independent nation-state. On January 22, 1918, the newly established Central Rada (parliament) of the Ukrainian National Republic promulgated its Fourth Universal (manifesto), proclaiming that from this day forward, the newly created republic would be the “independent, free and sovereign state of the Ukrainian people.”

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The Ukrainian National Republic survived until 1920. Three different governments competed for control: a socialist government under Michael Hrushevsky; a monarchist, German-supported government under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky; and a nationalist government under Ataman Simon Petlura. Unable to withstand invasions by Polish armies from the west, Denikin’s white Russian armies from the south, Red Bolshevik Russians from the northwest, and homegrown anarchists from within the ill trained, poorly equipped Ukrainian national army under Simon Petlura collapsed. When the smoke of battle cleared, and the peacemakers at Versailles had completed their deliberations, Ukraine was divided among four nations. Bukovyna was ceded to Romania. Transcarpathian Ukraine (Ruthenia), once ruled by Hungary, went to Czechoslovakia. In 1923, the Council of Ambassadors decided to award Eastern Galicia to Poland. And Eastern Ukraine, geographically the largest region of Ukraine, was reconstituted as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). In 1922, the UkrSSR was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Hoping to win the loyalty of Ukrainian nationalists, Lenin initially allowed the Ukrainian identity to blossom. Books and newspapers were published in the Ukrainian language. Academic studies—from elementary school to the university—were conducted in the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian music and theater, as well as political dialogue, flourished. Under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), Ukraine’s economy improved substantially. This national renaissance came to an end soon after Stalin gained control of the Soviet Union. Russification of the Ukrainian language returned. Academics who pushed Ukrainian themes found themselves in Siberia. Stalin’s collectivization campaign forced Ukrainian farmers to turn over their farms—lock, stock and barrel—to the state. Soviet labor camps were expanded. Any and all resistance to Bolshevik Russian domination was savagely eradicated.1 Collectivization in Ukraine led to the Holodomor (Great Famine) in 1932–33, eventually killing some 7 to 10 million men, women, and children. While Ukrainians were starving, Moscow was selling Ukrainian wheat on the world market.2 Additionally, Stalin’s reign of terror during the 1930s destroyed the Ukrainian Communist Party, and all but obliterated the remaining vestiges of the Ukrainian national identity.3 In comparison to life under the Bolsheviks, about 4 million Ukrainians living in Poland enjoyed a better life, at least initially. Most Ukrainians reconciled themselves to the occupation, believing that accommodation through economic and political action was the only reasonable course of action. They were able to develop a unique infrastructure of cultural,

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economic, and political organizations. Ukrainians served on the Polish National Assembly. There was another stream, a far more militant one, of the Ukrainian response to the Polish presence in Western Ukraine. In its forefront was a group of Ukrainian war veterans who could not bring themselves to accept Polish suzerainty. Organized resistance to Polish rule began in 1921, with the creation of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), which resorted to assassination of Polish officials and other acts of terrorism. In 1929, UVO members helped establish the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In 1930, Poland responded to Ukrainian violence with a pacification campaign that eventually attacked not only UVO and OUN cadres, but Ukrainian cultural institutions as well.4 In the end, pacification only served to radicalize the Ukrainian population and garner more support for OUN. In Romania, the government attempted to Romanianize its Ukrainian population by officially classifying Ukrainians as “Romanians who have forgotten their mother tongue.” With the exception of a democratic interlude that lasted from 1928 to 1934, Romanian policy in Bukovyna was one of repression. Meanwhile, Ukrainian life in Czechoslovakia was amazingly peaceful. Prague’s policy toward the 500,000 Ukrainians living in Ruthenia was one of tolerance and benign neglect. Nevertheless, soon after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Ukrainians in Ruthenia, supported by OUN, established the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine under the presidency of Msgr. August Voloshyn.5 At the end of World War II, Stalin incorporated Eastern Galicia, Bukovyna, and Ruthenia into the UkrSSR. The same tyrannical policies of denationalization, collectivization, mass murder, and terror that had prevailed in Eastern Ukraine were soon foisted upon the newly incorporated Ukrainian regions, too. In the Beginning (1880–1914) Most immigrants from Ukraine to the United States—some 250,000 by 1918—were illiterate men from Transcarpathia and Eastern Galicia who arrived in the early 1880s to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania. Culturally, they either identified with their village or called themselves “Rusyns,” an identity dating back to the tenth century. They were followed to America by Catholic priests from their home regions who instilled a religio-cultural, and later, ethno-national, identity in the immigrants. Priests from Transcarpathia promoted a Rusyn (Ruthenian) identity; priests from Galicia pushed the Ukrainian identity. Later, when

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some Catholic priests converted to Orthodoxy, a Russian identity was introduced as well. By 1914, some 20 percent of Ukraine’s early immigrants called themselves Russians, 40 percent remained Rusyns, and 40 percent came to call themselves Ukrainians. In the forefront of the Ukrainianization campaign in America were the Ukrainian (Byzantine-rite) Catholic Church and two fraternal insurance societies—the Ukrainian National Association (UNA), especially its house organ Svoboda, and the Ukrainian Workingmen’s Association. From the beginning, the mind-set of Ukrainian Americans was anti-Russian. “Russia represents national slavery, hell for peasants and workers, darkness and decay, and the end of our people,” declared Svoboda on December 19, 1908. Hoping to familiarize Americans with the Ukrainian cause, the UNA and UWA cooperated in the publication of Ukraine’s Claim to Freedom, a booklet that declared that “the ultimate goal” of the Ukrainian people “is the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state.” In 1915, the first congress of Ukrainians in America convened and established the Federation of Ukrainians in the U.S. It was an umbrella organization that resolved to aid the homeland “in its struggle for self-determination based upon democratic principles.” As time went on, however, the Federation was split by internal bickering between left and right wing factions. In 1916, the right wing bloc established the Ukrainian Alliance of America.6 The Twenties The first political ideology to emerge among Ukrainian Americans was socialism. A number of local political clubs came together in 1915 to establish the Ukrainian Federation of Socialist Parties (UFSPA). A split soon occurred within the UFSPA between social patriots who favored national renewal, and Bolsheviks who emphasized class warfare and world revolution. The Bolshevik wing eventually bolted and established the Ukrainian Federation of Communist Parties (UFCPA). Ukrainian Bolsheviks helped establish the Communist Party of America (CPA) in Chicago in 1919. Bombings, strikes, riots, and other disturbances followed, leading to arrests and mass deportations of aliens. Alarmed by the “Red Scare,” Congress passed laws in 1921 and 1924, restricting immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. As a result, no more than 20,000 Ukrainian immigrants entered America between 1920 and 1939. Ukrainian Bolsheviks in America, meanwhile, proclaimed that the people of Ukraine were irrevocably united with Russians in the building

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of a democratic paradise for the working class. With funding from the Soviet Union, the UFCPA proved to be an effective political organization. Robitnyk (Toiler), the official Ukrainian-language UFCPA organ, enthusiastically predicted the triumph of worldwide socialism.7 In 1920, Ukrainian Communists published the first Ukrainian-language daily in the United States, Ukrainski Shchodenni Visti (Ukrainian Daily News). This was followed by Molot (Hammer) and Komunistychnyi Svit (Communist World). Their message was simple and powerful that Ukraine was alive, and the working masses in Ukraine had established a Bolshevik Ukraine taking what was rightfully theirs without asking the Allies for permission. In 1924, Ukrainian Communists convened the United Ukrainian “Toilers Congress” and established the United Ukrainian Toilers Organization (UUTO). Labor temples were established and Ukrainian cultural activities—choirs, dance troupes, orchestras, and drama groups—flourished. Classes for illiterates were created as well as youth organizations such as Young Pioneers. In 1932, American Communists launched the International Workers’ Order (IWO), and Ukrainian Communists established local branches of IWO, which eventually came to be called Ukrainska sektsiia mizhnarodnoho ordenu or ORDEN. By 1938, ORDEN had some 15,000 members.7 The political organization that enjoyed the greatest support in the Ukrainian American nationalist camp during the 1920s, and much of the 1930s, was the Sich. Originally established as the Ukrainian Athletic Association, Sich evolved into a paramilitary society that recognized Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, living in Germany, as the legitimate head of the Ukrainian government in exile and the leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement. As the only Ukrainian political movement with tacit support from the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Sich (later renamed the United Hetman Organization, or UHO) was, initially, the Ukrainian nationalist community’s only viable ideological alternative to Ukrainian Communists in America. Sich was fervently anti-communist from the moment of its inception. The Soviets were defined as “a pack of rabid, savage . . . robbers and bandits . . . who pillage and plunder, castigate and burn,” exclaimed Sichovi Visti (Sich News), the Sich periodical.8 Many Ukrainian Americans were convinced that another European war was inevitable. Impressed by the ability of Czechs and Poles to organize military units in the United States, the UHO leadership decided to prepare a similar army to fight for Ukraine during the next world war. Military units were organized among the youth, and “maneuvers” were held as well. In 1930, the United States militia (National Guard), eager to

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bolster its sagging ranks in a postwar and antimilitary era, allowed Ukrainians to form their own military units under the command of American officers. Among the first to enlist were Chicago Sich members, followed by Ukrainians in Cleveland and Detroit. The final step in the development of a Ukrainian fighting force was the creation of a Ukrainian “air corps.” During the 1930s, the UHO obtained three airplanes—two biplanes and a four-passenger, single-wing model. Owning aircraft enabled Sich to establish air corps cadres and aviation schools in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, where the Hetman movement had its largest membership.9 The Thirties Three American Presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, all Republicans—refused to recognize the Soviet Union during the 1920s. This changed with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. At the height of the Holodomor in Ukraine, and only a few months after assuming office, the new president wrote a letter to the Soviet Union’s Chairman of the All-Union Executive Committee Mikhail Kalinin, expressing his desire “to end the present abnormal relationship” between the two countries. Stalin sent his foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, to meet with Roosevelt. The Roosevelt-Litvinov Accord was signed on November 16, 1933. Among other agreements, both governments promised “not to permit the formation or residence on its territory of any organization or group . . . which has as its aim . . . the overthrow . . . or the bringing about by force of a change in the political or social order.” The Soviets never honored the agreement, but for Ukrainian anti-communists in America, the accord had a tremendous impact, especially after the Soviets opened their embassy and stocked it with dozens of NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, i.e., the Soviet Secret Service) officers.10 Commenting on the Accord, The Ukrainian Weekly, an English-language supplement to the UNA organ Svoboda, reported that some 8,000 people had participated in a New York City march protesting Soviet policies in Ukraine and added that while the protest was “not intended to hinder the policies and movements of the United States government . . . nevertheless, we look dubiously upon the value of any benefits which America may obtain from having official relations with a government whose rule is based on force alone.” 11

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The Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU) The political group that enjoyed the greatest growth among Ukrainian American patriots during the 1930s was the Ukrainian Nationalists. Despite a relatively late organizational start, by 1939, Nationalists were the largest Ukrainian political faction within the anti-communist camp and in firm control of the largest Ukrainian fraternal organization, the Ukrainian National Association (UNA). It began in 1929 with the arrival in America of Colonel Evhen Konovalets, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who traveled from community to community spreading the Nationalist gospel. It was during his travels that the idea for an American-based Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU) was born. By 1938, the ODWU organizational network had a total membership in excess of 10,000. Included were seventy ODWU branches, seventy Gold Cross women’s auxiliary organizations, and forty-one Young Ukrainian Nationalist (MUN) branches.12 ODWU began publishing Nationalist, a weekly newspaper, in 1935.13 Responding to those who believed Hitler was interested in helping Ukraine win its independence, Nationalist reminded its readers in 1936 that the last time Germany helped Ukraine, a dictatorship was established under Hetman Skoropadsky. “Ukrainians must not have any illusions as to Hitler’s objective having any connection with Ukraine’s aspirations to sovereignty,” warned the ODWU gazette that same year.14 Like the Ukrainian Americans of UHO, Ukrainian Nationalists in America saw no conflict between love of Ukraine and loyalty to America. “We must remember that no country surpasses America’s achievements or her place of honor in the world,” the Nationalist opined. “Nationalism is love of country and a willingness to sacrifice for her . . . A person brought up in Ukrainian Nationalism will make a 100 percent better American citizen than one who was not taught nationalism at all,” Nationalist explained, “ODWU has an obligation to protect America from subversive elements.”15 Meanwhile, Ukrainian and American Communists were accusing ODWU of being an organization of anti-American fascists. “We have stated many times that we are not fascists nor do we support any kind of dictatorships,” responded Nationalist in 1937. “American nationalism was responsible for the War of Independence, the war of 1812, and for sustaining Abraham Lincoln in America’s loneliest hour,” argued the

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ODWU periodical. “Was it ‘nazism’ or ‘fascism’ that guided Washington, Lincoln, and other American statesmen who made the United States a world power? Or was it—American nationalism?”16 Determined to establish a Nationalist Front against the Bolsheviks, ODWU organized a Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1938, bringing some 5,000 participants to the Hippodrome in New York for a manifestation of mass solidarity. Featured speakers included OUN leaders who had arrived from Germany. At the end of the manifestation, the audience extended their right arms shouting, “Slava Ukrainy, Slava Heroim!” (Glory to Ukraine, glory to our heroes). Nationalist wrote on September 7, “We Nationalists are American citizens; we believe in Americanism and those great traditions which were achieved by constant struggle against unbelievable odds just as our people are now struggling; we are spreading no foreign dogma in the United States; rather we are promoting love for American ideals in constant agitation for the rebirth of the land of our fathers.” Concerned with growing Communist and fellow-traveler accusations that their organization was allied with Hitler, ODWU changed the name of its press organ to Ukraine and began publishing a monthly, The Trident, in the English language.17 The United Ukrainian Organizations of America (UUOA) The need for a nationwide Ukrainian organization that could unite all anti-communist elements in the United States became apparent soon after the gradual decline of both the Federation and the Alliance, earlier umbrella organizations founded by Ukrainian nationalists. In 1922, 130 delegates representing 176 Ukrainian organizations, including the UNA, Sich, the Ukrainian League of American veterans, and two newly established fraternal insurance associations—the Providence Association and the Ukrainian National Aid Association—came together in Philadelphia and established the United Ukrainian Organizations of America (UUOA). During the course of its eighteen-year history, it was involved in humanitarian, cultural, and political activities.18 UUOA chapters organized nationwide demonstrations against Soviet brutality in Ukraine. In November 1933, demonstrations were held throughout the United States around the theme “Save Ukraine from Death by Starvation.” Counterdemonstrations were staged by the Communists, resulting in bloody clashes in Boston, New York, Chicago, Bridgeport, and Detroit. The encounter in Chicago was especially brutal:

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“100 Hurt in W. Side Riot,” read the Chicago Tribune’s banner headline of December 18, 1933. According to the Tribune account, several hundred Communists showered “bricks, clubs, eggs and other missiles from an elevated train platform above the parade route of about 3,000 Ukrainian men, women, and children, and then proceeded to attack the marchers with blackjacks, brass knuckles and lead pipes. The Ukrainians (among whom were a contingent of Sich members with unloaded rifles) fought back with fists, rocks, and rifle butts, sending a number of the attacking party to the hospital.” After the clash, the parade continued to its destination for a mass rally. The UUOA was also instrumental in calling congressional attention to the Holodomor (The Great Famine). On May 28, 1934, Congressman Hamilton Fish, Jr., a Republican from New York, introduced House Resolution 399, urging the Soviet Union to “place no obstacles in the way of American citizens seeking to send aid in the form of money, foodstuffs, and necessities to the famine-stricken regions of Ukraine.”19 A thirty-one page UUOA brochure, Famine in Ukraine, was published later that same year, containing excerpts from American and other Western newspapers as well as full texts of letters from Soviet Foreign Minister M. Litvinov and B. Svirski, counselor of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., branding all stories about the Ukrainian famine “lies.”20 The Soviet Union alerted the U.S. State Department to the military goals of UHO in 1936, complaining that they were in violation of the Roosevelt-Litvinov Accord. The FBI investigated that same year, but found no cause for alarm.21 The Communist defamation campaign, however, continued. A second FBI probe of UHO was initiated in response to an unidentified informant of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, who reported that UHO was pro-German, used military ranks among its cadres, had three airplanes, and performed “Nazi drills.” Once again, the FBI found little to be concerned about.22 The activities of the UHO, ODWU, the UNA, all firmly in the antiSoviet camp, came to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Congressman Martin Dies. An investigation followed. On September 27, 1939, Emil Revyuk, a disgruntled left-leaning assistant editor of Svoboda and president of UUOA, testified before the committee. He alleged that all three organizations were sympathetic to the Nazis and might be plotting the overthrow of the United States.23 At the end of the hearing, Congressman Dies concluded that these were “organizations that have been shown to be nothing in the world but agencies

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of foreign powers . . . they provide an elaborate espionage system in this country.” Outraged by Revyuk’s lies, ODWU leaders waited for their day on Capitol Hill. In preparation for the anticipated hearing, The Trident editors compiled a 132-page affidavit, which rebutted Revyuk’s allegations and documented ODWU’s loyalty to the United States and its principles. The Dies Committee never called ODWU or UNA leaders to testify.24 The Defamation Campaign Through their contacts in Ukraine, Ukrainian-American nationalists knew what life was like in Soviet Ukraine under Stalin. Therefore, they needed to be discredited and pro-Soviet writers obliged. A defamation campaign got under way with the appearance of a book, The Fifth Column Is Here by George Britt. Ukrainians were working in airplane factories and navy yards, Britt explained, but “through its privately fostered ODWU, the German intelligence office now has access to these plants.”25 Publications that joined the defamation campaign were The Hour (edited by Albert E. Kahn, a Soviet agent, and initially financed by the ADL), Friday (edited by Michael Sayers), and PM (financed and edited by Marshall Field III).26 Although they were at loggerheads in the Ukrainian community, The Hour linked the UHO and ODWU as being of one mind regarding Nazism. The two organizations had much in common, observed The Hour—anti-Semitism, fascism, sabotage, terrorism, and anti-Sovietism.27 “Ukrainians Help Nazi Plots Here—Secret Revolutionary Society Tied in with Hitler’s War on U.S.A,” wrote PM. Alleging direct ties with Berlin and the drilling of “uniformed storm troopers,” the article concluded that ODWU was “pro-fascist and pro-Nazi.”28 PM also described ODWU as associated with a “subsidiary organ of a body connected with the Intelligence Department of the War Office in Berlin, Germany.”29 On September 29, 1940, PM reported on “a secret camp of Ukrainian terrorists, stooges of Hitler.” The Hour alleged that Svoboda, the UNA organ, published directions on “how to make bombs” as part of a broad plan to train subversives.30 When a Cleveland to Pittsburgh train was derailed in March 1941, The Hour ran a story under the headline “Ukrainian Fascists and Pennsylvania Train Wreck,” demanding “an immediate investigation by the federal authorities of the Ukrainian terrorist groups in an about Pittsburgh.”31 Soon after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, The Hour went after the ODWU publication Ukraine, which “continues to

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circulate throughout the country . . . agitating its readers to take steps to further the aims of the Nazi cause.”32 The ODWU press printed all of the lies, demanding retractions and apologies from The Hour, but the Communist front paper never responded. Fortunately, the FBI was not fooled. On October 1, 1941, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed Lawrence M. C. Smith, chief of the Department of Justice’s Special Defense Unit, that there was reason to believe that The Hour “is definitely affiliated with the Communist Party although this fact is carefully concealed from the public.” Furthermore, wrote Hoover, “the campaign carried on by The Hour against Ukrainian organizations seems vastly exaggerated.”33 Still, the defamation campaign against Ukrainian nationalists was highly effective. Even Time magazine piled on, claiming that “Ukrainians were trained in espionage and sabotage” by the Nazis.34 A new low was reached in 1942 with the publication of Sabotage! The Secret War against America, written by two Communists—Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, a Soviet agent with the code name “Borets.” Coming a few months after the United States declared war on Nazi Germany, the book was a bombshell. Kahn and Sayers repeated all of the old Dies Committee mendacity and added a few flourishes of their own. OUN leader Evhen Konovalets, assassinated in 1939 by a Soviet agent,35 was depicted as “a tall blondish man with gray watery eyes, a military bearing, and a passion for jewels. He had earned himself considerable notoriety in Ukraine as a rapist and a killer.”36 The editor of Svoboda was identified as a Nazi agent with “sharp, birdlike features, a narrow forehead and a tight mouth that habitually twists in a caustic smile.”37 Walter Winchell, America’s most popular news commentator, publicized this book over the radio, calling it “one of the most exciting and important books of the war.”38 The FBI, meanwhile, still had not arrested one Ukrainian American. On September 5, 1942, The Hour tried again, accusing ODWU of stealing military secrets, disrupting union meetings, and making bombs. Even Reader’s Digest fell for the hoax condensing Sabotage! in its October, 1942 issue. The FBI investigated UHO and ODWU extensively. In a memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1943, Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark concluded that based on the evidence, prosecution of any UHO member is “not warranted” and that “no further specific investigation is at this time requested.”39 The exoneration was a year late for UHO. On March 7, 1942, terrified by Communist claims that after the war, the United States would extradite them to the UkrSSR for trial, the UHO membership voted to dissolve the organization.

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The FBI completed its investigation of ODWU that same year40 and of the UNA a year later.41 During the Soviet-orchestrated defamation campaign, some 70 percent of ODWU’s members resigned. The UNA suffered less, but ODWU members holding posts with the UNA supreme assembly were asked to resign by the UNA president. Nine did so, but two refused. Overall, the Soviets had scored a significant victory. The Forties The eighth UUOA convention was held on December 8, 1939, with delegates representing some two hundred local organizations in attendance. President Revyuk refused to answer questions about his Dies Committee testimony and threatened a law suit against anyone who impugned his character. He was not nominated to any post on the new national board. Aware that the UUOA had been permanently damaged by the testimony of its president, delegates elected an interim board and instructed it to call a Ukrainian American congress to form a new, more broadly based Ukrainian-American anti-communist political coalition. On May 24, 1940, 805 delegates from 168 different communities came together in Washington, D.C., to establish the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). Resolutions were passed appealing for American support of Ukrainian aspirations and denouncing Soviet and Nazi aggression in Europe. A few months later, John C. Metcalf, a former Dies Committee investigator, called the FBI to inform them that the UCCA was “a Nazi outfit.”42 ODWU, meanwhile, soldiered on. Its president, Alexander Granovsky, a professor at the University of Minnesota, sent an appeal directly to the White House in May, boldly urging the U.S. president to champion the cause of Ukrainian liberation, assist Americans of Ukrainian descent in their promotion of Ukrainian independence, bring the Ukrainian question to the attention of the free world’s leaders, and provide assistance to Ukrainians in Europe.43 The defamation campaign, however, continued unabated. The editor of The Ukrainian Weekly responded on October 3, 1942, “Our fair-minded fellow Americans may not be aware of it, but we of Ukrainian extraction are being persecuted . . . Those who . . . would break up our unity and strength, our institutions and our common ideals, are doing their utmost to blacken our good name and bring disrepute upon us.” The second UCCA convention was held on January 22, 1944. Reviewing the deleterious results of the Soviet-inspired defamation campaign

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raging around Ukrainian Americans, Stephen Shumeyko, newly elected UCCA president, declared, “Simply because we want our kinsman in their native land to enjoy after this war the freedom and democracy we are so fortunate in having here as Americans, we have become the object of ruthless vilification by those who regard with hatred the idea of a free and democratic Ukraine. Chief among them . . . are the Communists in this country.”44 Due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the infiltration of Soviet agents in his administration, it is not surprising that President Roosevelt had little sympathy for the Ukrainian cause.45 This pro-Soviet mind-set changed dramatically once Harry S. Truman succeeded FDR. The Displaced Persons Act On February 11, 1945, the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union signed a repatriation agreement at Yalta, guaranteeing the return of all Displaced Persons, by force, if necessary. The agreement defined Soviet nationals as all those refugees who had lived within the borders of the Soviet Union prior to September 1, 1939. At the end of September 1945, the Western Allies and the Soviets claimed to have some 14 million Displaced Persons under their care. Approximately 7.2 million were Soviet citizens. They included Ostarbeiter (forced laborers from Eastern Europe), POWs, military collaborators, and the so-called non-returnees or Displaced Persons who had no wish to return to the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were in Germany voluntarily, the result of an often agonizing decision to leave everything behind and to move out with the retreating Germans rather than remain in Ukraine and wait for the return of Soviet rule. The Soviets argued that that only those who collaborated with the Nazis were unwilling to come back. This view was shared by the New York Times, which declared that the refugees were “collaborationists who have no claim on the sympathies of Russia’s western allies.” The UNRAA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) director in the American occupation zone of Germany also argued that “anti-repatriation groups are not the product of democratic processes but are rather the remnants of pre-war regimes that reflect Nazi and fascist concepts.”46 So initially, the British, the French, and the Americans went along with Soviet demands for Displaced Person repatriation, even if forced. By November 1945, Western commands had repatriated over 2 million people to the Soviet Union. Almost all of them ended their lives in the

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Soviet Gulag. Learning of the tragedy from refugee relatives and from Ukrainian American servicemen stationed in Europe, UCCA published a thirty-one page brochure titled Plight of Ukrainian D.P.s in 1945, which emphasized that Ukrainians refused to return because “they well know that on account of their patriotic Ukrainian sentiments and their antitotalitarian and pro-free Ukraine actions, they face imprisonment, banishment to Siberian wastelands, or execution.” Responding to an article titled “Pro-Nazi Ukrainians Seek Funds to Bring Storm Troopers to the U.S.,” which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, the UCCA president slammed the allegations as “unmitigated lies.” As for collaborators, he wrote, “in all probability, among the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian D.P.s there may be persons who did collaborate with the Nazis . . . Naturally, it is not our intention to help in any way such persons . . . the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, whom the communists always brand as pro-Fascists or pro-Nazis, were either murdered by the Gestapo or held and mistreated in Nazi concentration camps throughout the war.” This letter was never printed in the New York Herald Tribune. Forced repatriation, known as Operation Keelhaul, was eventually banned by General Dwight Eisenhower. In the U.S. Congress, meanwhile, a bill permitting a total of 205,000 refugees to immigrate to the United States won overwhelming approval, and on June 25, 1948, President Truman signed it into law. The Displaced Persons Act permitted some 100,000 new Ukrainian immigrants to emigrate to the United States. Almost all of them were anti-communist, and they had been investigated for Nazi sympathies in Europe by nine separate U.S. agencies.47 The Fifties and the Sixties In Europe, meanwhile, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had split into two factions. The original, older OUN members remained loyal to Andrew Melnyk, the elected successor to Evhen Konovalets. They came to be identified as OUN(M). Another, much younger contingent was organized by Stephen Bandera. They came to be identified as OUN(B). Members of both factions came to the United States, bringing with them the conflicts, rivalries, and hatreds that had emerged in Europe. In America, OUN(M) members gravitated to ODWU, a move that led to an initial ODWU rebirth. OUN(B) members established the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms in Ukraine as well as a women’s auxiliary and the American Ukrainian Youth Association of

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America (SUMA). Organizations associated with OUN(B) came to call themselves the “Liberation Front.” Both Nationalist organizations remained staunchly anti-communist. In later years, they each attempted to take over various older organizations, primarily the UNA and UCCA. Clashes within ODWU between old immigrants and new immigrants were never resolved and the organization’s influence waned. Having started from scratch, the Liberation Front blossomed. OUN(B) had created the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) in 1943 near Zhytomyr in Ukraine. It served as a coordinating center for fourteen anti-communist émigré political organizations. Headquartered in Munich since 1946, ABN was headed by Yaroslav Stetsko from its inception to 1986.48 In an effort to counter the disinformation being promoted by leftwing professors at American universities, the UNA engaged the services of history professor Clarence Manning of Columbia University, who wrote The Story of Ukraine (1951) and Ukraine Under the Soviets (1953). The Ukrainian Weekly also never ceased to extensively report on events in Ukraine. The UNA gazette wrote that “despite the ruthless enforcement of Russian totalitarian communism upon the Ukrainian people, Russian master-race minded rulers still experience considerable trouble . . . All in all, the Ukrainian people behind the iron curtain are patiently awaiting a new day. They are determined in their struggle against Moscow, secure in their belief that the freedom they fight for shall come.”49 Ukrainian Americans also made a special effort to convince various American government officials to proclaim their support of Ukrainian independence. A highlight of the Ukrainian struggle for recognition during the 1950s was the passage of the Captive Nations Proclamation by the U.S. Congress on July 17, 1959, mandating that American presidents annually designate the third week in July as “Captive Nations Week.” The original language, developed in large measure by UCCA president Dr. Lev Dobriansky, reminded Americans that the nations submerged by Russian imperialism “look to the United States as the citadel of human freedom.”50 A notable political victory for Ukrainians in America was the erection of a statue of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s poet laureate and freedom crusader, in Washington, D.C. on June 27, 1964. It took years of lobbying Congress by the UCCA and the UNA. Some 100,000 Ukrainians were present for the unveiling by Dwight D. Eisenhower.51 Another significant event in Ukrainian-American life was the establishment of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (WCFU) in November 1967. Some 1,300 delegates from seventeen countries attended the weeklong sessions

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in New York City. A Freedom Rally was held in Madison Square Garden with some 10,000 in attendance.52 Then, in 1967, Dr. Lev Dobriansky published a book, The Vulnerable Russians, in which he argued that the Soviet Union did not exist. Instead, there was only Russia and her prison house of nations.53 The Soviets publicly condemned the book and its author. The Seventies and the Eighties By 1974, the Ukrainian American community was heavily involved in a campaign, initiated by the youth, to free Ukrainian dissidents from Soviet prisons.60 On May 17–19, 1977, the Ukrainian National Association sponsored a Human Rights Day in Washington, D.C. More than 150 UNA members from as far away as Phoenix, Arizona, visited their senators and congressmen, inviting them to a reception hosted by Senator Bob Dole and the UNA in the Capitol. Over fifty U.S. legislators, including thirty-one senators, attended the reception, promising to write letters to Secretary Leonid Brezhnev on behalf of imprisoned Ukrainian Helsinki monitors. Realizing how important a continued Ukrainian presence in Washington was, the UCCA opened a Ukrainian National Information Service (UNIS) in the nation’s capital on November 18, 1977.54 It was during the 1970s that Ukrainians finally received some recognition from the GOP. While campaigning for office, Richard Nixon promised to formally recognize the work of all ethnics in the party. The Republican National Committee hired a full time activist to head the Republican Heritage Groups Council, a multiethnic coalition, which expanded the ethnic network of Eastern Europeans in the party. Ukrainians established the Ukrainian National Republican Federation, which eventually included twenty state affiliates. By 1976, a Ukrainian was serving as a Special Assistant to President Gerald Ford in the White House (see, for example, the Figure 2.1), another Ukrainian was a legislative assistant to Senator Bob Taft, and a third worked for Senator James Buckley. Among the highlights of Ukrainian activity was the publication in 1986 of The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine in Ukraine by renowned Sovietologist Robert Conquest. His research was subsidized by the UNA. The UNA was also involved, along with Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU), in having the U.S. Congress appropriate money for the creation of The Ukraine Famine Commission. The Commission published a 524-page report to Congress

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Figure 2.1. President Ford meeting with Ukrainian Catholic hierarchs in the Oval Office. Left to Right: Bishop Ivan Prashko, Bishop Basil Losten, Cardinal Josef Slipyj, President Ford, Brent Scowcroft, Myron B. Kuropas. Source: White House Photograph. Courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

in 1984, which concluded that “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–1933.”55 Despite great progress on the American political stage, Ukrainian Americans suffered some reversals internally. Trouble within the UCCA had been brewing for years between the Liberation Front and all other member organizations. It came to a head at the 1980 UCCA convention when the Liberation Front mobilized what appeared to be a clear majority of delegates and pushed through its own slate of officers, totally ignoring the UCCA constitution, which provided for minority representation. The UNA and other disaffected delegates walked out. When efforts to heal the division failed, the UNA called for a convention of disenchanted organizations. On October 1, 1983, 122 delegates representing thirty national organizations convened its constitutional conference in Washington, D.C, and formally established the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council (UACC). In December, after much debate, UACC delegates were formally recognized at the Fourth World Congress of Free Ukrainians. A concerted effort by the Liberation Front to take over the UNA that same year failed.56

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Adding to the woes of the UNA and the Ukrainian American community was the renewal of what many believed was another Soviet-inspired defamation campaign. When the U.S. Congress established the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) within the Department of Justice to search for Nazi war criminals in America, most Ukrainians were supportive. When OSI accused a number of Ukrainian Americans of war crimes using Soviet supplied evidence, the community began to question OSI procedures. The Ukrainian Weekly editorialized, “In their zeal to blow the whistle on suspected Nazi collaborators, the federal task force made the unpardonable and dimwitted blunder of striking a deal with Soviets, whereby Moscow would supply evidence to assist the unit in its investigations. Needless to say, the Soviets were more than willing to ‘lend a hand.’”57 The Ukrainian community went into a full-press mode against the use of Soviet evidence in American courts. The UNA established the UNA Ukrainian Heritage Defense Committee in 1985, appropriating $100,000 for its work. A UNA information office was opened in Washington, D.C., in 1988. The Ukrainian American Bar Association invited the OSI director Allan Ryan to attend their convention. Questioned about Soviet evidence, the OSI chief dismissed Ukrainian anxieties as “not his concern.” The Ukrainian Weekly responded on November 22, 1981, “Well, it certainly is our concern. The political dimension must be considered in determining Soviet motives for supplying Soviet evidence against Ukrainians, and in questioning the veracity and admissibility of that evidence.” On June 5, 1983, the Ukrainian Weekly elaborated further: “It is extremely difficult to guarantee that American judicial practices are upheld when Soviet witnesses are subpoenaed by the KGB and give their deposition testimony in the presence of Soviet procurators, who often brusquely cut off as irrelevant questions about the witness’s background, or prior dealings with Soviet government officials . . . Moreover, because the Soviet Union is a repressive and closed society, defense lawyers cannot determine the credibility of a witness.” A number of subsequent publications by various individuals only served to heighten community’s suspicions. In his book, Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, Allan Ryan wrote, “The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was a brazenly discriminatory piece of legislation, written to exclude as many concentration camp survivors as possible and include as many Baltic, Ukrainian and ethnic German Volksdeutsche as it could away with . . . Had Congress tried to design a law that would extend the Statue of Liberty’s hand to the followers and practitioners of

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Nazism, it could not have done much better than this without coming right out and saying so.” Ryan mentioned that he had received his list of Ukrainian “war criminals” from one “Wasyk Yachenko” (his real name was changed “to protect his privacy”). In reality, it was Michael Hanusiak, a well-known, lifelong Ukrainian American Stalinist who often traveled to the Soviet Union. Ryan devoted an entire chapter to Ivan Demjanjuk, emphasizing that there was overwhelming evidence that John Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka.58 Led by AHRU, the Ukrainian community raised over $1 million for his defense.59 Other slanderous books and articles followed. In 1985, Charles Higham wrote American Swastika: The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst from 1933 to the Present Day. Citing Albert Kahn’s The Hour as a primary source, Higham identified the UNA publication Svoboda as “the official fascist newspaper” and many UNA members as “extremists.”60 Ukrainian involvement with the GOP also came under attack in a publication titled Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party by Russ Bellant. Citing Alfred E. Kahn and Sabotage as a significant source, Bellant suggested that people associated with OUN(B) were Nazis, as were certain members of UCCA. An entire section was devoted to the ABN and the various ethnic organizations associated with it. Although there was no evidence confirming any of the allegations, the Republican National Committee quickly disbanded the Heritage Groups Committee.61 There was more. A book titled Inside the League described the ideology of Ukrainian nationalists as little more than “fanatical racism against ethnic Poles and Russians and virulent hatred of Jews.”62 In Blowback, Christopher Simpson labeled the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) as “a neo-Nazi émigré coalition.”63 Even as late as 1991, as the Soviet Union was imploding, a publication titled Alliance for Murder: The NaziUkrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocide argued that “in many ways, Ukrainian nationalist murderers surpassed their Nazi partners in perpetrating atrocities against innocent people.”64 The Ukrainian KGB was also churning out English-language screeds, such as M. Ternovsky’s Imprisoned by the Past, which identified Ukrainian nationalists as enemies of international peace;65 The SS Werewolves, which described Ukrainian nationalists as “a treacherous band of spies, saboteurs, and criminal terrorists”;66 while Enemies of Peace and Democracy condemned President Ronald Reagan for meeting with Ukrainian American leaders described as “former Nazi lackeys.”67

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Conclusion Contrary to the melting-pot theory of ethnic assimilation, immigrants from Ukraine did not disappear into the American mainstream. On the contrary, they discovered and nurtured their unique identity and, in the process, they created a patriotic ethno-national community that was indisputably anti-communist. Three generations of American-born Ukrainians were raised by their parents, the church, and various cultural and educational institutions to believe that it was their almost sacred obligation to speak Ukrainian, to preserve their ethnic heritage, and to combat Communism. Doing this, they were taught, was good for the United States as well as for Ukraine. Being vigorously anti-communist during various periods in American history was a dicey affair, especially for East European ethnics often accused of undue bias. Beginning with President Roosevelt and concluding with President Carter, the underlying American approach to the Soviet Union was twofold: containment and accommodation through coexistence and detente. The Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc elicited a kind of self-defeating angst within the State Department during the 1970s, especially while Henry Kissinger served as a Secretary of State and Brent Scowcroft was National Security Advisor. The goal was to maintain the status quo in Eastern Europe in keeping with a doctrine developed by Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Kissinger’s protégé, according to which Eastern Europe would remain under Soviet influence for the foreseeable future.68 It was finally President Reagan who called the Soviet Union what it truly was—“an evil empire”—and adopted a foreign policy of rollback that eventually led to the collapse of the Bolshevik empire. To the Soviets, groups such as Ukrainian Nationalists were a threat. Ethnic anti-communists in the United States knew the truth about the Soviet regime and were determined to expose the disinformation and deceit peddled by the Soviets and fellow travelers in the West. At the time, Soviet intelligence services were nothing, if not thorough. The NKVD (Soviet secret service), the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), and the KGB (NKVD’s successor) recruited the best and brightest talents in the Soviet Union and left no stone unturned. The Soviets also had their own disciplined network of agents within the U.S. government,69 and benefited from the naiveté of those Americans who seemed prepared to believe the best about the Soviets and the worse about Soviet detractors. Fortunately for Ukrainians and the world, it all turned out surprisingly well.

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Notes 1. For a complete history of the first Ukrainian National Republic see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, Second Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 339–79. See also Myron B. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations, 1884–1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 73–161. 2. See Robert Conquest, Harvest of Despair: Soviet Collectivization and the TerrorFamine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 3. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 177–78, 227–34. See also Subtelny, Ukraine, 380–424. 4. Hugh Seton Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 335. 5. Subtelny, Ukraine, 425–52; Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 231–42. 6. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 73–161. 7. Ibid., 162–200. 8. Sichovi Visti, May 16, 1921. 9. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 209–30. 10. Ibid., 186. 11. Ukrainian Weekly, November 23, 1933. 12. Volodymyr Riznyk, “Pochatky ODWU u Rozbudovi ii Merezhie: Nashi Uspikky I Trudnoschi,” Samostina Ukraina (October/November 1968), 6–7. 13. Volodymyr Dushnyck, “Do Istorii Ukrains’koi Natsionalistychnoi Prsy v Amerytsti,” Samostina Ukraina, October/November (1968), 3. 14. Nationalist, January 1, 1936. 15. Nationalist, November 15, 1936. See also Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 267. 16. Nationalist, October 1, 1937. 17. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 248–49. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 250–51. 20. Famine in Ukraine (New York: United Ukrainian Organizations of the United States, 1934). 21. FBI Memo, April 10, 1936, File #61–9183–3 UHO, Section I, Washington, DC. Copies in possession of the author. 22. FBI Memo, August 2, 1940, File #61–9183–8, UHO, Section I, Washington, DC. Copies in possession of the author. See also FBI Memo, June 13, 1940, File #9183–6X, UHO, Section I, Washington, DC. Copies in possession of the author. 23. House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 5250–309. 24. For a comprehensive review of FBI probes of UHO and the Dies Committee investigation, see Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 220–25, 275–84. 25. Cited in the summarized translation of a pamphlet distributed at the XXth UNA Convention (FBI Files, UNA, Section II; also in FBI files, ODWU, Section VI).

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26. Albert Eugene Khan was identified to the FBI as a Communist Party member by confessed Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley, who said that one of his services to the Soviets was “to collect information about anti-Soviet Ukrainians in the United States.” See FBI files, Elizabeth Bentley Deposition, November 30, 1945, 65–14603. Kahn had a long and distinguished career working for the NKVD and, later, the KGB. On this, see Herbert Rommerstein and Eric Briendel, Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Chicago: Regnery, 2001), 418–23. 27. Cited in FBI Memo to Mr. Clegg from J. F. Pryor, August 23, 1940, UHO, Section I. 28. Cited in Ukraine, September 13, 1940. 29. Cited in Ukraine, October 15, 1940. 30. The Hour, February 8, 1941. 31. The Hour, April 15, 1941. 32. The Hour, November 1, 1941. 33. FBI Memo for Mr. Lawrence M. C. Smith, Chief Special Defense Unit from John Edgar Hoover, October 1, 1941, UHO, Section II. 34. Time, June 30, 1941. 35. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1994), 23–26. Pavel Sudoplatov killed Konovalets at the personal request of Stalin. 36. Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, Sabotage! The Secret War Against America (New York: Harper, 1942), 85. 37. Ibid., 93–94. 38. See the cover of the 1944 reprint of Sabotage! 39. Department of Justice, Memo to the Director of the FBI, November 9, 1943, File #61–9183–95, UHO, Section IV. 40. FBI Memo, November 24, 1943, File #61–10497–71. 41. FBI Memo, May 22, 1944, UNA, Section VI. 42. FBI Memo to E. A. Tamm from K. R. McIntire, September 9, 1940, File #102– 8-X5, ODWU, Section I. 43. Ukraine, May 24, 1940. 44. Stephen Shumeyko, The Story of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (New York: Ukrainian Congress Committee, 1951), 18–19. 45. Rommerstein and Breindel, Venona Secrets, 210–20; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 116–72. 46. The New York Times, January 24, 1945. See also “UNRAA’s Chief of Displaced Persons Urges Repatriation,” news release, March 24, 1947, John Panchuk Papers, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 47. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 390–405. 48. See Leonid Poltava, “Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine,” in Ukrainian Heritage in America, ed. W. Dushnyck and N. L. Chirovsky (New York: Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, 1991), 469–75.

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

65

See also Myron B. Kuropas, Ukrainian American Citadel: The First One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1996), 380–82; Stephen Kuropas interview by author, February 14, 1993. For information about ABN, see V. Markus, “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations,” The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1985), 79. Ukrainian Weekly, January 22, 1951. See proclamation text in Kuropas, Ukrainian American Citadel, 437–39. Ibid., 441–55. Ibid., 475–78. Lev E. Dobriansky, The Vulnerable Russians (New York: Pageant, 1967). Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel, 524–30. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Report to Congress: Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932–1933 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988), vii. Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel, 549–58, 564–67. Ukrainian Weekly, February 15, 1981. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 16. On the Demjanjuk’s case, see, for example, Yoram Sheftel, Defending Ivan the Terrible: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996). Charles Higham, American Swastika: The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst from 1933 to the Present Day (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 118. Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (Boston: South End Press, 1988). Scott Anderson and Jon Lewis Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Meade Company, 1986), 22, 62, 284. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), 174–75, 269. B. F. Sabrin, ed., Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Partnership in Genocide (New York: Sarpedon, 1991), 3–13. M. Ternovsky, Imprisoned by the Past (Kiev: Ukraina Society, 1980). V. Styrkul, The SS Werewolves (Lviv: Kamenyar, 1982). Olexiy Kartunov, Enemies of Peace and Democracy (Uzhorod: Karpaty, 1985). In 1976 and 1977, the author served in the White House Office of Public Liaison as special assistant for ethnic affairs to President Gerald R. Ford, often representing the president at various ethnic functions. Whenever speaking to groups from Eastern Europe, the author was instructed not to mention the Soviets in an offensive way. He was even handed a lexicon of politically correct terms. For example, he could mention “Soviet hegemony,” but never “Soviet repression.” The same held true for Soviet-bloc nations. When Croatian Americans wished to

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present Betty Ford with a hand-embroidered costume sewn to her specifications, there was a concern that Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia might be offended. There was even a question if Croatians (all American citizens) should be allowed into the White House. It was a struggle to get Hungarian Freedom Fighters to meet with President Ford as well as the cardinal of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Josef Slipyj, who had spent seventeen years in the Soviet Gulag. When Brent Scowcroft returned to the White House during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, the author believes that it was Scowcroft, favoring the status quo, who convinced President Bush to support Moscow over Kyiv when the president addressed the Soviet Ukrainian parliament on the eve of Ukraine’s declaration of independence. “Americans will not support those who seek independence from a far-off tyranny with a local despotism,” declared Bush. “They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred.” First called the “Chicken Kiev” speech by William Safire of the New York Times, the sobriquet stuck. 69. For an overview of the impact of Soviet spies in the U.S. government, see Jerrold Schechter and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002).

CHAPTER 3

The American Armenians’ Cold War The Divided Response to Soviet Armenia

Benjamin F. Alexander

The May 22, 1952, issue of HAIRENIK WEEKLY, the official English-language organ of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or Tashnag Party, reported that one John Arzoomian, age thirteen, had attempted to run away from his family’s Bronx home. He was no ordinary runaway, however: he aspired to “join the Army” and help liberate his ancestral homeland, Armenia, from Soviet rule.1 The lad was of course rushing things a bit—even by Tashnag party standards—but assuming that his household regularly possessed copies of the paper, he had apparently learned his lessons well. That paper, in concert with party ideology, most certainly wanted its readers to share the sorrow of an occupied homeland and the sense of struggle for its liberation—precisely what young Arzoomian would not have been reading if his family subscribed to the competing partisan organ, the Mirror-Spectator of the Armenian Democratic Liberal, or Ramgavar, Party. From 1920 to 1991, within the borders of the Soviet Union, there existed an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and long before there was a cold war to speak of, the Armenian immigrant population in the United States had to grapple with the fact that their ancestral homeland lay under

The author wishes to thank Aram Arkun for giving the manuscript a read.

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Communist rule. But they did not agree on how to grapple with it. On the contrary, the key feature of Armenian ethnic politics in the United States was a bitter rift between two partisan factions, and key among the issues was Armenian-American people’s appropriate attitude toward, and relationship with, the Soviet state. To the Tashnag party, which had presided over Armenia’s brief taste of independence during, and just after, the World War I years, Soviet rule represented enemy occupation. Parties of the anti-Tashnag coalition, in sharp contrast, accommodated themselves to the situation and viewed the status of Armenia in terms of a more benign custodial arrangement. The cold war years saw a crystallization of this partisan animosity and certainly influenced the discourse with which the internal battle was fought. Thus, to understand the place of the Armenian Americans in the annals of ethnic anti-communism in the United States, one must examine the intense partisan feud between the Tashnag Party and the anti-Tashnag coalition and the contested memories of the brief period just after the 1915 Turkish genocide,2 when the eastern portion of historic Armenia existed as an independent republic dominated by the Tashnag Party. The Thousand-Day Republic and Its Legacy On the eve of the 1915 Turkish genocide, the United States already had a settled and upwardly mobile, though small, Armenian immigrant community. The sense of imminent danger in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I caused numbers to increase. The influx of refugees from war and genocide continued into the 1920s, though sharply stanched by the 1924 immigration restriction act. The 1920 census showed 37,647 Armenian-speaking foreign-born persons in the United States, and 52,840 Armenian-speaking persons, combining both American- and foreign-born. During the span from 1920–1924, the figure of Armenian immigrants entering the country is calculated at 20,559. Thus, the Armenian population in the United States by the mid-1920s can be estimated as approaching or exceeding 80,000, including the indeterminate number of non-Armenian-speaking descendants of immigrants.3 While Armenians before and after the genocide-driven influx were not sufficiently numerous to dominate whole neighborhoods, with the exception of the community in rural Fresno, California, they did make themselves a presence in certain municipalities including Union City, New Jersey; Worcester and Watertown, Massachusetts; Troy, New York; New Britain, Connecticut; Detroit; and New York City. An Armenian community tended to have an

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Apostolic church, a smaller though not insubstantial Protestant church, privately owned ethnic coffeehouses, and local clubhouses of their oldworld-founded political parties, including the Tashnag, Constitutional Ramgavar, Hunchak, and Reformed Hunchak parties. A series of mergers would bring the Ramgavar or Democratic Liberal Party to the fore in the 1920s as the leading non-Tashnag political force. Significantly, the parties provided the leading newspapers of the community.4 The Republic of Armenia, coming into existence at the end of May 1918 and collapsing in November 1920, epitomized free and independent Armenia to some, but not all, Armenians of the global diaspora. The Tashnag Party dominated its governance, and members and supporters of the Tashnag Party worldwide identified with it. However, Armenians of the increasingly united non-Tashnag coalition, representing several political parties and the leadership of the Apostolic and Evangelical churches and the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), saw the future of Armenia more in the work of a delegation which the Apostolic Catholicos had dispatched to Paris in 1912, headed by the wealthy Egyptian Armenian Boghos Nubar Pasha. While both factions saw themselves as representing all Armenians, the Tashnag institutions were more closely identified with eastern Armenia or the territory of the republic and the non-Tashnag institutions associated more with western Armenia or the territory under Turkish rule. The competing partisan presses reflected this split. Hairenik, the official organ of the Tashnag Party, consistently touted the legitimacy and the achievements of the republic. Azk, published by the Constitutional Ramgavar party, as well as several other non-Tashnag papers, criticized the actions of the Tashnags and wrote more of an imagined future Armenian state than the tangible present one. Even as Armenians suffered the shellshock of the 1915 genocide under the Ottoman Empire and the constant threat of more massacres at the hands of Turks, the opposing factions accumulated a trove of contested memories about each other’s actions. For example, a truce at Batum in May of 1918, just before the republic was declared, represented a necessary military decision for Tashnags and an illegitimate surrender of Armenian-inhabited lands to the Turks for the anti-Tashnag parties. An election in the early months of 1919 in the Armenian-American communities for four delegates to a diasporan congress in Paris provided another contested memory, with charges of fraud flying. Beneath it all was the naked fact that the two broad factions represented two different visions of Armenia. The Tashnags’ vision centered on the Tashnag-dominated republic, while

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the non-Tashnags’ vision centered on the negotiations of Boghos Nubar Pasha for a vaguely defined future political entity.5 During the World War I era, Armenians managed to keep their schism in the family. Editorial pages of the Armenian-language press would ring with partisan vituperation, but when addressing political notables in Paris and Washington, Armenian spokespersons generally spoke in concert. The Tashnags and the anti-Tashnags agreed that they wanted the territory of Armenia expanded at the expense of Turkey to include historically Armenian provinces, and that they wanted the help of the world’s powers in building up Armenia as a militarily viable state. Delegates in Paris heard speeches by both Nubar and the delegate from the republic, the writer and warrior Avedis Aharonian, but they merged their originally differing claims and appeared to represent complementary portions of the worldwide Armenian population rather than conflicting partisan factions. That following fall, a mix of Armenian spokesmen at Senate subcommittee hearings on the grim situation in Armenia, and possible American responses, did likewise.6 The Armenian cause garnered great solicitude from statesmen around the world and from much of the American population. In the end, however, this did not translate into a willingness on the parts of Europeans or Americans to put financial and military resources into Armenia’s defense. In one of the last cruel ironies of the era, in the fall of 1920, Woodrow Wilson, by request of the European leaders, put forth a map of the rightful boundaries of Armenia, which granted a considerable portion of the six historically Armenian provinces of Turkey that Armenian spokesmen claimed. The Ottoman government had agreed in the Treaty of Sèvres to accept whatever boundaries Wilson would draw. However, Turkey itself was going through internal tensions, and even as the ink was drying on Wilson’s map, a new regime was rising to power. Turkish armies closed in on Armenia at the same time as the Soviet Red Army did likewise from the other direction. By the end of November 1920, Tashnag leaders had surrendered the reduced Armenia to the Soviets. After a February uprising, the Soviet Armenian Republic took hold. Not only had Armenia not gained the territory from Turkey prescribed by Wilson’s map, but the Soviet government actually ceded two historically Armenian provinces on the Caucasus—Kars and Ardahan—to the Turks.7 After the fall of the republic and the creation of the Armenian Soviet Republic in late 1920 and the start of 1921, conflicting partisan positions grew even more stark and irreconcilable. The Tashnag Party in America swore a stance of opposition to Soviet Armenia. Reuben Darbinian, justice

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minister of the Thousand-day Republic, became editor-in-chief of the Boston-based Hairenik press, and other political and military notables served as either contributing writers or other party functionaries. The other parties, meanwhile, accommodated themselves to Soviet rule. Notable among them was the now-reconstituted American Democratic Liberal, or Ramgavar party, which from 1922 onward published the daily paper Baikar (“struggle”). On a constant basis, readers of the competing presses read contrasting opinions of the Soviet regime, with Hairenik functioning as its prosecutor and Baikar as its apologist (though from a pragmatic, not a Communist, standpoint). Baikar ran celebratory articles of the building up of the nation’s productive economy. When the massive confiscation of property from the Holy See at Echmiadzin got underway, in 1924, Baikar editorialized that ecclesiastics did not need to live like princes, and that the resources of the church lands might be better used to benefit “the people.” Hairenik, predictably, condemned the moves and chastised the Ramgavars for explaining away every manifestation of Soviet tyranny.8 A 1924 series in Hairenik featured a Georgian intellectual who had recently escaped from his country, who described life under Communism as “hell,” “nightmare,” and an order where “rights generally have no meaning.”9 In tandem with this, the presses rehearsed the contested memories of the Thousand-day Republic. The Tashnags celebrated May 28, the anniversary of the founding of the republic, as a most sacrosanct holiday. The 1930s and the Tourian Assassination For the Armenian partisan animosities in America, the events of 1933 ushered in a new era characterized not only by a higher intensity level and a formalized split in the Apostolic Church, but also an end to any attempts at keeping the partisan conflict in the family. From 1933 until the end of the 1960s, Armenian party advocates frequently called upon non-Armenians to take sides in their schism and to see the bad faith of their opponents. The saga that made 1933 such a pivotal year began at the Armenian Day pavilion of the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago on July 1, when the Armenian community’s highest ranking churchman, Archbishop Levon Tourian, ordered the removal of the former republic’s Tricolor flag from the stage where he was to deliver an invocation. To the primate, the flag stood as a symbol of provocative disrespect for the homeland’s present Soviet government. To Tashnags, though, the flag was the symbol of the Armenian nation, and his refusal to share a stage with

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that symbol made him a traitor to his nation. On December 24, 1933, at the Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Church in the Washington Heights section of New York, the archbishop was assassinated: surrounded by a group of men and stabbed to death in broad daylight while marching in procession for the morning’s liturgical service. Within days, New York City police had nine members of the Tashnag Party in custody, and the following June, a jury convicted them of the crime. Throughout the whole saga, Armenian-Americans experienced two separate stories. One sector of the community felt great outrage at the murder of their beloved spiritual leader and counted both the nine suspects and the Tashnag Party as guilty of a dastardly and fratricidal atrocity. The other side viewed Archbishop Tourian as a traitor to his nation and the nine accused as innocent scapegoats. The partisan presses did their part in cultivating these parallel universes, and the bitterness remained for decades after.10 Meanwhile, the 1930s brought another dimension to ArmenianAmerican community life as well, namely, the emergence of a new English-speaking second generation. Importantly, some of the latest currents of Americanization thought at the time believed that the second generation could best be induced to feel American by having outlets to celebrate their distinctive ethnicity. To that end, International Institutes had already sprung up with bilingual nationality workers, ethnic clubs, and traditional music and dance pageants during World War I and the 1920s, originally part of the YWCA structure. Armenians partook of these opportunities. At the same time that representatives of the host society promoted Americanization through ethnic identification, ethnic leaders took care to exhort their constituents to integrate themselves into America’s mainstream society and economy. This was not mere capitulation. Their lobby goals were best served if they could claim that Armenians were steadfastly patriotic and politically well connected Americans, and economically successful Armenians in America could contribute to homeland causes all the more. Thus, in both the Tashnag and Ramgavar parties, youth organizers called upon the second generation to take pride in both identities and to see no contradiction between them.11 Paradoxically, Tashnags in the 1930s grudgingly admitted that the worst thing the Soviet government could do was pull its forces out of Armenia. Vartouhi Calantar Nalbandian explained, “The A.R.F. cannot eject the Soviets from Armenia, in fact, it does not want them to go at this time.” A withdrawal “would mean instead invasion by Turkey and fresh

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massacres.” But, she hastened to add, “that is no reason why [the Tashnag party] should refrain from criticism of and opposition to an odious tyranny and cease laboring for a better day.” Similarly, at a 1937 meeting of a Brooklyn chapter of the party’s youth organization, Tzeghagron, the Tashnag guest speaker said, “it is too early now to think of independence. First we must follow the ideals of political aspirations and follow the ideals of true Tzeghagrons before we think of that.”12 Where the indoctrination of the youth was concerned, Tashnag leaders labored to instill a sense of collective identity as a people in exile from their homeland, engaged in a struggle for its liberation. The real struggle might come later, but the sense of it, the state of mind, had to be integral to the culture now. The creed of Tzeghagron included a requirement that a member be “one who demands a free and independent Armenia” as well as “manly and courageous” and “always attentive to the voice of his race.” The pages of Hairenik Weekly served as a virtual village square for Tashnag adults to expound on what Tashnag youth should be taught. One frequent writer, Mrs. Annie Hatch Boornazian, believed that knowing the language and absorbing a trove of folk tales, songs, dances, and heroic historical narratives would render to the young “the romance of Armenia,” “that quality that has enabled it to live long past contemporary nations, and that lives in the present with an undiminished flame to light those days that are to come.” “The individual,” Boornazian told readers, “must not only assimilate knowledge, he must assimilate rhythm, as expressed in our dances; he must think in pictures, as in the theaters. He must enter the group and assimilate the group into his consciousness the better to understand Armenia.” Additionally, Boornazian wrote of the individual Armenian youth that “his thought must be clarified.”13 The Ramgavar Party also published an English-language weekly and spawned youth organizations to keep the second generation involved. “It is they,” a 1932 Armenian Mirror editorial posited concerning the youth, “who are to supply Armenia with architects, mechanics, engineers, intellectuals, and artists tomorrow.” Absent, however, was the sense of a contemporary struggle for the homeland or hostility to its present regime, as the author referred to “the greatest reality of contemporary times, the reawakening of Soviet Armenia.”14 Thus, while the Tashnags saw their homeland as occupied by a hostile invader, the Ramgavars saw their homeland as being taken care of by a friendly custodian. The Ramgavars’ homeland was more a part of their past and their imagined future than of their present.

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Armenian Partisanism in World War II and the Cold War The Tashnag party, already on the defensive in the public eye over the 1933 Tourian assassination, incurred accusations of holding fascist tendencies and Nazi sympathies in the latter half of the 1930s and during and after the World War II years. At least some of the charges had a basis. In 1936, the front page of the Armenian-language daily, Hairenik, housed a three-part series in August and another article in September giving open praise to Hitler for the rebuilding of Germany, with the August articles expressing explicit sympathy for the regime’s anti-Semitism.15 More murky, though, were the charges that the youth group Tzeghagron emulated the Hitler Youth and sported a fascist approach to nationalism. Compounding the ambiguity was the promiscuous use of the word “race,” very common in that time period to refer to nationality and ethnicity. Critics translated Tzeghagron as meaning “race worship.”16 The November 2, 1940, issue of The Nation magazine reported that a “fascist” organization known as the Tzeghagrons, the youth group of the Armenian Tashnag party, had just purchased a 100-acre tract of land in Franklin, Massachusetts, called Camp Unity. The column played up the expressions of Nazi sympathy in Hairenik, made much of the Tashnags’ use of the language of race, and referred to the Tourian assassination as a central example of the Tashnags’ modus operandi.17 The virulently antiTashnag Armenian journalist Avedis Derounian devoted an opening chapter to the Tashnags and the Tourian assassination in his book Under Cover, an exposé of Nazi and fascist groups in America, written under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson. Just after World War II, anti-Tashnags saw the worst in an accord revealed to have been made with Hitler by several Tashnag leaders. Tashnags defended this as a pragmatic measure resulting in the safety of thousands of Armenians living under Nazi rule, while the critics saw it as part of an opportunistic strategy to enlist Nazi power for the liberation of Armenia from the Soviets.18 Clearly, by this time, Armenians no longer gave off even the fiction of speaking with one voice to outsiders. On the contrary, they made their schism well known and sought to enlist the support of outsiders against their adversaries. In 1943, the three major non-Tashnag political parties— the dominant Ramgavar party and the smaller Hunchak and Progressive (overtly pro-Bolshevik) parties—jointly founded the Armenian National Council of America. Two years later, in a memorandum to the delegates at the San Francisco Conference for the founding of the United Nations

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Organization, the council declared that it represented “all the Armenian civic, social, cultural and religious organizations in the United States, except a small fascist faction known as the Dashnags.” To make extra sure that the delegates would know which petition to disregard when it reached their hands, a footnote added that these disreputable rivals “have presented themselves to this Conference as the ‘Armenian National Committee.’” Ironically, the two petitions presented at San Francisco differed little in actual substance. Both petitions reviewed the long history of oppression and broken promises that Armenians had suffered and the valiant service they had rendered to Western civilization in both world wars, invoked the map that Woodrow Wilson had drawn up in 1920, and championed the right of Armenian refugees to return to their ancestral homeland.19 Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the World War II, the enemy partisan camps would share some common goals not only with each other, but also with Stalin. One of the circumstances that inspired the “Truman Doctrine” speech was Stalin’s demand to the government of Turkey for joint control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits. Less remembered outside of Armenian histories is Stalin’s concomitant demand for the reattachment of two historically Armenian provinces, Kars and Ardahan, to Armenia, in a reversal of Lenin’s 1921 cession of these to Turkey. These efforts fizzled and failed. Stalin started by claiming the provinces for Armenia, then shifted gears toward claiming them for Georgia, then dropped the demand completely. Western policymakers certainly would not take kindly to such a move in any event, since, to them, it would represent not the return of Armenian land to Armenia, but the transfer of non-Communist territory to the Communists. Significantly, though, for as long as the scenario seemed possible, the Tashnag as well as the antiTashnag spokespersons advocated for it.20 Similarly, the Tashnags temporarily supported a postwar repatriation plan. On December 2, 1945, the Soviet government announced that it would allow members of the Armenian diaspora, including many refugees from the genocide, to move into Soviet Armenia, allowing them exemption from the usual customs assessments as well as access to subsidized housing. This spurred great excitement worldwide. Because this plan would require much money for the transportation costs of beneficiaries, the AGBU went right into action collecting funds. Rallies were held amid the various Armenian communities. At first, the Tashnag Party supported the effort; however, their enthusiasm soured when it became clear that the Soviet government was not allowing ARF members in the ranks of the newly

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admitted repatriates. From 1946 to 1948, about 100,000 went to Armenia, most from Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, as well as a substantial number from Greece. There were 7,280 from France and, apparently, about 1,000 from the United States as well. French author Yves Ternon reported that the experience proved a disappointment for many who opted for it: “They discovered housing and food shortages, corruption and the black market, discrimination practiced by the autochthons who had not asked them to come and who resented their invasion of the job market, and by the administration which suspected them of having remained under bourgeois influence.” Moreover, Soviet tolerance of a distinctly Armenian national identity proved short-lived. There was a wave of arrests in October of 1949. The Tashnag press made much of the negative reports that came back in the years that followed.21 After about 1950, the Tashnag Party moved in a direction that directly mirrored a trend in the broader American political scene. The buzzword associated with Truman administration policy was, of course, “containment,” and the idea that America and its anti-communist allies could best fight Communism by keeping their own houses in good order and setting the example of salutary life without Communism. Right about this time, however, a much more forceful philosophy of anti-communism called “psychological strategy” arose. It was a view that America had a mission to help liberate the population of the Soviet empire by stirring up resistance to Soviet rule. A number of new books on the market in and around 1950 argued that Americans could feel a common struggle with the Russian people against the Soviet government. With funding from the CIA, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia began operations in 1951. The committee went through two name changes early on, with the name “Russia” presently replaced by “the Soviet Union,” and then the latter portion changed to “for Liberation from Bolshevism.” There was a Psychological Strategy Board as well.22 With the rise of liberationist thought in the mainstream American press and the government came a simultaneous upsurge of cold war rhetoric in the Tashnag press. This was a rise from a generalized stance of anti-Soviet ideology to a more immediate sense of mission to join forces with the U.S. government and Iron Curtain countries to accelerate the downfall of Soviet Communism. The Tashnags had incorporated Armenian nationalism with anti-Sovietism right along, and now the American political climate aided their cause more than ever. The linkage between Tashnag Armenian consciousness and American patriotism was, in itself, not new. But the early to

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mid-1950s saw a marked upsurge in editorials in the Hairenik press that linked the Armenian national liberation struggle with the American cold war struggle in such a way as to make Armenian diasporic nationalism and American patriotism synonymous.23 The anti-Tashnag coalition continued not only to keep the peace with the Soviet state in its discourse but to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Soviet Armenia. Over 1,500 reportedly showed up on December 12, 1948, to mark the twenty-eighth anniversary of “the founding of the Armenian Republic,” as the Mirror-Spectator article called it. On November 23, 1952, the Armenian National Council observed the thirty-second anniversary of the “emancipation of Armenia from tyranny, insecurity and the threat of annihilation.” Shortly after, the Ramgavarcontrolled Baikar published an editorial suggesting a balance sheet for the years after Sovietization, with the good outweighing the bad. “During these 32 years Armenia has enjoyed security and peace—in the sense that no attack or invasion against her has occurred . . . Reconstruction, industry and agriculture made great advances. Great progress was made culturally, in the arts, and all branches of science.” Were there negatives as well? Yes, “during these years Armenia has remained under the domination of one kind of thinking. She has not allowed free traveling to those who would have liked to visit their native land, or those who would have liked to see the outside world.”24 Actually, Ramgavar leaders and editors consistently defended themselves against any suggestion that they were either blind or sympathetic to Soviet tyranny. A Mirror-Spectator editorial asserted, “We . . . reject the hackneyed rationalizations that seek to explain tyranny . . . One may with considerable warrant attack the Soviet system—which does of course include tyranny.” But, the writer continued, articles promoting repatriation of Armenians to their homeland, no matter who governed it, were not propaganda.25 Hairenik Weekly challenged this view not long after, to which the Mirror-Spectator ran another piece that epitomized the degree of all-out verbal warfare characterizing relations between the two camps: FINALLY, we would be hopeless dupes if for a moment we believed Hairenik’s absurd slogans for a free Armenia, and its protestations of devotion to freedom. For the only free Armenia the Dashnags will tolerate is one that they alone may govern. Nor are they capable of detecting a contradiction in this. It was not very long ago that they betrayed their despicable purposes themselves, with their unspeakable associations with the Nazis, prompted by an eagerness to march into Armenia, even in the rear of such a liberator as the late Adolph Hitler and his infamous legions.26

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The rivalry between Tashnag and Ramgavar would most likely have endured through these years with or without the cold war climate. However, the cold war affected its vocabulary and its terms of engagement. Tashnag leaders generally took care not to call their rivals in America “Communists,” but they did use the term “pro-Soviet” quite freely. A 1952 editorial in Hairenik Weekly quoted, with complete concurrence, a speech made by Edward O’Connor, Commissioner of Displaced Persons, at an anti-communist rally of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America in Philadelphia. He said: In examining the several steps which the pro-Soviet elements will take in retaliation for the forces of freedom to press the psychological war inside the Iron Curtain one step would have as its goal the discrediting of all resistance movements which have taken place in the Soviet Union since 1940, as well as current liberation movements having counterpart organizations anywhere in the free world. They will be characterized as Nazi collaborators, terrorist bands, anti-Semites, criminal gangs, and anti-Christians. By this method they expect to confuse and scare off the timid, turn healthy emotions into violent prejudices, and finally to create general controversy, not on the facts, but on the perversion of facts.27

The implication was clear: this should completely explain why such terms appeared in the anti-Tashnag press with reference to the Tashnags. Nobody understood the principle that the best defense is a good offense better than the Tashnags. In 1955, it was the Ramgavars who found themselves on the defensive. The June 25 edition of the Boston Post and the June 26 edition of the New York Times both reported that, at hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, Mrs. Stella Andrassy, a former staff person with New York Civil Defense, had provided a list of thirty-four foreign-language newspapers in America that hued to the Soviet line, including the Ramgavar organ Baikar.28 The Ramgavars promptly attributed the report to the Tashnags, while Hairenik editor Reuben Darbinean denied that the Tashnags had served as informants and suggested that the origin of the story was its mere state of being true.29 Ramgavar leaders prepared their defense and marshaled together a display of Baikar editorials that in one way or another criticized Soviet actions.30 The official stance of the Ramgavar Party, and undoubtedly the attitude of the majority of non-Tashnag Armenians in America, had more to do with pragmatically tolerating Communism as Armenia’s protector against Turkey. However, the anti-Tashnag coalition did include the Armenian

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Progressive League, which avowedly embraced Bolshevism. The coalition also included some Christian clerical apologists for Bolshevism. Bishop Tiran Nersoyan, elected Archbishop in 1944, wrote a 1942 book, A Christian Approach to Communism. On the one hand, he wrote with great regret about the Soviet state’s persecution of Christianity and the rejection of religion. On the other, his solution was to suggest that both the Communists and Christians needed to learn that Communism and Christianity shared common principles and could work together as allies. At one point, he equated state tyranny with “a surgeon performing an abscission or amputation on a body in order to save the patient . . . These measures can be regarded as the self-mutilation of society for the purpose of self-preservation.” Moreover, the papers of Charles A. Vertanes, an Armenian Protestant clergyman and a spokesman for the anti-Tashnag coalition who led the Armenian National Council of America in the 1940s and early 1950s, reveals full-fledged Communist sympathies. By 1951, the Ramgavar leadership saw fit to distance itself from Vertanes and the council in response to learning that Vertanes brought an Armenian delegation to the notoriously pro-Communist “Partisans of Peace in Warsaw” conference.31 Many of the voices of the cold war era combined anti-communism with antiliberalism and painted expansions of social welfare and business regulation as steps toward a Communist state, often using the words “liberal,” “socialist,” and “Communist” interchangeably. On this point, the Tashnag Party differed sharply. The ARF had a socialist heritage, and in its early days, some of its manifestos seemed barely distinguishable from Marxism. By the 1950s, at least in the American context, when Tashnags expressed their socialist side at all, they did so mainly by showing approval of government welfare programs. From Tashnag leaders’ point of view, socialists, as long as they were democratic ones, ought to be among the most natural challengers to Communism. But of course one did not have to be socialist to be anti-communist. The Tashnags wrote, “In all nations there is a large number of those who are not socialists but who are good democrats. And since socialism without democracy may easily be converted into Stalinian Communism or Hitlerite Nazism, therefore democracy is a far more fundamental and essential requisite for peoples than socialism.”32 Also, the Tashnags believed that those who insisted on armed preparedness to fight Communism on the literal battlefield as the chief priority were right, as all social reforms would be worthless “if tomorrow the Soviets succeeded in subjugating England.”33

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Formalizing the Church Split: A Tale of Two Holy Sees Today in America, as elsewhere, there are two distinct networks of Armenian Apostolic churches. One is affiliated with the “Diocese” at Second Avenue and 34th Street in New York and is under the jurisdiction of the Holy See at Echmiadzin, populated with the non-Tashnag faithful. The other is linked with the “Prelacy,” just a few blocks uptown on 39th Street, and with the Holy See of Cilicia, formerly in Sis (a city in Cilicia, now part of Turkey) though actually headquartered in Antelias, Lebanon, with predominately Tashnag worshipers in its pews. The existence of two Holy Sees dates back many centuries. The process by which Armenian churches split along lines of Tashnag and anti-Tashnag began in the early 1930s and escalated beyond all hope of reconciliation with the Christmas Eve 1933 stabbing of Archbishop Tourian. It was from 1956 on that the Tashnags had their own Holy See, and they emphatically incorporated the split into their running narrative of the anti-Soviet crusade, while their adversaries viewed it as merely the latest episode of Tashnag treachery. Historically, the high churchman at Echmiadzin, Armenia, bore the title “Catholicos of All Armenians,” though partisanism had eroded this claim since the 1930s. In 1955, the post came up vacant again, and an election was held with the approval and supervision of the Soviet government. As non-Tashnag Armenian-Americans (including Avedis Derounian) traveled to Armenia to attend the inauguration of the new Catholicos at Echmiadzin, Vasken I, the Ramgavar press ran upbeat stories on what these travelers saw, while the Tashnag press disputed both conditions in Armenia and the legitimacy of this election.34 Meanwhile, the Catholicate at Antelias (still symbolically referred to as Sis) also had a vacancy. With some political maneuvering in the church, Tashnags successfully claimed victory with the installation of their man Zareh I on the throne. The Tashnag-dominated churches in the United States, in something of institutional limbo since 1933, embraced Antelias as their spiritual center. The church rupture was now complete: Apostolic Armenians now had two complete church structures—one for each partisan orientation.35 During these years, elites of Tashnag and anti-Tashnag factions worked hard to discredit each other, not only among the Armenian populace but with outsiders as well. In the wake of the formalized church split, spokespersons for both houses of God published strident pamphlets addressed to general readerships, with each referring to the other camp as “the dissident

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church,” accusing its handlers of high crimes and misdemeanors and arguing for its own authenticity. To partisans of Echmiadzin, long-standing tradition made the Catholicos of that Holy See the Catholicos of All Armenians. This camp also viewed the Tashnags as having secured the 1956 victory at Antelias by illegitimate means, including the use of an Assyrian bishop to serve as one of the three requisite bishops for Zareh I’s 1956 consecration. The Mirror-Spectator mockingly referred to Zareh as “the Catholicos of All the Dashnaks.” Those of Tashnag persuasion who identified with Zareh considered the election of Vasken I at Echmiadzin to have been controlled by the Soviet government and considered the Catholicos to lack sufficient ecclesiastical independence from the Communist state. In keeping with the times, each faction in the United States sought to convince the general American population of the other’s illegitimacy. The Tourian memory continued to receive airplay in the process.36 Liberationism and Partisanism on the Wane Both Tashnag cold war rhetoric and the hostility between Tashnag and non-Tashnag found their climax in the mid-1950s and early 1960s and then slowly began to subside. For one thing, the sense of a struggle and a “psychological strategy” to liberate captive peoples behind the Iron Curtain declined in the American political scene.37 Fiery Tashnag editor Reuben Darbinian, writing in 1962, complained of the failure of the Eisenhower administration to aid 1956 and 1957 anti-Soviet revolts in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, lamenting that “the Republicans factually continued the general policy of the Democrats in regard to captive nations.”38 In 1966, two years before his death, Darbinian conceded that “under the present world situation to contemplate any important change in the Armenian case is, practically, out of the question.” But, consistent with the Tashnag party’s position over the decades, he reaffirmed the importance of keeping both the Armenian people and the larger American society aware of both the Armenian cause and the evils of Communism. The Hairenik press continued to watch developments in the Soviet government with wariness. In the late 1960s, much of the partisan discourse centered on the split in the church and the contested memories affecting which Catholicos truly represented the Armenian people. The fact that so much of the debate now centered on authenticity of church rituals and interpretations of ecclesiastical law bespoke a mellowing of the conflict.39

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At the same time, the definition of the Armenian cause was seeing a subtle shift. Armenians, right along, had carried the memory of the fact that in 1915, and over several ensuing years, the Turkish government had brutally massacred over a million Armenians, and Armenian lobby groups, right along, had called upon the world’s powers to pursue harsh policies toward Turkey in remembrance of the great crime. By the 1960s, with increasingly consistent usage, the great crime had a formal name—the genocide—and Armenians directed their political energies at the memories that united them in enmity toward Turkey and in disappointment with governments and institutions failed to condemn Turkey’s actions. The year 1965 saw separate parades and vigils of Tashnag and non-Tashnag Armenians observing the genocide’s fiftieth anniversary. A decade later, the factions combined to observe the sixtieth.40 The Twentieth World Congress of the Tashnag Party resolved, in 1972, to shift its emphasis to Turkey rather than the Soviet Union as its primary enemy. By the mid-1970s, international networks of Armenian terrorists were on the scene, some with apparent Tashnag support, assassinating Turkish officials. Armenian terrorism at the international level did venture into some anti-Soviet actions between 1977 and 1982,41 but in the larger picture, the “Armenian Cause” now mostly meant remembering the genocide and holding Turkey accountable. The demographics of the émigré population were changing as well. Influxes of new Armenian immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and the Soviet Union after 1965 were shaking up the fabric of existing Armenian communities. As editorialists exhorted Armenian Americans not to look down upon the newcomers, and urged the newcomers not to fret too much over Armenian-Americans’ seeming disconnection from Armenian language and culture, one could see that the difference between Tashnag and Ramgavar—and the fight over whether to love, loathe, or tolerate the Soviet state—had lost its hold on Armenian life in America.42 Conclusion In the Armenian-American community, both anti-communism and accommodation to Communist rule over eastern Armenia occurred in the context of a partisan feud. The factions of Tashnags and anti-Tashnags predated the Bolshevik Revolution, but the particular events in their lives after the Sovietization of Armenia reflected the new situation. The Armenian political parties were global diasporan institutions with elites who dominated the presses and appointed field workers to cultivate their

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ideological base. The ideologies of both opposition and accommodation had much to do with the strategies of diasporan politicos who desired to influence their homeland’s future. Even so, it should not be inferred that the elites led their constituents anywhere that the constituents did not want to go. The viability of old-world-based parties on new-world soil clearly indicates that a sizable number of Armenian immigrants in America, and their American-born progeny, clearly desired to stay connected to their ancestral homeland. The competing parties represented different ways that immigrants and their children could share in that sense of participation. The conflicting visions of the situation in the homeland tied in closely with contrasting styles of ethnicity. The Tashnag Party promoted an ethnicity intertwined with struggle to liberate the homeland and opposition to its present regime; the Ramgavar Party promoted an ethnicity more celebratory than militant, with an aspiration of participating in the homeland’s eventual independence, but an absence of either time urgency or conflict with the Soviet regime. Tashnags had an occupied homeland; Ramgavars, a protected one. For all the fierce fighting that took place, the parties agreed on more than they would admit. They desired Armenian Americans to be loyal to their Armenian heritage, attached to the future of their homeland, and integrated in the host society as upwardly mobile and patriotic Americans. In fact, for all the lamentations about the lack of unity at mid-century, it appears that the partisan division was actually serving some purpose in the way that the party leaders and partisan newspaper editors marketed their ideas and maintained their relevance to their constituents. The decline of partisan bickering came, then, not so much from a change of circumstances in the homeland, as from a change of focus in the community. The genocide, long a reality, rose to the fore in community discourse from 1965 onward. The sense of need for America and other world powers to recognize the genocide took on a heightened urgency. The issues that had divided Tashnag and Ramgavar had a decreasing relevance as yet another young generation came of age and new immigrants joined the settled communities. Notes 1. Hairenik Weekly, May 15, 1952, 1. 2. On the genocide, see Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), and Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

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3. Harold Takooshian, “Armenian Immigration to the United States from the Middle East,” Journal of Armenian Studies 3 (Winter 1986–87): 133–55, esp. 136–38, 140–41; Edward Minasian, “The Armenian Immigrant Tide: From the Great War to the Great Depression,” in Recent Studies in Modern Armenian History (Belmont, MA: NAASR, 1972), 105–17, esp. 109–10; E. P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children, 1850–1950 (New York: John Wiley, 1956), 333. 4. Robert Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 71–72, 105–22; Edward Minasian, “They Came from Ararat: The Exodus of the Armenian People to the United States” (master’s thesis, University of California Berkeley, 1961), 252–53. 5. Richard G. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 30–38, 126–55, 250–91; George Kooshian, “The Armenian Immigrant Community of California, 1880–1935” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2002), 146–55, 176–93; Jenny Phillips, Symbol, Myth and Rhetoric: The Politics of Culture in an Armenian-American Community (New York: AMS, 1989), 81–84; Benjamin F. Alexander, “Armenian and American: The Changing Face of Ethnic Identity and Diasporic Nationalism, 1915–1955” (PhD diss., City University of New York Graduate Center, 2005), 57–74; Hairenik, July 4, 1918, 2; October 9, 1918, 2; January 24, 1919, 1; Azk, July 7, 1918, 2; August 8, 1918, 2; January 28, 1919, 2. 6. Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 377–80; Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, Vol. 4 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 147–57; Maintenance of Peace in Armenia: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Sixty-Sixth Congress, First Session, on S.J.R. 106: A Joint Resolution for the Maintenance of Peace in Armenia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), esp. 3–12, 114–22. 7. Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 79–91; Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia, vol. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1–44, 180–236, 373–408; Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 299–318, 349–62. 8. Kooshian, “Armenian Immigrant Community,” 306–7; Baikar, March 11, 1924, 1; January 19, 1926, 2; Hairenik, March 20, 1924, 2; January 22, 1926, 2. 9. Hairenik, April 30, 1924, 1. 10. Phillips, Symbol, Myth and Rhetoric, 121–30; Gregory Doudoukjian, “Oral History: An Intergenerational Study of the Effects of the Assassination of Archbishop Leon Tourian in 1933 on Armenian-Americans” (master’s thesis, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Crestwood, NY, 1993); Ben Alexander, “Contested Memories, Divided Diaspora: Armenian Americans, the Thousand-Day Republic, and the Polarized Response to an Archbishop’s Murder,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27 (Fall 2007): 32–59.

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11. Raymond A. Mohl, “The International Institute Movement and Ethnic Pluralism,” Social Science 56 (Winter 1981): 14–21; Stephen Weiss, “Ethnicity and Reform: Minorities and the Ambience of the Depression Years,” Journal of American History 66 (December 1979): 566–85; Hairenik Weekly, October 29, 1937, 1, 2; March 8, 1940, 1, 3; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, February 1, 1939, 5; February 8, 1940, 2, 5. 12. Hairenik Weekly, March 29, 1935, 3; October 29, 1937, 2. See also Hairenik Weekly, January 15, 1937, 2. 13. Hairenik Weekly, July 10, 1936, 5; Hairenik Weekly, October 29, 1937, 2. 14. Armenian Mirror, July 8, 1932, 2. 15. Hairenik, August 19, 1936, 1, 2; August 20, 1936, 1, 3; August 21, 1936, 2; September 17, 1936, 1. 16. A more nuanced translation would be “devotee of the race,” according to doctrinaire Tashnag sociologist Sarkis Atamian. Sarkis Atamian, The Armenian Community: The Historical Development of a Social and Ideological Conflict (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 391–93. 17. The Nation, November 2, 1940, 419; December 28, 1940, 657–58. For Reuben Darbinian’s angry refutation, see Hairenik Weekly, May 2, 1941, 1. The site in question did indeed become Camp Hayasdan, which operates today. 18. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, September 1, 1945, 1–3; John Roy Carlson, “The Armenian Displaced Persons: A First-Hand Report on Conditions in Europe,” Armenian Affairs 1 (Winter 1949–50): 17–34; James G. Mandalian, “The Smearer: A Response to John Roy Carlson,” Armenian Review 3 (Summer 1950): 3–19. 19. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, June 23, 1945, 2, 3; Hairenik Weekly, June 21; 1945, 2; June 28, 1945, 1, 4, 5; Charles A. Vertanes, Armenia Reborn (New York: Armenian National Council of America, 1947), 173–79. 20. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, June 7, 1947, 1; June 14, 1947, 1, 4; June 21, 1947, 1, 4; Hairenik Weekly, August 30, 1944, 2; Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 66–67, 152–53; Yves Ternon, The Armenian Cause, trans. Anahid Apelian Mangouni (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1985), 125–26. 21. Ternon, Armenian Cause, 127–29; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, May 18, 1946, 2; June 15, 1946, 1; June 29, 1946, 1; September 14, 1946, 1; September 28, 1946, 1; Hairenik Weekly, April 18, 1946, 2; July 25, 1946, 2; September 12, 1946, 2; H. Gerounian, “Code Letters from Armenia,” Armenian Review 3 (Summer 1950): 117–20. 22. David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a Free Russia Since 1881 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100–25; A. Tchilingarian, “The American Committee and the Struggle Against Bolshevism,” Armenian Review 8 (Spring 1955): 3–10. 23. Hairenik Weekly, January 20, 1943, 3; April 15, 1942, 2; March 6, 1952, 2. 24. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, December 25, 1948, 1, 3; December 6, 1952, 1; December 13, 1952, 1, 2; Hewlett Johnson, The Soviet Power (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940).

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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Armenian Mirror-Spectator, October 15, 1949, 2. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, November 19, 1949, 2. Hairenik Weekly, March 6, 1952, 2. New York Times, June 25, 1955, 7. Reuben Darbinian, “The Ramgavars Before the Tribunal of Public Opinion,” Armenian Review 8 (Autumn 1955): 3–19, quotation on 6. Avedis Derounian to Hratch Yervant, August 6, 1955 (and other letters that month), Box 10, file “Armenian Democratic Liberal Party,” Avedis Derounian Papers, NAASR, Belmont, MA. Tiran Nersoyan, A Christian Approach to Communism: Ideological Similarities Between Dialectical Materialism and Christian Philosophy (London: Frederick Muller, 1942), quotation on 25–26; see also James G. Mandalian, “Bishop Nersoyan on Communism,” Armenian Review 5 (Spring 1952): 3–13; Vertanes, Armenia Reborn; Box “Vertanes Trips,” Folder 49, Charles A. Vertanes Papers, NAASR, Belmont, MA; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, March 10, 1951, 1, 2. Hairenik Weekly, February 21, 1952, 1. Reuben Darbinian, “About the Present World Crisis,” Armenian Review 4 (Winter 1951): 49–58, quotation on 49. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, October 8, 1955, 1; October 15, 1955, 1, 4; October 29, 1955, 1. Atamian, The Armenian Community, 424–40; Arpena Mesrobian, “Like One Family”: The Armenians of Syracuse (Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 2000), 206–9; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, March 3, 1956, 1; April 14, 1956, 2; M. Herardian, “Interrelations of Etchmiadzin and Cilician Patriarchal Sees,” Armenian Review 9 (Summer 1956): 16–32; Reuben Darbinian, “The Struggle Around the Armenian Church,” Armenian Review 9 (Winter 1956), 12–23; Reuben Darbinian, “The Armenian Church Break,” Armenian Review X (Winter 1957): 3–16. Crisis in the Armenian Church: Text of a Memorandum to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America on the Dissident Armenian Church in America (Boston: Central Diocesan Board, Armenian National Apostolic Church of America, 1958); Bedros Norehad, The Armenian Church and Its “Defenders” (New York: Gotchnag, 1958); Armenian Mirror-Spectator, April 27, 1968, 2; May 25, 1968, 2; Darbinian, “Armenian Church Break.” Foglesong, American Mission, 126–39. Reuben Darbinian, “The Captive Nations and the West,” Armenian Review 15 (Winter 1962): 3–12, quotation on 5. Hairenik Weekly, March 10, 1966, 1; March 31, 1966, 1; April 28, 1966, 3; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, May 18, 1968, 2; May 25, 1968, 2; June 8, 1968, 2. Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, 227–29; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, April 17, 1965, 1; Hairenik Weekly, April 15, 1965, 2, 7; Armenian Mirror-Spectator, April 24, 1976, 1. Francis P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: The Past, the Present, the Prospects (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991). Anny Bakalian, Armenian-Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 2.

CHAPTER 4

One Goal, Many Paths Internal and External Struggles of the Hungarian Émigrés

Judith Fai-Podlipnik

Following World War II, Hungary bore the scars of economic devastation, social chaos, and political uncertainty. The Provisional Government, set up in Debrecen in 1944, worked with the Allied Control Commission to reestablish control and issue elections as soon as possible. Yet, whilst many politicians were scrambling to secure positions in the government, the Communists, referred to as Muscovites,1 began their own tract for power in Hungary. Since the Siege of Budapest in December 1944, thousands of Magyars were already fleeing from their homeland. Many Jews and other fascist opponents had hoped to return home, only to be spurned by their neighbors. Those who sympathized or collaborated with the Nazis also sought refuge wherever they could. Thus began the onset of the significant emigration movement to lands regarded as free: Western Europe, Australia, South America, and North America. Thereafter, in reaction to the gradual Communist overthrow, more Magyars ventured to the West to seek freedom. While there, many of the political émigrés established organizations whose main mission was to free Hungary from Soviet imperialism. They hoped to return to a free Hungary soon. Unfortunately, these personalities bearing a common nationality and aspiring for the same general outcome were involved in negative and caustic attacks. This chapter demonstrates that although the organizations and émigré politicians

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had a single common objective, the amalgam of certain international events, the general insouciance of the U.S. government toward Eastern Europe, and the traditional rivalries between the expatriates rendered their efforts fruitless. Historical Background To gain a better understanding of basis for the Hungarian struggle against the Communists after World War II, one must refer back to 1848, which marked the beginning of more than a century of mistrust and animus between the Hungarians and Russians. Like other nationalities in Europe, the Magyars launched a revolution against those they deemed as oppressor—the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. Initially, it looked as if the Magyars would be triumphant, yet their fate took a turn for the worse when Austrian Emperor Franz Jozsef assumed the throne and requested the military aid of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. In August 1849, the Austrian/Russian coalition defeated the Magyar nationalist insurgents. This loss and the extreme repression afterwards remained fresh and real in the minds of the people. In 1919, following World War I, Russia—now the Soviet Union—again infringed upon Hungary. The Soviet-sponsored Béla Kun regime lasted for only 133 days, yet this was enough to cause further odium for their assailants. Two Russian invasions in modern history were more than enough for the Magyars. Therefore, in 1945, when their nemesis returned, the Hungarians were fervid in countering the new encroachment upon their freedom. In 1944, the Red Army entered Hungary and most people were happy to see the end of the war. Though the presence of the Soviet forces unsettled much of the population, they did not deem it as an immediate or permanent threat to the democratic direction for which they aspired. This delusion was compounded by the fact that the interwar regime under Admiral Miklós Horthy had banned the Communist Party, and thus many believed that those who had recently returned from Moscow, coined the Muscovites, would not have the wherewithal to disable the democratic process. Immediately after the war, a Provisional Government assumed control. Members of the government, all of whom rigorously opposed the fascists, included representatives of the Smallholders’ Party, the Social Democratic Party, the National Peasants, the Bourgeoisie-Democratic Party, and the Communists (the Soviet members of the Allied Control Commission ordered the inclusion of the latter group). This government immediately

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made preparations for democratic elections, scheduled for November 1945. Only those parties that were members of the Provisional Government could place their name on the ballots. The Hungarian Communists campaigned vigorously, slandering the others and avowing that they alone were the true defenders of democracy. In spite of their efforts, the results of the elections favored the Smallholders’ Party, which represented the middle class, small landowners, some industrialists, lower aristocracy, and gentry. It obtained 57 percent of the votes in comparison to the mere 17 percent gained by the Communists. The new coalition government included the parties that participated in the Popular Front, including the Communists. The Muscovites held most important policymaking agencies such as the Ministry of the Interior. One of the Muscovites, Matyás Rákosi, who was the Secretary General of the Hungarian Communist Party, assumed the title of Deputy Prime Minister. In fact, 64 percent of the officers were members of left-wing parties and 31 percent of those were Communists.2 So, the Communists held an advantage since they controlled the weighty posts in the government and had the backing of the Soviet Union and the ever-present Red Army. On February 6, 1946, the New Hungarian Republic came into being with democratic principles. Simultaneously, those in Moscow created Hungarian-Soviet groups and began infiltrating the other left-wing parties, solidifying their control in both the economic and political arenas. They began forcing non-communist politicians out of office, a tactic otherwise known as Rákosi’s “operation salami,” for he removed all opponents slice by slice. His most common tactics to eliminate the competition were accusing a politician of being a traitor against the Republic or of Titoism after 1948.3 In spite of the Muscovite attempted purgation, they accrued only 22.25 percent of the votes in the 1947 elections, which furthermore established that the Magyar population was dauntlessly against the Soviet-sponsored political party. Disappointed with the outcome of the elections, Rákosi escalated the assaults against the rival groups. Politicians such as Prime Minster Ferenc Nagy of the Smallholders’ Party and dozens of others from that party, Dezso Sulyok of the Freedom Party, Zoltan Pfeiffer of the Independence Party, and Karolyi Peyer of the Social Democrats, to name a few, fled from their homeland. President Zoltan Tildy, who favored appeasing the Communists rather than combating them, attempted to reassure Magyars at home and abroad that all was well in Hungary. In radio messages transmitted to the United States, he “pledged himself to building a better Hungary than ever before.” In addition, he invited Magyar-Americans to

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visit their homeland to gain a better and more accurate perspective of the situation.4 Unfortunately, Tildy’s confidence lacked any realistic backing. Akin to the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, the final stages of the cleansing process involved the purging of Communist ministers and party members deemed too moderate or treasonous. In actuality, the purges extended beyond the political realm. Thousands, particularly from the upper and middle classes, fled from Hungary to seek refuge from the oppressive government, which practiced torture: “On the walls of the village council houses, there was a ‘guilt board’ with the names of the Kulaks [wealthy peasants]. The bearers of those names had to stand on one foot for hours in one of the other offices, or to crouch on all fours and bark like a dog as a warning to other Kulaks who did not fulfill their delivery plan.”5 Rákosi mimicked Stalin’s course of action by collectivizing, industrializing, and terrorizing. Most people were unwilling to cooperate and expressed their distress to their relatives and friends in the West with the hope of garnering some assistance.6 On the other hand, not all Magyars despised the regime. Some hoped that the Communists would bring more equality and rid the nation of the discriminatory hierarchies of the past. One person wrote, “life here is facing improvement. When you work, you can live well. The prices are relatively high; they are adapted to wages and profits. Foodstuffs are copiously available for everybody.”7 Yet the predominant tone of the correspondences expressed misery and desolation under the authoritarian regime. Waves of Immigration By 1948, the Communists firmly established their reign over Hungary. Thousands had fled to the West, and the United States was a major recipient of these émigrés. Waves of Hungarian immigration were a direct response of the political climate of each particular year. In late 1944 to 1946, those who fled were supporters of the Horthy regime, the Arrow Cross, and other fascists. For the most part, they remained in Europe, creating organizations that continued to adhere to their original nationalistic and anti-Semitic principles in spite of their defeat.8 During this time, a sizable population of Jews also fled from Hungary to the United States. They did not actively sponsor or participate in any of the Hungarian American organizations. Hungary willingly collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, establishing its own Jewish ghettos and labor camps. Unsurprisingly, then, the Magyar Jews avoided the nationalistic

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Hungarian associations, and instead joined Jewish assistance organizations. Moreover, unlike their Hungarian Christian counterparts, most Hungarian Jews, who emigrated immediately following the war, did not desire to return. The next group of refugees left between 1946 and 1947. They represented the political center such as the Smallholders’ Party. In accord with the purges, the refugees of 1947–48 were more leftist leaning and included the Social Democrats and the Socialists. For the most part, the politicians who fled from Hungary hoped tto return to a country resembling their prewar homeland. The Hungarian émigrés who were not politicians represented the upper class and were thus different from those Hungarians who had ventured to the West before World War II. The late nineteenth century saw the migration of workers and peasants who sought the economic advantages of America with the hopes of returning home to purchase land. This group initially settled in the Eastern portion of the United States, working in industry and mining. The influx of immigrants translated into cheap labor. A number of Hungarian settlements arose in, for example, Colorado’s mining community and Louisiana’s lumber area. The post-World War I flock was predominately the advocates of the Kun regime, the Communist members of intelligentsia and their sympathizers, or Jews caught in the midst of the White Terror.9 Their settlements in the United States were more widespread as they did not seek menial labor but other forms of employment that suited their educational level. The years 1944–47 saw the immigration of the upper and upper middle classes, who feared for their lives under Communism.10 Also among these political refugees were intellectuals who “maintained the values of feudal honor between the aristocratic classes, independent spirit, national glory, disdain toward mercenary projects, keen aesthetic appreciation, and an unrestrained emotionalism.”11 All of the émigrés, whether politically active or not, viewed the Soviet presence in their homeland as temporary. While some, particularly those with political aspirations or economic investments, hoped to return home, others, such as Jews, accepted the United States as their new home. The settlement of the postwar émigrés proved disjointed and confusing. The gentiles sought acceptance into already existing Hungarian communities in Cleveland, Ohio, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. Magyar Jews, however, were scattered throughout the country. They moved to whichever community offered them employment and a home and did not involve themselves with the various Hungarian American fraternal, social,

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cultural, or political associations. Their concern for the state of affairs in Hungary was not as great as for the others; nevertheless, they were not in favor of the Soviet occupation. Thus, the majority of Hungarian émigrés from all backgrounds agreed upon one issue—their desire to see Hungary independent. They wished to communicate freely with their families and ensure security for those at home.12 They hoped for free elections and some sort of democratic government sans Soviet and Red Army physical presence. With regard to their ends, they were unified; yet in their means, they were disparate. Moreover, most of them failed to recognize that even though their host-nation clearly articulated its disapproval of the situation in Hungary, it was not committed to acting on its behalf.13 Following World War II, U.S. diplomatic policy had reversed the direction from that of the previous years. No longer an isolationist, it took the helm of the postwar efforts to reconstruct Europe along democratic lines. However, it was only willing to go so far. For the most part, the United States “carefully avoided a stand on delicate political issues that might have antagonized the Russians.”14 The U.S. government modified its immigration policies. During the interwar years, it had accepted a limited number of émigrés, but following the World War II, with the accumulation of deportees into the German, Austrian, and Italian refugee camps, President Harry S. Truman enacted a modified law that allowed approximately 42,000 Displaced Persons to enter the United States. Moreover, in certain cases, Congress would grant special immigration visas to various individuals under what was known as the “Non-Quota Act.”15 The U.S. government also assigned the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and other international volunteer agencies to accelerate the immigration process.16 From July 1945 to June 1946, 97 percent of immigrants who landed in the United States came from Europe, with 2 to 4 percent from Hungary.17 Interestingly, the Department of State recorded the Hungarians as the fourth largest immigrant group, yet most of them were Jews.18 With the significant influx of Displaced Persons (DPs) from Europe, Washington, D.C., had to reconsider its policies. On June 28, 1948, the U.S. government passed the Displaced Persons Act, which authorized the admission of 205,000 refugees between July 1948 and June 1950. Congress made sure to incorporate various restrictive stipulations, intercepting persons of questionable character.19 The United States also afforded monies and other support to various international organizations such as the International Refugee Organization and

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the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. Both groups provided legal, economic, and political assistance to the new émigrés. The U.S. government was also a major sponsor of Radio Free Europe, which sought to bring the citizens behind the Iron Curtain “truth, hope and encouragement to bolster their determination to shake off the Soviet yoke.”20 Americans had launched a program to undermine the Soviet bloc and eventually cause its economic collapse.21 Additionally, in 1951, the Kersten Amendment provided $100 million for enlisting refugees from the Soviet satellite states to the American military service.22 Unfortunately, this and other operations were not strong, serious, or cohesive enough to counter the Soviets. Therefore, some accused Washington of making empty promises to the Magyars in America and Europe. The U.S. government had offered “hope” without “help” or policy that “was long on words and short on deeds.”23 Fundamentally, the United States was unwilling to take any action on behalf of East European nations and, sadly, many in Hungary took their assurances seriously, only to find themselves alone in their struggle. Meanwhile, the political, economic, and social statuses of Hungarian émigrés varied, yet they all exerted energy and resources to free their homeland. The majority of the postwar émigrés aspired to liberate their homeland in order to establish a government free from autocracy and outside domination. However, some favored the reestablishment of a constitutional monarchy, others wanted a republic, and yet another group was hoping for a socialistic, less centralized government. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Hungarian immigrants planned to return to their homelands once they had earned enough money to provide them with comfortable lifestyle. Yet, most of them remained in the United States and eventually became assimilated. The post-World War I Magyar émigrés established more politically and diplomatically oriented organizations. They were not hopeful of returning home, particularly since the new government under Admiral Miklós Horthy was quite conservative and even somewhat fascist. When World War II erupted, several associations, including one under the leadership of Béla Lugósi, Hollywood’s “Dracula,” arose to support Hungary’s struggle against Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, animosities exported from the homeland created factionalism within the émigré community and were the major cause for the rapid dissolution of its war-effort groups. Factionalism continued among émigré groups of the post-World War II era, yet their political ambitions and activities were of a larger scale than previously. Additional factors contributed to the variegation of this new

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émigré political scene. First, the U.S. government now was at the forefront of the international discourse. Second, an enemy of the past—the Soviets—had reappeared, causing renewed fear and hostility. Finally, the character of the émigrés as a group was more varied by class and political proclivities than before. Thus, the dynamic of Hungarian émigré political affairs became extremely active and colorful during the postwar era. Internal Conflicts The established political émigrés in the United States initially welcomed and embraced some of their colleagues from the homeland, but eventually most of these alliances broke apart. Such was the case between Tibor Eckhardt and Ferenc Nagy. Both expatriates were members of the Smallholders’ Party while in Hungary, and Eckhardt rallied for Nagy’s entry into the United States in 1947. However, they became bitter adversaries in the 1950s. Discrepancies in policy, such as Nagy favoring the establishment of a Hungarian Republic and extensive land reforms and Eckhardt and his supporters opting for the restoration of a monarchical system, caused a rift between the once collegial duo. In 1951, Nagy founded his Hungarian Peasant Association with its newsletter Paraszt Szovetseg Ertesito (Hungarian Peasant Message) that strove to build a new nation based on ethics, not class identity. It regarded the peasants as the foremost representatives of the ethical prerequisite in politics. Meanwhile, Eckhardt remained at the helm of an opposition movement and the two were unwilling and unable to reconcile. As one émigré explained, “the two groups are jockeying for position and since the Hungarian National Council’s Executive Committee has certain limited funds at its disposal, patronage-hungry opportunists among the exiles are carefully watching the struggle in the Council, ready to throw in their lot with whichever group will ultimately gain the upper hand.”24 Thus, the primary impediment to the unification of Hungarians under one umbrella organization was factionalism. Since the interwar period, when the Hungarian American community became more politically oriented, factionalism and strife plagued the émigré society and its organizations. Strong political personalities emerged, each averring to be the honest and true leaders of their community, causing further politicization of the society. Although all expatriates aspired to liberate Hungary from the Soviet clutches, their personal rivalries obstructed any effectual or unified movement. Influential politicians such as Nagy, Béla Varga, and Károly Peyer, all of whom had fled from the Communist threat, brought

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with them resentment not only for the Soviets and Muscovites but also for one another. They imposed these traditional, yet acrimonious, feuds upon the Hungarian society in the United States. As described in a document of the American Council for Nationalities Service, “hardly had they set their feet on American soil and became acquainted with American Hungarian organizations of considerable power and wealth, they quickly made bids to capture their leadership. Obviously they hoped to use American Hungarian institutions of long standing as convenient vehicles for their own personal and political ambitions.”25 Émigrés of more conservative leanings incurred a rash of accusations. For example, Monseignuer Béla Varga, an influential member of the Smallholders’ Party, who had immigrated to the United States in 1947,26 was accused of serving predominately Catholic interests and maintaining a “dictatorial presidency”27 as the President of the Hungarian National Council. Moreover, opponents accused both Varga and Eckhardt of advocating the restoration of the Habsburg monarchy to the throne of Hungary, supporting the reinstatement of Horthy to the government and even cooperating with the Nazis. Among the expatriates of the postwar period, Eckhardt incurred the most criticism and created the greatest rifts both in the United States, where he resided, and in Europe. While in Hungary, Eckhardt served as the President of Awakening Magyars (Ébredö Magyarok Egyesülete), Hungarian representative to the League of Nations and member of the parliament from the Smallholders’ Party. The policies and actions that he sponsored in these capacities came back to haunt him. Eckhardt emigrated in 1940 with the support of Horthy, to establish diplomatic ties with the Allies. This role and the support of the Regent generated much controversy. His adversaries accused him of being “an irredentist, anti-Semite and Admiral Horthy’s lame-duck representative in Washington.”28 Also, Eckhardt’s role as the President of the Awakening Magyars was rehashed and repeatedly criticized.29 The Awakening Magyars were an active and venomous group involved in the White Terror following World War I. Its basic goals were the revision of the Treaty of Trianon, which took away two-thirds of Hungary’s land and population, and the cleansing of the country of Communists and Jews. Eckhardt was no doubt the president of the organization, but he averred that the Prime Minister at the time had hired him to infiltrate and cause the ruination of the group. His opponents naturally questioned this assertion as he further proved anti-Semitic tendencies by voting for the anti-Jewish legislation during the immediate prewar period.30

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However, more liberal politicians also received blows from their opponents. For example, Peyer, who emigrated to the United States in 1949, was a propitious figure within the Hungarian American community. As penned in a letter by the American State Department, “Peyer is well disposed toward the United States. He is the leader of the BIS and labor union faction of the Hungarian Socialist Party in exile . . . Peyer has the support of the greater part of the Hungarian exiles and is in close touch with American labor circles.”31 In spite of his popularity, some condemned Peyer’s ideals and character. One person claimed that he convinced a group of miners in Hungary to strike against the government. Supposedly, after eleven days, Peyer abandoned the cause, due to which he was labeled a traitor who became right “on the skin of the miners” and whom no one should trust.32 Émigrés who represented the political left were not spared either. For example, the attacks on Rusztem Vámbéry exemplified the consistent state of infighting between the expatriates. He was a 1920 émigré and leader of numerous political groups including the Hungarian Socialist Movement (Magyar Szocialista Mozgalom). In 1947, Vámbéry still had hopes for Hungary, even though he disapproved of the Soviet occupation of the country. “In spite of the Soviet pressures, he felt that there was an amazing amount of civil liberties still existing and pointed to the numerous political parties in opposition which had their own papers and which castigated their rivals freely.”33 His leftist leanings rendered him vulnerable to the attacks. As stated by Eckhardt, “his sharp intellect was constantly searching for mistakes committed by his friends and collaborators; all his life he was a menace to the cause, which he just happened to represent.”34 The infighting was not restricted to individuals. It also plagued the various Hungarian American organizations, old and new—those established as fraternal associations and those that had a definite political agendas. The American Hungarian Federation (AHF) was an example of a traditional assistance organization that became integrally embroiled in the virulent political climate of the postwar Hungarian community. Established in 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio, the AHF was one of the strongest and most influential associations in the Hungarian American community. In late 1944, a group of Hungarian Americans organized the Hungarian Relief Movement to provide financial assistance for, and to sponsor, the Hungarians in European internment camps. The AHF was involved with this movement, which lasted until 1953, sending approximately three million dollars to the facilities and sponsoring hundreds of immigrants

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wanting admission into the United States.35 In fact, approximately 5,600 refugees received the federation’s assistance.36 The primary goals of the AHF remained virtually unchanged since 1906. The goals were (1) to serve as respectable citizens of the United States, (2) to acquaint Hungarian immigrants with democracy and wean them from the ideas that “undermine the Constitution of the United States,” (3) to preserve and teach the second generation immigrants the history, art, literature, and culture of the Magyars, (4) to “harmonize” the different efforts of the various Hungarian American organizations, (5) to guard the historical rights of the Hungarian people, (6) to support both American and Hungarian American charities, and (7) “to support, within the Constitution and laws of the United States, a movement for independent Hungary, human rights and citizenship of displaced persons.”37 Though the AHF tenets did not clearly denote any political inclinations or affiliations, and its leaders continuously denied having political agendas, the organization did house members who had ties to explicitly political groups. This caused recrimination against the association as a whole. Some deemed the group a right-wing movement and accused it of participating in political activities, which defied its original mission of being a fraternal and insurance organization established to help the new immigrants integrate into the American system. The critics also pointed out that the AHF was a nonprofit organization, yet it charged dues of two dollars from each member. Its opponents believed that the wealth of many of the federation’s supporters and required membership fees proved that the program as whole was a scam.38 The controversy came to a head in October 1948, when the AHF promised its support to New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey in his presidential campaign against Harry Truman. The Hungarian American newspaper Szabadság printed an article of protest against the federation’s involvement in the campaign, saying “since the Hungarian American Federation is a nonpolitical association and represents many Democrats also, this action is subject to criticism.”39 However, the organization denied the accusations and continued to support Dewey, who was a Republican. The year 1949 proved even more detrimental to AHF’s reputation. Its president, István Balogh, made an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee in Washington, D.C. This incited much protest within various Hungarian American circles because Balogh had spoken to the committee as if he was the official representative of the entire community. Opponents launched a major press campaign against him and the AHF that appeared in publications such as Amerikai Magyar Nepszava

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and Magyar Jöv.40 They not only condemned his actions in Washington, but also resurrected previous accusations, such as that he had sponsored fascists who desired visas to enter the Untied States. Regardless of the tremendous amount of criticism, AHF still received widespread support from many Magyars in the United States. It continued the stance against the Communist ascendancy in Hungary and sent letters to several American politicians addressing that issue. However, its campaigns had no substantial results. The Promise of the Hungarian National Council Immediately after World War II, the Hungarian American community lacked an influential movement that could claim to serve as an authoritative political organization representing the entire immigrant population. As noted earlier, World War II saw the establishment and rapid dissolution of several freedom movements, yet for a short time thereafter, the community actually lacked any legitimate group to assist in the emigration process. It took time to recuperate and regroup following the infighting fiasco during World War II. Some smaller movements arose, such as the one under Vámbéry, yet they were generally ineffective in garnering popular support. However, the appearance of the Hungarian National Council (Magyar Nemzeti Bizottmány, or HNC) in 1947 significantly altered the political atmosphere of the Magyar-American community. Its impact was so great that Hungarians around the world reacted to it both positively and negatively.41 HNC consisted of an executive committee, which included a president, vice president, and several other individual positions, and eight specialized subcommittees dealing with foreign affairs, economy, finance, interior conditions, justice, social welfare, education, national defense, and industrial reconstruction. Unlike previous associations that relied upon the prestige of one prominent individual, most participants of the HNC were ex-members of the Hungarian parliament, that is, socially and politically influential personalities from Hungary. The membership totaled approximately 50,000, whereas 100 former politicians served as the ministers and representatives of the various committees. The number of expatriates actively involved in committee work varied over time.42 In its bylaws, HNC clearly stated that those once associated with the Arrow Cross, that is, Hungarian fascists, were vehemently condemned and refused admission.

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However, some Magyar-Americans accused HNC’s members of having direct contact with fascist sympathizers in Europe. Overall, the primary role of the HNC was to serve as a representative movement of all Magyars around the world and from every class, religion, race, and creed. Its aim was to support the struggle against the Soviets and fascists and to reestablish a democratic system in Hungary. Thus, the HNC was a “democratic ‘shadow government’” or a government-in-exile,43 and as written in a report to the American Council for Nationalities Services, “the make-up of the Executive Committee is such that it could easily be transformed into a Government if and when this should become desirable.”44 Yet, the leading members of the association denied any personal political aspirations. They averred that once Hungary was liberated they would welcome free elections. On April 28, 1949, the HNC held its first assembly in New York City. Its bylaws were drafted by Eckhardt and Nagy. They stated that (1) the president did not have the right to make any independent decisions, (2) after the groups of three made an agreement or decision, they had to publicize the information to all the members of the council, including those who resided overseas, (3) the foreign section also had to inform the American sector of its activities,45 (4) all members of the Executive Committee should respect each other and refrain from making any personal criticisms, and (5) they should reject any financial contributions to the organization that could prove damaging to its reputation.46 Thus, according to its written precepts, the HNC was a unified, cooperative, democratic organization that impartially and respectfully represented a variety of political tenets, excluding fascism and Communism, and the Hungarian American community overall, with the hopes of restoring a multiparty government to Hungary. This agenda was analogous to the other Hungarian American associations of that time, yet its existence was more puissant and controversial. The HNC’s primary focus was on the plight of the refugees and the persecution of those still in Hungary. Its representatives put forth considerable effort to help their homeland. For example, in June 1952, Varga ventured to Europe to witness the conditions in the refugee camps and to ask for the cooperation of other immigrant societies.47 Also, the HNC made several attempts to gain the support and assistance of the U.S. government. It sent letters to various American representatives, pleading for assistance in putting an end to the 1951 deportations in Hungary.48 In one such dispatch, dated June 12, 1951, the signatories asserted that “the civilized world learned the truth about the horrors of

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the Nazi deportations when it was too late to help. This must not happen again. The western world cannot stand by and look on with indifference to what goes on in Central and Eastern Europe.”49 Although the U.S. government sent sympathetic responses to the HNC, apart from verbally condemning the situation, it did nothing to obstruct the deportations. The HNC also mailed letters to government officials on behalf of the Magyar escapees still awaiting admission into America. At Eckhardt’s suggestion, it organized a separate board—the International Refugee Committee—to deal with the DP problem. The only time when the Hungarians received open support from both the U.S. government and American public was during the Mindszenty affair. Paralleling the actions of Stalin, Rákosi initiated economic Five Year Plans in Hungary. To achieve his goals, he attacked those he considered an impediment to the nationalization of land and educational system. Among his first targets were the religious organizations and their leaders, including Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty, Hungarian Primate and Bishop of Esztergom. The cardinal undoubtedly abhorred the Communists and thus commenced an assault on the enemies of the church via the pulpit and other methods of propaganda. Eventually, Rákosi issued an order for his arrest, and on December 23, 1948, the Hungarian secret police took the cardinal into custody, charging him with planning a royalist plot against the republic, espionage, and black market currency dealing. The Hungarian newspaper Szabad Nép wrote that Mindszenty was “the greatest and most reckless enemy of the Hungarian people and the agent of our most wicked enemies.”50 One month later, the government put the cardinal on trial, deemed him guilty and condemned him to a life in prison. For two months thereafter, the Communists arrested more than 1,400 clergy members.51 In response to this, the U.S. government received thousands of letters from Hungarian American organizations and the general population, asking for intervention on behalf of the cardinal. The American Legation in Budapest wrote a letter of protest to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accusing Rákosi and his government of violating Article 2 of the postwar peace treaty that assured all Hungarians of basic political and human rights. Furthermore, the United Nations launched an investigation on the case. Nothing came of it and the Muscovites ignored all of the accusations. Mindszenty remained imprisoned until 1956. Hence, for the most part, the efforts of the post-World War II Hungarian American organizations proved fruitless, except for assisting some refugees. Yet they never ceased to try helping their homeland to free itself from the Soviet

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grasp as well as winning acceptance from Magyars around the world and the United States. To add further tumult to a chaotic situation in the Hungarian American community, in April 1954, Eckhardt resigned from his political post on the executive committee of the HNC. After that, the HNC splintered into more factions and, by 1958, it had completely disappeared from the Hungarian American political scene. Other organizations lasted longer. Among them were the World Federation of Hungarian Veterans (Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közösség, or MHBK), the Hungarian Socialist Movement (Magyar Szocialista Mozgalom) under the leadership of Peyer and the Committee for Hungary’s Liberation, whose role was that of “the guardians and representatives of the just claims of the Hungarians in the free world and of those silenced in the enslaved homeland.”52 All of these groups held the same goal, yet their size and influence did not compare to that of the HNC. Until 1956, local, regional, and even national associations lobbied for their beloved homeland, yet factionalism caused the demise of most of them. It rendered all of them virtually impotent in the struggle against Communism and in their attempts to garner support from their host nation’s government: “Aside from Cold War politics, what discouraged the U.S . . . from sponsoring any of these groups [and expatriates], or at least accept them as legal agencies, was the friction between them.”53 Yet, interestingly, certain government branches, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), found some use for the expatriates. Apparently, the CIA employed Eckhardt to gather and disseminate information.54 However, for the most part, the American government refused to officially back any specific movement in exile and did nothing to halt the establishment of a monolithic Communist regime in Hungary. The 1956ers The mid-1950s brought a brief period of light to the darkness for the Hungarian nation. For a few days, the Magyars experienced a pithy reprieve in their fight for freedom. On March 5, 1953, Josef Stalin died. Thereafter, many satellite nations responded to changes initiated in Moscow and began to de-Stalinize. They shed their hard-line governments and leaders in favor of more moderate ideals and pacesetters. One must realize that they were neither shunning nor condemning Communism. Rather, they craved relief from heavy industrialization, collectivization, and purges, all of which were proving harmful. Thus, Imre Nagy, who had served a prison sentence for being a moderate Communist, was able

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to temporarily dethrone Rákosi in 1953.55 Nagy initiated many changes, particularly in the agricultural and industrial realms. He also fulfilled his promise of releasing and rehabilitating political prisoners in 1954. This “New Course,” a common term used by most Hungarian historians, lasted only briefly in the spring of 1955. It mimicked what was going on in the Soviet Union, namely, the dismissal of Grigorii Malenkov and ascendancy of Nikita Khruschev. In Hungary, Rákosi soon resurfaced and ousted Nagy, accusing him of “right wing deviations.”56 It is important to note that although the government may have shifted back to a more Stalinist disposition, the “public sentiments did not end with the leadership . . . the most durable and important result of the Nagy correction, and of the subsequent, short-lived experiment with reform, was that it served as a point of departure and reference for later, more radical changes.”57 In the United States, a few new organizations arose in reaction to the changes in Hungary. The Committee for Hungary’s Liberation was born in New York City in May 1955. It sought to “liberate Hungary from the double bondage of Russian Communist yoke and from the similarly oppressive occupations of the bordering states, assuring the right of self-determination for all Hungarians living in the Carpathian Basin.”58 During this time, the U.S. government again sent mixed signals to the Hungarians. While it supported the changes, it was unwilling to advocate any particular members of the regime or to get directly involved in the transformation. The following year, Hungary exploded. Poland had just experienced a revolution whose end result was that of political reform. Its neighbor tried to follow suit. In October 1956, a student movement that sought the same objectives as the Poles, such as freedom of the press and release of political prisoners, published and distributed its demands. On October 23, 1956, a group of peaceful demonstrators set out on the streets of Budapest, only to be halted by the police. Shots were fired and the Revolution of 1956 began. At the end of October, the Magyars thought they had defeated the evil Russian Empire as the Soviet tanks rolled out of their country, yet within two weeks, the Soviets had underhandedly and brutally crushed the rebellion. While Soviet tanks were battering the country, 200,000 Magyars fled from their homeland. Thirty thousand Magyars eventually arrived at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. As noted by author Géza Szentmiklósy Éles, “within a short time Camp Kilmer was so overcrowded with the refugees that the United States government pleaded with Americans to sponsor and give them homes and employment.”59 The Hungarian American

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population stepped up to help their Magyar brethren. Assistance was provided by individuals such as Ilonka and Joszef Lang, who took in two physicians, provided them with shelter, taught them English, and found them medical positions in nearby communities. Organizations such as the AHF also provided $512,560 for those coming from their homeland.60 Many other groups and individuals gave aid to the persecuted from Hungary but the welcome was not always so easily received. The character of the 1956 refugees was different from that of previous migrations. This group was predominately from the educated and upper classes. They were neither the old aristocracy nor the Socialists who fled in 1947, but the upper crust of the intelligentsia. They defined themselves as different from the previous émigrés due to their social, economic, and educational background.61 Nevertheless, local and national Hungarian associations did all that they could to help these newcomers, as did other Americans. Sympathy rang far and wide for the 56ers. This openness allowed for their settlement throughout the United States, not just in those areas where a significant Hungarian American community existed. At the same time, the Hungarian American community had no single unified movement with the same membership and intensiveness that the HNC once had. The last bout with the HNC had caused the debilitation of major politicians such as Eckhardt and Nagy and damaged their reputations nationally and internationally. Several of the expatriates participated in the relief efforts during 1956, but their role was minimal when compared to years past. So, once again, the goals of the émigré organizations were the same—namely, to help the refugees and to free their homeland from the oppressive yoke of Communism, yet they remained divided, small-scale, and limited in their influence. The U.S. government’s reaction to the uprising did not help matters. While verbally condemning the situation and making subtle promises to the Hungarian Americans and Hungarians in Hungary, the U.S. government did nothing to help. Instead, it confused the Magyars and gave them false hopes. U.S. inaction bolstered the Soviets’ confidence. Consequently, Hungary remained under the control of the Russians for another thirty-three years. Conclusion The Hungarian community in the United States saw an aggrandized amount of political activity after World War II. A plethora of smaller as well as national and international organizations under the leadership of

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prominent figures arose to assist the refugees and protest the ascendancy of the Muscovites. At the same time, Hungarian émigré politics was characterized by conflicts and disagreements. Although 1956 brought internal unity within Hungary against Soviet aggression, it was still met with divisiveness among Hungarians in the West. An amalgam of personal and organizational splits, indifference on the part of the United States, and the socioeconomic differences between the émigrés all added to the political conflicts that predetermined the fate of Hungary after World War II. Without a consolidated and cooperative movement and the support of the Western governments, Hungary had no chance of impeding its absorption into the Soviet satellite system. Notes 1. After the temporary Communist regime under Béla Kun, which lasted 133 days, the next Hungarian government banned the Communist Party. However, it survived throughout the interwar period. 2. László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War 1945–1956 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 82. 3. In 1948, Jozef Broz Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia, was expelled from the COMINFORM that labeled him, among the disciples of Stalin, as a traitor. Thus, anyone who associated or sympathized with Tito also earned the reputation of an enemy of Communism. 4. “Tildy Reports Progress,” New York Times, March 15, 1948, 10. 5. Tamas Aczel and Tibor Meray, The Revolt of the Mind: A Case History of the Intellectual Resistance Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), 200. 6. U.S. State Department, Records of the Department of State Regarding the Internal Affairs of Hungary, 1933–1956, October 1950, General Records of the Department of State, The National Archives, Washington, D.C. 7. Ibid., November 3, 1950. 8. Some Hungarians established organizations such as the Hungarian Freedom Movement (Magyar Szabadságmozgalom), the Fraternal Organization of Hungarian Veterans (Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közösség), and the The Hungarists (Hungárista Mozgalom) in Europe, whereby each contained members with fascist and/or questionable military connections. They all harbored anti-Semitic feelings, staunchly opposed Communism, and claimed to be the lawful governmentin-exile. See Judith Fai-Podlipnik, “Feuding Hungarians in the West: Troubles with the Struggle Against Communist Ascendancy in Hungary, 1945–1956,” International Social Science Review 82, nos. 1–2 (2007), 3–19. 9. The White Terror of 1919–20 was a government-sponsored movement that targeted and rid Hungary of the Bolshevik threat, but in accord with the revisionist and nationalistic spirit of the time, Jews, who were not associated with the Communists, also became the victims.

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10. Kázmér Nagy, Elveszett Alkotmány: A Magyar Politikai Emigráció 1945–1975 (Budapest: Gondolat, 1984), 22. 11. Alexander Boros, Their New World: A Comparative Study of the Assimilation Patterns of Four Waves of Hungarian Immigration (Kent: Kent State University, 1959), 140. 12. “Felhivas,” Tibor Echkardt Manuscripts, Box 16, Magyar Emigrans Folyóratok, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 13. Nagy, Elveszett Alkotmány, 58. 14. Stephen Kertesz, “Peacemaking on the Dark Side of the Moon; Hungary 1943– 1947,” The Review of Politics 40, no. 4 (1978):487. 15. “U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Nationality Monthly,” February 1, 1949, American Council for Nationalities Service Documents, Box, 3, File D.P., Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 16. “President Orders Speedy Admission of More Refugees,” New York Times, December 23, 1945, 3. 17. Robert Tucker, Charles Keeley, and Linda Wrigley, Immigration and United States Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), 73, 88. 18. U.S. Department of State, Records of the Department of State Relating to the Problems of Relief and Refugees in Europe Arising from World War II and Its Aftermath, 1938–1949, November 21, 1945, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, The National Archives, Washington, D.C. 19. American Council for Nationalities Service, “The DP Problem and America,” Shipment 7, Box 4, File International Refugee Organization, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneappolis. 20. Ibid., Shipment 3, Box, 9, File Finished Project, 1951–58. 21. Borhi, Hungary and the Cold War 1945–1956, 274. 22. Ibid., 285. 23. Charles Gati, Failed Illusions, Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), 112. 24. American Council for Nationalities Service, Shipment 3, Box 18, File NCFE, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 25. Ibid. 26. U.S. Department of State, Records of the Department of State Regarding the Internal Affairs of Hungary, 1933–1956, June 3, 1947, General Records of the Department of State, The National Archives, Washington, DC. 27. “Magyar Bizottsag, 1952,” Tibor Eckhardt Manuscripts, Box 15, Magyar Emigrans Folyóratok, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 28. “In Defense of Tibor Eckhardt” Box 1, Tibor Echkardt Manuscripts, Magyar Emigrans Folyóratok, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 29. American Council for Nationalities Service, “Introduction to the Political Divisions of Hungarian Americans,” Shipment 3, Box 18, File Hungarian NCFE, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

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30. As a representative of the Smallholders’ Party in the Parliament, Eckhardt voted in favor of the first anti-Semitic bill on May 28, 1938. It reduced Jewish involvement in financial, industrial, and commercial enterprises to 20 percent and in the movie industry, theater, and press to 5 percent (Randolf Braham, The Politics of Genocide, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 125. 31. U.S. Department of State, Records of the Department of State Regarding the Internal Affairs of Hungary, 1933–1956, August 24, 1949, General Records of the Department of State, The National Archives, Washington, DC. 32. “Magyar Bizottsag, 1950,” Tibor Eckhardt Manuscripts, Box 16, Magyar Emigrans Folyóratok, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 33. Note that this was still in 1947. See U.S. Department of State, Records of the Department of State Regarding the Internal Affairs of Hungary, 1933–1956, October 2, 1947, General Records of the Department of State, The National Archives, Washington, DC. 34. Tibor Eckhardt, “Unpublished Autobiography” (New York: The Hungarian Library), 36. 35. Steven Bela Vardy, The Hungarian Americans (Boston: Troayne, 1985), 114. 36. American Council for Nationalities Service, Shipment 3, Box 18, File Hungarians, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 37. Ibid. 38. American Council for Nationalities Service, Shipment 4, Box 1, File Reports on Foreign Language Publications, June 1–15, 1948, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 39. Ibid., October 1948. 40. The AHF and others averred that the two aforementioned papers were tools of the leftists and Communists. 41. Other Hungarian émigré organizations existed, too. Their goals were the elimination of the Soviets from their homeland. However, they, too, experienced infighting. For further information on the Central European Hungarian Association, see Fai-Podlipnik, “Feuding Hungarians in the West.” 42. Vardy, The Hungarian Americans, 127. 43. “Emigres Starting to Unite on ‘Shadow Governments,’” New York Times, August 30, 1948, 4. 44. American Council for Nationalities Service, Shipment 3, Box 8, File NCFE, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 45. The foreign section was located in Paris, France, though the bulwark of the movement was in the United States. 46. “Magyar Bizottsag, 1949,” Tibor Eckhardt Manuscripts, Box 15, Magyar Emigrans Folyóratok, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 47. Ibid., Box 16. 48. As an avid adherent to Stalin’s methods, Rakosi attacked those who rejected his programs and decrees on collectivization, nationalization, and industrialization.

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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For example, the police arrested thousands of wealthy peasants who refused to become collectivized. The fate of these unfortunates was either internment camps or prisons. Some were even deported to the Soviet Union’s Gulag. U.S. Department of State, Records of the Department of State Regarding the Internal Affairs of Hungary, 1933–1956, June 12, 1951, General Records of the Department of State, The National Archives, Washington, DC. “Cardinal Labeled Imperialist Agent,” New York Times, December 31, 1948, 6. “‘Blow Up’ Foreseen in Central Europe,” New York Times, February 10, 1949, 15. Géza Szentmiklósy Éles, Two Hungarian Immigrations, Victims of Misconceptions (Cleveland, OH, 1975), 78. Fai-Podlipnik, “Feuding Hungarians,” 8. John Bakeless to Hamilton F. Armstrong, July 20, 1973, John Bakeless Papers, New York Public Library, New York; Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 98–99. As noted earlier, just like Stalin, Rákosi purged Communists deemed too lenient and “Titoist” during the last phase of establishing his monolithic regime. Nagy fit into this category. Peter Sugar, Peter Hanák, and Tibor Frank, A History of Hungary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 376. János Rainer, “The New Course in Hungary in 1953,” Cold War International History Project 38 (2002):55. Éles, Two Hungarian Immigrations, 78. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 63. Julianna Puskás, Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York: Homes & Meier, 2000), 282.

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CHAPTER 5

The Highs and Lows of Czech and Slovak Émigré Activism Prokop Tomek

Open anti-communist struggle, both in Czechoslovakia and among Czechs and Slovaks in exile, began with the Communist coup of February 1948. This event constituted a major political change that posed a serious threat to the political elite of pre-World War II democratic Czechoslovakia. The state terror began right after the Communists seized power and continued for about five years. The new regime liquidated entire social groups either physically or by confiscating their property and applying various administrative measures. As a result, an entire class of private farmers, craftsmen, and businessmen was destroyed. Non-communist intellectuals were forced to take manufacturing jobs without the possibility of doing intellectual work for a long time, and often, forever. The Communists tried to control the churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church by closing its monasteries and interning most of the monks and nuns, imprisoning senior authorities of the church, and isolating the Catholic Church from the Vatican. The Communists also took over all other political parties. The Social Democrats were incorporated into the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1949. The formerly powerful democratic parties such as the National Social Party and the People’s Party were transformed into loyal puppet organizations. Any political opposition was outlawed and those who dared to protest were imprisoned or executed. In essence, the Communists destroyed democratic civil society and created a uniform public organized into Communist-controlled professional

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and social organizations. In response to all this, a large number of democratic politicians and ordinary citizens fled Czechoslovakia and became refugees. The Czech and Slovak Minority in the United States—The Nineteenth Century Until 1948 The Czech and Slovak minority in the United States had been developing since the nineteenth century. In 1870, there were about 40,000 Czechs and Moravians (a Slavic minority residing in Western regions of Czechoslovakia) in the United States. In 1920, already over 800,000 Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks resided in the United States. They were mainly economic immigrants. Immigration from the industrially underdeveloped Slovakia continued during the years of the Czechoslovak Republic. During the first twenty years of the twentieth century, about 500,000 Slovaks arrived in the United States, and by 1940, over a million Czechs and Slovaks lived in the United States. By the early 1950s, the émigré community in America constituted the largest concentration of Czechs and Slovaks outside of Czechoslovakia. Their loyality to the United States was unquestionable, yet many preserved close ties to their homeland. They created various national associations and remained religiously active. They also provided significant help to Tomas Garrigue Masaryk during World War I when he visited the United States, seeking help for his idea of Czechoslovak independence. Independent Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918. Due to linguistic and ethnic similarities, and also because of the need to outnumber the German minority in the Czech lands, Masaryk declared the creation of a united Czech and Slovak nation. Soon after, some Slovak politicians began a struggle for the creation of independent Slovak state, so even in the United States, there were both united Czechoslovak and separate Czech and Slovak émigré organizations. The founder of the Czechosolovak state Masaryk was intellectually opposed to Communism, and during the 1920s, Czechoslovakia gave home to a large number of former aristocrats and democratically oriented Russian refugees. However, in general, Soviet Russia was not seen as a threat to independent Czechoslovakia. When the Czechoslovak Communist Party was founded in 1921, it became a loyal member of the Communist International, yet it participated in the Parliamentary elections and actually received a notable number of votes. In 1935, Masaryk signed the Russo-Czechoslovak Mutual Assistance Pact

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in which Russia agreed to help in a case of invasion providing that France would help, too. Nevertheless, Soviet Russia offered no support when, in the fall of 1938, independent Czechoslovakia was destroyed by Nazi Germany. Its borderlands, populated by ethnic Germans, were cut off and added to Germany. On March 15, 1939, the rest of Czech and Moravian lands were occupied by German troops, and the so-called Protectorate of Czech and Moravian lands was established by the decree of Adolf Hitler. Slovakia was transformed into a formally independent state, while, in reality, it was completely under Nazi control. During this period, Slovak authorities took part in the Holocaust of Slovak Jews. During World War II, Czechs and Slovaks in the United States participated in the so-called Second Fight movement, which was dedicated to fighting the Nazis and restoring national independence.1 It was led from Great Britain by the second president of Czechoslovakia and a friend of Masaryk, Edvard Beneš. In the United States, the movement organized protests, manifestations, and other actions such as a demonstration in Chicago on September 25, 1938, attended by 65,000 people.2 Recent refugees from the Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia joined in as well. As the leader of the resistance movement, Beneš tried to unite the exile community but not everyone accepted his authority. Some opponents argued that his conception of Czechoslovakia had failed and the only reason it had been able to last was because of the assurances of the Versailles treaty. Other critics pointed out that Beneš was too willing to cooperate with Moscow and with the Czechoslovak Communists and that he saw German Nazis as a bigger danger to Czechoslovakia than the Communists, even though they were both equally threatening to Czechoslovakia’s independence. Another notable critic of Beneš was the powerful rightwing politician in exile, General Lev Prchala. During World War II, he founded the Czechoslovak National Commitee as a part of the Central European Federation.3 After the war, Prchala remained in exile and surrounded himself with various Czech right-wing politicians. The so-called Prchala movement cooperated with Polish right-wing exiles, representatives of Germans from the Sudetenlands, and propagated the idea of the Central European Federation.4 Prchala planned to create volunteer troops to fight the Communists in Czechoslovakia. He did not believe that the large world powers cared about countries like Czechoslovakia and thought that only associations such as the Central European Federation could ensure the Czech independence. Prchala was an advocate of traditional Christian values and radical anti-communism but he failed to

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realize his plans in the bipolar world of the post-World War II era. His federalist movement found limited support in Europe and had only marginal influence in the United States. Beneš also received a lot of opposition from the émigré activists of Slovak independence. Most of them were politicians of the independent Slovak state. They had fled Slovakia in fears of retribution at the end of World War II. This group was highly pro-Catholic and believed that the ultimate authority was the Vatican. It was widely popular among Slovaks in the United States. The movement was helped by the arrival of Karol Sidor in 1948. He was a right-wing nationalist politician who had served as an ambassador of the Slovak state in the Vatican since 1939. He became the chair of the Slovak National Council Abroad, which was first headquartered in Canada and later moved to the United States. Through this organization, Sidor promoted the idea of incorporating Slovakia into a European federation. This concept even won recognition from the biggest Slovak organization in the United States—the Slovak League, which, during its 30th Congress in 1949, adopted a program for the creation of an independent Slovakia within a federal Europe.5 Another Slovak independence activist was Ferdinand Ďurčanský, who had been a politician in Slovakia from 1940–45. In exile, he surrounded himself with radical henchmen demanding restoration of the Slovak state in its 1939–45 form. Their organization was first called the Slovak Action Committee and later renamed the Slovak Liberation Committee. Although it promoted anticommunism, its main ideology was Slovak separatism. Notably, all Slovak exiles in the United States shared anti-communist attitudes. They opposed Communism as an atheist ideology and they also could not forget that the Czechoslovak Communists, with Soviet help, had destroyed the first formally independent Slovak state of 1939–45. The Slovak exiles’ political program aimed at the restoration of Slovak nation-state, possibly within some European federation or confederation. Their argument for independence was rooted in the widely accepted postWorld War I principle of the right of every nation to self-determination. The Slovak independence movement in exile slowed down after the death of Karol Sidor in 1953, although organizations such as the Slovak Liberation Board and the World Congress of Slovaks lasted well into the 1960s and 1970s.

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The Arrival of the Post-1948 Exiles In the years after February 1948, the United States received a new wave of émigrés from Czechoslovakia. These refugees were predominately Czechs and supporters of Beneš, who favored a self-governed, united, and democratic Czechoslovak Republic. This group received a lot of sympathy in the United States because their views were seen as similar to the political values of this country. These exiles also enjoyed a certain extent of legitimacy due to the auhority positions they had held in democratic Czechoslovakia. They found little in common with the earlier immigrant groups whose goal was not the restoration of a united Czechoslovak state. In general, most of the existing immigrant communities were involved in charity work and providing support to the refugees and few explicitly political initiatives originated from them. A rare exception was the American Committee for the Liberation of Czechoslovakia, established in 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio, and dedicated to the fight against the Communist oppression in Czechoslovakia. Thus, at least initially, the arrival of the new exiles rejuvenated political activism among the Czech and Slovak minorities. Soon, however, this immigration stream dissipitated and most refugees assimilated.6 The new émigré population consisted of a variety of groups. One of such groups contained more than a hundred diplomatic representatives of democratic Czechoslovakia who had remained abroad. A much larger group consisted of those who had left in order to combat Communism from abroad. Others simply did not wish to live under Communism or had economic reasons to emigrate. Altogether, about 25,000 people left within three years after the Communist coup. Although it was illegal to leave Czechoslovakia from February 1948 to 1964, there were some openings for crossing the borders with Austria and Germany, mostly on foot. In 1951, the Communist regime began to install fences of barbed wire with electric current on the western border with West Germany and Austria. Due to this, the number of refugees dropped dramatically, to only about 300 per year. By 1965, about 100 people had been killed trying to escape. Allegedly, the chairman of the Czechoslovak Communist Party at the time, Klement Gottwald, welcomed the departure of domestic opposition and did not fear their influence from abroad. Nevertheless, the State Security organization (StB) felt differently. To them, the refugees were an enemy that they wanted to keep under control.

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Upon their arrival in the American zone in Germany, the Czechoslovak refugees were investigated by the U.S. military’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) due to fear of infiltration by the Communist secret police and in order to obtain information. Naturally, the first experiences abroad were difficult for the refugees. Most of them lived first in overcrowded refugee camps in Germany. The process of emigration to other countries was lengthy and difficult. Even two years after the Communist coup, more than 10,000 Czechs and Slovaks still resided in the refugee camps in Europe. Prominent politicians trying to escape Czechoslovakia had it easier than regular refugees. Some of them were deployed to a villa in Oberusel in Frankfurt am Main. After a short wait, they were allowed to travel to other countries, mainly Great Britain and the United States. This special treatment was due to the expectation in the West that the politicians could provide valuable information on the situation in Czechoslovakia and propose a plan of action for fighting the Communists. Sometimes, however, the escape did not succeed. For example, deputy prime minister and chairman of the People’s Party, Jan Šrámek, and his colleague, minister of Postal Services Frantisek Hála—both Catholic priests and longstanding Christian politicians—were arrested by the state security at the small, rural airport, waiting for illegal departure with a French aircraft on March 21, 1948. They remained under strict internment until Hála died in 1952, and Šrámek, in 1956. The first Czechoslovak political refugees did not arrive in the United States until 1950. The delay was mainly due to the low immigrant admission quotas and the complex immigration laws. The relocation of the refugees to the United States was greatly helped by the establishment of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees (AFCR). The Czechoslovak National Council of America, the largest exile organization, maintained close and supportive contacts with the AFCR, which built a good connection between the old and the new groups of exiles. In 1950, the AFCR became a partner of U.S. authorities in relocating the refugees. It arranged guarantors and employment and paid the cost of travel for each refugee. By 1990, the AFCR had helped about 200,000 refugees from Czechoslovakia settle in the United States. The AFCR also acted as a human rights advocate for people inside Czechoslovakia. For example, it issued a publication written by a former diplomat of democratic Czechosolovakia, Jan Papánek, on the conditions in labor camps in Communist Czechoslovakia, asking the United Nations (UN) to investigate this situation. The new refugee population contained the elites of all democratic political parties. The largest group was the leadership of the Czechoslovak

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National Social Party. Its chairman and deputy prime minister, Petr Zenkl, deputy prime minister Hubert Ripka, minister of education Jaroslav Stránský, general secretary of the Party Vladimir Krajina, and two members of Parliament—Julius Firt and Ota Hora—all found themselves in exile. The members of Parliament of the second most influential force, the People’s Party—Ivo Duchacek and Adolf Prochazka—emigrated, too. Also among the refugees were journalists Ferdinand Peroutka and Pavel Tigrid, who were associated with the People’s Party. The Slovak Democratic Party in exile was represented by its chairman, Jozef Lettrich, and two members of Parliament—Martin Kvetko and Samuel Belluš. Two ministers from the Social Democratic Party’s leadership—Vaclav Majer and Blazej Vilím—escaped abroad. The Sudeten Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II, and now found themselves in exile, constituted a particular case. Politically, they supported Social and Christian Democrats. However, none of the Czech and Slovak political parties in exile wanted to imply a revision of the German expulsion in 1945–46 and therefore refused to develop any relations with representatives of this former minority. The only exception in this case was the federalist movement of General Prchala. Soon, most of the former political leaders realized that the continuation of the kind of active political life they were used to was unrealistic in exile. It was hard to maintain political parties in exile. One of the biggest problems was the lack of financial resources necessary for funding party offices and paying staff members. Some of the politicians had personal financial difficulties. Many of them worked manual labor and only a few received some sort of financial aid from the U.S. government through the National Committee for a Free Europe. All of this greatly complicated their political abilities and, eventually, their parties turned into small, private groups that issued occasional memoranda and declarations. Response to the Communist Coup in the West The Western diplomats in Prague had warned the local politicians that Czechoslovakia should not count on Western assistance in opposing the Communists, and they were correct about this. Archival sources show that the West knew about the true nature of events in Czechslovakia in 1948.7 Nevertheless, Western governments remained inactive. This lack of response could be explained by the failure of the Czechoslovak democratic leaders to prove their commitment to democracy in the preceding

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years. They had not been able to send a clear signal of their desire for democracy, and now the West offered no help. The West interpreted the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia as a signal for the need to strengthen its own defense against possible threats from the East. It was understood in the West that the coup in Prague was likely to affect the division of Germany and the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany and NATO. Therefore, the United States intensified its influence in Europe. For example, on the day of the coup, the International Bank and the Czechoslovak government were scheduled to have a meeting about the Czechoslovak request for a $350 million loan. On February 27, 1948, Secretary of State George Marshall announced that the U.S. government had terminated all loans and restricted exports to Czechoslovakia. This development led to a practically full economic embargo by all Western nations. One of the loudest expressions of opposition to the Communist coup in the West was initiated by Czechoslovak representative to the UN, a Slovak, Ján Papánek. He submitted protests to UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie on February 25 and March 10, 1948. Papánek demanded that the UN initiate a criminal investigation on the use of violence by the Czechoslovak Communists, as assisted by Moscow. He declared that the takeover in Czechoslovakia had been illegal and gave examples of repressions after the coup. Secretary-General Lie rejected both protests on the grounds that Papánek was no longer the representative of Czechoslovakia but a mere private person. Then, on March 12, 1948, the Chilean delegate to the UN agreed to present Papánek’s protest note as his own request. Trygve Lie opposed the request again. When the Chilean government submitted its request for the second time on March 16, 1948, Lie finally agreed to put the Czechoslovak matter on the agenda of the Security Council. There, Papánek’s note was presented by Argentina. The UN Security Council formally discussed the note without any notable results. In fact, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia was covered during ten meetings of the Security Council between March 17 and May 26, 1948, but no resolution was ever adopted and the Soviet Union vetoed a decision on this issue twice. Papánek was invited to the meeting of the Security Council twice. In protest, the new UN representative from Communist Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Houdek (who later defected to the West), did not attend the meetings. Ultimately, the efforts of Papánek had little effect and proved the disinterest of the Western nations in Czechoslovakia’s plight.

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The Active Period of Exile Anti-Communism The period between 1948 and 1956 was arguably the most active period of Czech and Slovak anti-communism in exile. It focused on a number of key issues. First, the exiles had to decide who could take on the role of defeating the Communists. Second, they had to develop the new political leadership of the so-called Third Fight movement.8 Additionally, the Czechs and Slovaks in exile had to create an organization that could unite and represent them. Western governments, especially the Americans, perceived the émigré organizations from the Communist controlled countries as a crucial instrument of the cold war. They could be used for propaganda purposes as representatives of the captive nations and, in some cases, as sources of important intelligence information. However, the émigrés themselves were incapable of creating an organized anti-communist movement in the West due to a wide range of internal conflicts, which divided the Czechs and Slovaks into a large number of competing groups. Most of them replicated the divisions from the former Czechoslovak political system. Also, unlike the previous immigrants, the new political refugees lacked strong leading figures. During World War I, émigrés were united behind Tomas Masaryk, while during World War II, their leader was Edvard Beneš. After 1948, the émigré leadership was in the hands of various conflicting factions. Still, the émigrés tried. Preparations for the establishment of a united exile organization began in the spring of 1948 in Europe. In July 1948, further negotiations were held in New York City. The unifying organization— the Council of Free Czechoslovakia (CFC)—was expected to be founded on October 28, 1948, that is, the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of independent Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, the project was marked by major difficulties, causing delays. Among the controversies were issues such as who would fill the key positions, the nature of the Czechoslovak state, the size of Slovak representation, and the authority of the new organization. Finally, the establishment of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia was set for the end of February 1949 in Washington, D.C. The former Czechoslovak deputy prime minister, Petr Zenkl, became the chairmanelect of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia. His deputy was the chairman of the Slovak Democratic Party, Joseph Lettrich. The headquarters of the new organization were established in Washington, D.C., with branch offices in London and Paris. Although the Council of Free Czechoslovakia

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tried to include all exile political organizations, the Slovak separatists and Czech federalists did not join it. The founding of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia was announced to the governments of thirty-nine countries, twenty-one of which acknowledged its creation. The Council of Free Czechoslovakia tried to speak on behalf of the subjugated people of Czechoslovakia.9 Although the council tried, it failed to act as the government-in-exile, and had to respect the formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Among the council’s main goals were providing assistance to the refugees and the restoration of democratic and independent Czechoslovakia. It managed to become an arena of activity for dozens of Czech and Slovak politicians and diplomats. Unfortunately, its work was often paralyzed by disputes among its participants. Most of these conflicts were about the organization’s leadership. In 1949, the Council of Free Czechoslovakia purchased a house in Washington, D.C., for its permanent office and began to employ its own staff. During the 1950s, the council was able to issue several publications, such as The Council of Free Czechoslovakia Rapporteur (1949–54), Voice of Czechoslovakia (1951–55), and Czechoslovak Newspaper (1955–57). During its early period, the Council of Free Czechoslovakia greatly relied on the support of its host country. Its relations with the U.S. government were mediated through a nongovernmental organization—the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), which also provided financial support to the CFC. On January 25, 1951, the Board of the CFC split. Zenkl and his followers left because of controversy surrounding appointments, but then on January 15, 1952, the Board reunited thanks to the efforts of the journalist Ferdinand Peroutka and the NCFE. In the 1960s, the activities of the council were marked by a gradual retirement of its original founders. Without much hope for a change in Czechoslovakia, the council became increasingly passive. Then, during the 1970s, the council was restored thanks to the involvement of a new group of political refugees who had fled Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the 1968 revolution in Prague. Still, the core of its leadership consisted of descendants of the post-February 1948 émigrés. The council continued its activities even after the fall of the Communist regime until 1994, when it was transformed into the Council of Reciprocity between Czechs and Slovaks. As noted, the late 1940s and early 1950s was, politically, the most lively period in the history of Czech and Slovak exile in the United States. However, due to censorship, closed borders, and activities of the secret

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police, the exile groups had little contact with the opposition inside Communist Czechoslovakia. At the height of the isolation in the early 1950s, the Communist regime began persecuting remaining political opponents, such as the former member of the National Social Party, Milada Horákova, and her alleged followers. The intensification of political persecution ignited exile anti-communists, yet they had limited opportunities to change the situation. In order to express their concerns, a delegation from the Czechoslovak National Council of America presented a memorandum to President Harry Truman on June 3, 1948. The document demanded free elections in Czechoslovakia under the supervision of the UN.10 President Truman received a delegation of the Czechoslovak National Council of America again on March 5, 1949. Then, thanks to close contacts with the Slovak exile community, Republican Congressman Charles J. Kersten submitted Resolution No. 139 on July 1, 1951, to the U.S. Congress. The resolution was discussed by the Congressional Committee on Foreign Policy. In its text, Congress expressed a hope for the Czech and Slovak nations to soon be liberated from Communist rule and asked the president of the United States to take appropriate measures. This document anticipated the later steps of the Republican Party. Before the presidential elections of 1952, the Republican Party formulated its policy toward the enslaved European countries. Moreover, the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, adopted harsh rhetoric describing Eastern European countries as captive nations. But nothing changed beyond the strong words. By the end of 1954, even the anticommunist rhetoric of the Republican Party had disappeared. After the Soviets crushed the uprising in Hungary in 1956 and the West did not respond, the émigrés’ enthusiasm had sharply declined. Nevertheless, there were still some forms of anti-communist activism and some supporters that the Czechoslovak exiles in the United States were able to use. For example, there were a few American organizations that helped the exiles’ anti-communist cause. In 1947, the American Heritage Foundation created a company called the Crusade for Freedom. This was an explicitly anti-communist organization that led a campaign of sending balloons with leaflets across the German border into Czechoslovakia. Another important supporter was the aforementioned National Committee for a Free Europe, which created Radio Free Europe (RFE). For the Czechoslovak exiles, Radio Free Europe was an extremely important project. As noted, the exile activities were usually short-term and quite marginal. Most of the activism was carried out by a few individuals. Moreover, the Czech and Slovak exile communities were unable to

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unite and coordinate their actions. Their influence on the people inside Czechoslovakia was also limited. RFE was the only significant exception to this pattern because it was a well established and lasting instrument that could break through the information blockade of the Communist regime. RFE’s first thirty-minute program of news and political analysis for Czechoslovakia was broadcast on July 4, 1950. It was transmitted by a shortwave transmitter of 7.5 kW named “Barbara,” which was located in a cargo car in German territory near the Czechoslovak border. Official broadcasting began on May 1, 1951, from Munich. During the early period, programs were created by editors in New York and prepared recordings were transported by air to Munich for broadcasting. The creation of the Czechoslovak desk of RFE was followed by programs for Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. In November 1952, RFE opened a building equipped with twenty-two studios and all necessary technology. On March 1, 1953, the sister radio station, The Liberation (later, Radio Liberty), began its broadcasts to the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. Then the dramatic year of 1956 arrived. The revelations about the Stalin’s crimes, followed by the unrest in Poland and Hungary, raised a lot of hopes, while the violent suppression of the Hungarian revolution crushed them all. RFE faced accusations of having created the unrest. Although the radio station was cleared of all allegations, RFE still received a lot of criticism for expressing open support to the insurgents and for inspiring unfounded hopes among the Hungarians about possible help from the West. After this, the political atmosphere changed, as everyone understood that the balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States was going to remain unchanged. No liberation of Eastern Europe was to be expected soon. Another venue of anti-communist activism for Czechoslovak émigrés was the radio station Voice of America (VOA). It had already started broadcasting in the Czech and Slovak languages in 1942. It gained new significance after the Communist coup of 1948 when the VOA employed a number of the new exiles. Still, the character of its broadcasting remained different from that of RFE. VOA was the official government radio station and its main role was to explain the policy of the United States as opposed to fighting Communist regimes. Finally, there were a few military anti-communist organizations that were created abroad after the coup of February 1948. One of them was active in German territory under American control. It was Czechoslovak guard platoon no. 4091, formed as a labor service to the U.S. army and

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entitled “Labor Service Company Czechoslovakian.” Its members wore U.S. army uniforms with the insignia of the Czechoslovak military and the flag of Czechoslovak Republic. The commander of this unit was Major Karel Černý, who had been a personal attaché of General Heliodor Píka at the Czechoslovak military mission in Moscow and had served in France and Great Britain during World War II. This unit was supposed to be the core of the future Czechoslovak foreign army in the event of an armed conflict with the Communists. Also, in the case of an outbreak of a third world war, the members of this unit were expected to serve as interpreters and advisers to the U.S. military. The Labor Service Unit existed only for a short while. However, resistance activities in the area of the Czechoslovak border with the American zone in Germany continued. This border with the West was very important and thousands of people were involved in anticommunist resistance on both its sides. Their struggle cost hundreds of lives of couriers who were executed, shot at the border, or imprisoned in Communist prison camps. Colonel Charles Katek played a key role in the resistance activities under American control. Katek was born in Chicago to parents of Czech origin. During World War II, Katek led the Czechoslovak group in the Office of Strategic Services. Katek created strong friendships with a number of Czechoslovak officers. For example, while in London, he established contacts with Colonel František Moravec, who organized airdrops of parachutes in the Nazi-occupied Czechoslovak territory. After the war, Katek led the American military mission in Prague and later took a position of a military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Prague. In March 1948, the Communist government expelled Katek from Czechoslovakia for his support to democratic politicians. In the summer of 1948, Katek led the CIA headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, where he organized Czechoslovak spy groups. In 1954, Katek was summoned back to Washington, but between 1960 and 1965, he worked at the American embassy in Vienna. The Council of Free Czechoslovakia had a clear intention of becoming a leader of the anti-communist resistance movement. For this purpose, the council created a base for its own intelligence organization and its three branches were subsidized by the American, British, and French intelligence. In 1949, this organization was led by General Sergej Ingr, who, during World War I, had been a member of the Czechoslovakia Legion in Russia and France. Between 1940 and 1944, Ingr was the minister of defense in the Czechoslovak government in exile, and from 1944 to April 1945, he was the chief of the Czechoslovak army. After the war, he was

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discharged due to his highly anti-communist opinions, and in December 1947, he was appointed to the position of an envoy of Czechoslovakia in the Netherlands. In response to the coup of 1948, Ingr resigned and remained active in the anti-communist resistance until his death in Paris in 1956. Under Ingr’s subordination were these heads of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia’s intelligence sections associated with the Allied intelligence organizations. These leaders were General Frantisek Moravec in the United States, Lieutenant Colonel Karel Jindřich Procházka in Great Britain, and General Čeněk Kudláček in France. All three components of this organization operated in the U.S.-controlled parts of Germany and Austria. Unfortunately, a concept of a single intelligence service was not successful. Each section, associated with a particular Allied intelligence service, was completely independent and mainly served its direct sponsors. Their submission to the Council of Free Czechoslovakia was not implemented effectively and the only unifying element was General Ingr himself. What did the structure of the Czechoslovak resistance under the auspices of the United States look like? The organizing of the Czechoslovak intelligence groups was initiated in the American occupation zone in Germany during the summer of 1948. The central figure in this project was the aforementioned Charles Katek, who led the activities of a cover organization, the Economic Research Unit based in Regensburg. Katek’s representatives were Kurt Taub—who took control of the groups of Colonel Jaroslav Kašpar—Major Rudolf Drbohlav, Major František Bogataj, Colonel Alois Šedý, and General Frantisek Moravec. Each group consisted of the head and two or three assistants, who each managed several couriers. One person also served as a secretary and a translator. Couriers of information were recruited in the refugee camps. Their task was to make a number of trips along the entire border. Later, these intelligencegathering groups were merged under the command of General Frantisek Moravec. However, by the end of the 1950s, their activities had ceased completely. The reason for this was, among other things, the dramatic suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the West’s failure to help. The exiles were highly disappointed with this turn of events. In addition, they also had realized that the United States and the Soviet Union were entering the stage of détente, and thus, the resistance movement lost its hope for a victory. The loss of interest on the part of the U.S. government might have been due to the series of failures and weak results of this espionage enterprise. The couriers had limited skills in gathering intelligence

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and they faced a lot of difficulties. With the development of more open contacts between the Western and Communist controlled countries, the foreign intelligence services were able to recruit new informants from among the Czechoslovak citizens who visited the West. Response of the Communist Regime About two years after the coup, the Communist regime began to perceive the émigrés as its significant opponent. It actively tried to penetrate émigré organizations and organized political and propaganda countermeasures aimed at attacking and demobilizing the émigré community. The antiémigré work began in the early to mid-1950s with the so-called Action for Repatriation. It was intended to bring back the politically neutral economic refugees and use them as evidence of the normalization of conditions in Czechoslovakia. This project was ultimately unsuccessful as only about 1000 refugees returned. After this, the Communists developed an expansive campaign of propaganda attacks against the émigrés, particularly in both domestic and Western media. Following these attacks, the security apparatus tried to convince certain exiles to return and thus prove that the accusations against them had been wrong. Additionally, on some occasions, state security either physically attacked, or kidnapped and brought back to Czechoslovakia by force, some of the most active exiles. State security used intimdation and tried to create antagonism amongst the exiles by disseminating forged documents and printed materials and spreading discrediting information. It attempted to disorganize exile groups using its agents. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist regime organized a vitriolic antiexile media campaign and organized intimidating show-trials of the arrested foreign intelligence couriers or the prominent exiles who had been kidnapped. The regime’s actions were determined by an attitude defined in a 1953 document entitled, “The indicative report on subversive activities of the Czechoslovak emigration against Czechoslovakia.” In this report, the StB identified as hostile any émigré activities that seemed to go against or criticize the regime regardless of their ideological or religious content. Exiles’ activities were described using terms such as “the reaction” of “the traitors.” In Communist documents, “the emigration” referred collectively to all émigrés and acquired a strongly negative connotation. The émigrés who were politically inactive and intellectuals were largely tolerated by the Communists and seen as the best candidates for repatriation. Nevertheless, the exile community as a whole was considered

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a tool of American imperialists and therefore all activities of the émigré organizations were seen as having been coordinated by the CIA and serving American interests. And as the minister of the interior of Communist Czechoslovakia explained in the winter of 1953, “the main objective of our struggle should be made clear. Our enemy No. 1 is the Americans.”11 In its 1956 report, the StB noted that the largest exile organization in the United States was Sokol (Falcon),12 however, the most dangerous ones were the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and Radio Free Europe. Therefore, the StB noted, with satisfaction, the internal conflicts and occasional inactivity of the CFC. The AFCR was also defined as a hostile organization that served as a cheap instrument of “imperialist intelligence services.” The StB saw the exiles as damaging to the interests of Czechoslovakia because of their intelligence-gathering work on behalf of the United States. The exiles were also seen as a threat due to their propaganda and information activities, particularly radio broadcasts and the leaflets smuggled into Czechoslovakia. One of the biggest “crimes” of the exile community was their ability to influence world opinion about Communism and its regime in Czechoslovakia. The Communist security organizations also worried that the most prominent émigrés were concentrated in the United States, while the StB had only five agents, including the wellknown exile, Vlastislav Chalupa,13 working there. Due to this, the secret police was planning to expand its network and carry out a broad range of antiexile campaigns with the explicit goal of influencing the émigré community’s activities, organizing their return to Czechoslovakia, creating disagreements among them, and spreading misinformation about them. State security also tried to discredit and demoralize particular individuals. For example, they defined journalist Ferdinand Peroutka “as the most active enemy of Czechoslovakia” and planned “to look into the possibility of his liquidation.” To this day, it remains unclear what the exact intention of the StB’s actions toward Peroutka was. However, it is known that it tried to denounce Peroutka to the FBI as a Communist secret police agent.14 Conclusion The history of anti-communism among the Czech and Slovak minorities in the United States mostly concerns the period between 1948 and 1956. Before 1948, Communism was not such a dramatic problem, and after 1956, the émigrés no longer had much hope for immediate political change and their activism declined. Thus, active anti-communism

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for the Czechs and Slovaks in exile concentrated around the Communist takeover in 1948 and the reaction to it. The coup caused a mass exodus of politicians and elites from Czechoslovakia, which in turn led to an explosion of political activism in exile. The émigrés’ anti-communist activism was carried out mainly by particular individuals utilizing experiences and contacts built during the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. The exiles’ activities were a cause for serious concern to the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which used a variety of measures to demoralize and discredit the émigré anti-communism. Additionally, Czechoslovak anti-communism in exile encountered significant internal difficulties. It inherited the political conflicts from the democratic period in Czechoslovakia. Also, the differences between the Czechs and Slovaks, especially in regard to the question of Slovak independence, were never resolved. Thus, in the end, the Czech and Slovak émigrés in the United States failed to become a fully united and succesful force in their common struggle against Communism. Notes 1. The First Fight movement fought for the national independence of Czech and Slovak nations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I. The center of this resistance was abroad, where it had established the Czechoslovak volunteer troops in France, Russia, and Italy. The movement’s members were both Czechs and Slovaks, mainly prisoners of war who had originally served in the Austrian army. 2. Zemek Bedřich, Češi a Slováci v Americe (Praha, Československá republika: Ministerstvo informací, 1947). 3. The Central European Federation was founded by various European politicians in Paris in 1940. In 1943, it was changed to the Independent Central European Association and was headquartered in London. For organizational reasons, it was then transformed into Central European Federal Club under the leadership of Lev Prchala. The club had sections in numerous European countries. In June 1946, the Scottish League for European Freedom organized a conference of oppressed nations from the Central European Federal Club. CEFC later cooperated with the Antibolshevik Bloc of Nations. 4. In 1950, Prchala made an agreement with the leader of the Sudetengerman Countrymen Movement (die Sudetendeutsche Landsmanchaft), Dr. Robert Londgman von Auen. This was an ethnic movement that represented the interests and property rights of deported Germans. According to this agreement, the Czechoslovaks and Germans would all be living together within the Central European Federation.

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5. Grácová Genovéfa, “Dve koncepcie boja za slovenský Štátnosý,” in Slovenský povojnový exil. Zborník materiálov zo seminára Dejiny slovenského exuilu po roku 1945 (Martin, Slovenská republika: Matica slovenská, 1998), 79–85. 6. Chada Joseph, The Czechs in the United States (New York: Czechoslovak Society of Art and Sciences, 1981). 7. See, for example, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 4, Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: 1974), 733–58. 8. The Third Fight movement fought for the restoration of democracy and freedom in Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948. 9. Čelovský Bořivoj, Politici bez moci. První léta exilové Rady svobodného Československa (Tilia, Česká republika: Šenov u Ostravy, 2000). 10. Panorama. A Historical review of Czechs and Slovaks in the United States of America (Cicero, IL: Czechoslovak National Council of America, 1970), 109. 11. Report on the Activities of the First Administration of the Ministry of Interior, Number 561, Fund A 2/1, The Archive of Security Forces, Prague. See also National Archive, Archive of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 02/5 box 71, file 190, paragraph 1. 12. Sokol was a Czech sports and gymnastics movement founded in 1861. In the independent Czechoslovak state, Sokol identified itself with Masaryk and Beneš. After the coup of 1948, Sokol was partly destroyed and subordinated to the needs of the Communist regime. However, the Sokol organizations survived and remained strong in exile. It was particularly helpful in building connections between the old and the new immigrant communities in the United States. 13. The case of Vlastislav Chalupa evoked a lot of emotion in 1989. He was considered one of the most respectable émigrés and scientists until the publication of the information about his collaboration. 14. Žáček Pavel, “Tajný rozkaz ministra vnitra Rudolfa Baráka č. 20 z 10. února 1956 Agenturně operativní rozpracování zrádné československé emigrace,” in Menší sestra I. Vznik a vývoj První správy ministrestva vnitra 1953–1959. Edice dokumentů (Brno, Česká republika: Prius, 2004), 98–136.

CHAPTER 6

Multiple Fronts of the Cold War Ethnic Anti-Communism of Latvian Émigrés

Ieva Zake

Throughout the cold war era, political refugees from the Communist-dominated countries in Central and Eastern Europe passionately clung onto their beliefs in the evil nature of the Communist ideology. Feeling the pressure from the Soviet regime, experiencing the increasing alienation from the American institutions, and seeing themselves as the lone fighters for the freedom of their occupied country, émigrés such as Latvians had a difficult, yet fascinating, political experience during the cold war. Their political views were determined by their knowledge of the destructive power of Communism, which they had encountered firsthand in 1941 when the Soviet Union occupied and destroyed the independent country of Latvia, along with two other Baltic countries—Estonia and Lithuania. In the process, the Soviets murdered and deported thousands of people. Between 1941 and 1944, Latvia was under Nazi occupation, giving Latvians insight into another totalitarian regime. When it became clear that the Soviet army was returning to Latvia at the end of World War II, many Latvians fled to the West. Although specific reasons for their flight might have differed, all of them were driven by a conviction that Communism and the Soviet regime was a threat to their, and their nation’s, life. About 110,000 to 112,000 Latvians became stateless at the end of World War II. At first, with hundreds of thousands

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of other European refugees, they lived in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany, waiting to be taken in by the Western European countries. The process took a couple of years during which they came to be known as Displaced Persons or DPs. Their experience of escape from the Soviets and the life in refugee camps was filled with fear and grave difficulties. The Western countries did not always understand the dangers the refugees faced and the reasons for their resistance to return to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Soviets pursued an aggressive repatriation policy, claiming that all refugees from Soviet controlled territories were Soviet citizens and had no right to leave. As the Western organizations and governments began to cave in to the Soviet demands of repatriation, the refugees protested in desperation. Some even committed suicide just so that they would not be returned to the Soviet Union.1 Many Western countries, including the United States, were either ignorant about the enormous refugee problem in Europe or stalled their involvement in resolving it.2 After a prolonged period of doubt, U.S. President Truman finally decided to offer support to European DPs in January of 1946. During his State of the Union address, he invited the U.S. Congress to authorize massive influx of the DPs by adopting the Displaced Persons Act.3 The legislative process took quite awhile,4 but finally, the DP Act was signed into law in 1950. The deadline for receiving entrance visas for the DPs was set for December 31, 1951. This law brought thousands of Latvian and other Baltic émigrés to the American shores. During the execution of this act, Americans primarily recruited DPs who were physically fit, healthy, professionally useful, cleared as not having been Nazis, and had the so-called assurances or sponsorship provided by American organizations or individuals. “Assurances” guaranteed that each DP would have housing and employment upon their arrival in the United States. Overall, Americans were quite idealistic about this system and thus bound to be disappointed. Soon, the cultural and religious differences between American sponsors and refugees became apparent.5 Still, Latvian refugees shared many American cultural values and already within the first or the second generation, almost all of them reached a comfortable middle-class position. Regardless of this success, Latvian DPs resisted cultural assimilation by creating an elaborate network of social and religious organizations. They persistently called themselves “American Latvians,” indicating that their presence in the United States was temporary until their country would be liberated. They organized a strong and active social structure, which enabled them to maintain a dual identity where

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they could be “living among Americans geographically, economically, educationally—[and] living as Latvians socially, aesthetically, personally.”6 One of the most important elements in this dual identity was uncompromising anti-communism. It served multiple purposes as an expression of their loyalty to the host country, as a way to oppose the Soviet Union, as an instrument for maintaining connections to their lost homeland, and as a set of ideas that could unify the émigré community. Latvian Anti-Communist Doctrine The anti-communist doctrine of Latvian anti-communists focused on three major tasks: (1) telling the truth about the Communist regime, (2) the struggle for national liberation from the Soviet domination, and (3) the need to explain the ultimate similarity between the Communism and Nazism. One of the main goals of Latvian émigrés in the United States was to reveal the Communism’s “true face” and make sure that Americans realized the enormity of its threat.7 To accomplish this goal, Latvian organizations collected stories about their own and their relatives’ experiences under the Communist regime and told them through a variety of venues in the 1950s. Their mission was to warn the Americans about what their society would look like should the Communists have their way. From the refugees’ point of view, World War II had not ended. It continued in a covert form as the Soviets constantly attempted to penetrate every aspect of the Western societies. Fearing this sinister and manipulative nature of Communism, Latvian anti-communists were hardly optimistic about the changes in the Soviet Union after the historic 22nd Congress of the Communist Party, which condemned Joseph Stalin. They felt that although the Communist leaders were willing to admit the criminal nature of their activities, they had not applied this to the illegal Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries. Since only some of Stalin’s crimes had been denounced while the rest had been left unquestioned, the so-called thaw was really just another example of Communist propaganda. Instead of liberalization, the Soviet Communists had intensified limitations on the freedom of religion and expression, increased Russification campaigns of ethnic non-Russians, and persecuted Latvian Communists.8 Clearly, according to Latvian émigré anti-communists, the ultimate test of the Communist intentions was treatment of ethnic minorities and the occupied Baltic countries. And there, the Soviet record had not improved. Therefore, they mobilized against Khrushchev’s visit to the United States

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in 1959. Latvian anti-communists argued that the visit of the Soviet leader signaled normalization of relations with the Soviet Union, which was unacceptable until the Soviets gave up their plans to dominate the world. Latvian émigré organizations disseminated statements demanding the U.S. government’s assurances that Khrushchev’s trip would have no effect on the U.S. policy of nonrecognition of the occupation of the Baltic States. They explained that any exchanges with the Soviet Union were highly damaging to all captive nations behind the Iron Curtain because these contacts helped the Soviet propaganda and infiltration.9 Over time, the American public and government became more tolerant toward the Soviet Union and the Communists at home, especially in the post-McCarthy era. The refugees gradually lost their audience in the United States, also due to the Soviet Union’s quite successful external propaganda campaigns portraying itself as a peace-loving country. The younger generation of Americans was more likely to perceive the Soviet Union as a viable alternative to what they felt was an oppressive life in the United States. Already by the end of the 1950s, some of the Latvian anti-communists became increasingly aware that in order to reach the American audience, they had to find a rational way to argue about the mistakes in the Communist logic as opposed to capitalizing on its inherently evil nature.10 Other Latvian anti-communists, who felt betrayed by the Americans, turned to more irrational and paranoid rhetoric. They began to criticize the 1960s generation of Americans, particularly the student movements whose slogans, “Do not trust anyone over 30!” reminded them of Communist campaigns against all traditions, family, and past generations. These anti-communists watched, with terror, the changes in American laws and government policies, such as the foreign policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the Soviet Union. To the ethnic anti-communists, this was an immoral legitimization of slavery and oppression combined with anti-Americanism, for which they blamed American academics, students, politicians, mass media, the Catholic Church, and the World Peace Congress.11 Some Latvian anti-communists even declared that all of the American political Left ultimately served the Soviet interests and was secretly supported by the Soviet Union.12 They wrote that the American students who had completed exchange programs in the Communist countries later became initiators of underground terrorist organizations because they had been tutored by the Soviets on how to generate fear, panic, and total terror.13

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Still, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Latvian anti-communists felt increasingly lonely in their continuous belief that the Soviet Union was dangerous but not invincible. Everyone else appeared interested in suicidal efforts of supporting the Soviet Union and weakening the military power of the United States.14 The Latvian anti-communists could not comprehend the shame Americans felt about the Vietnam War, American inability to act against Communists in Cuba, as well as desire to limit and control the work of the FBI and CIA.15 Angry about this decline of anti-communism and the growth of anti-Americanism, Latvian anticommunists became sharply critical of the United States as well as the United Nations. Seeing the U.S. government’s feeble protests followed by a silence in response to the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in the mid1980s, some of the Latvian anti-communists reached a conclusion that their former ally—the U.S. government—could no longer be trusted.16 Latvian anti-communists were also critical of American anti-communism, particularly its naiveté and inability to comprehend that only forceful opposition, not negotiations, could destroy the Communist regimes. Echoing Barry Goldwater’s argument from the mid-1960s, Latvian anticommunists stated in the mid-1980s that the United States, as a country, had failed to take a proactive role in the anti-communist struggle. Moreover, some of the Latvian activists claimed that no American anticommunist could be trusted to go through with what they supposedly believed since all Americans were ultimately driven by business interests.17 While some argued that Latvian anti-communists should be less pessimistic and more realistic about what to expect from American politicians, others felt that they had been largely abandoned by their former Western friends.18 Even though Latvian anti-communists gave enthusiastic support to Reagan’s doctrine in the 1980s, they still felt as the few sane ones in the world that was willing to accept the Soviet madness. As noted, already by the mid-1950s, the Latvian ethnic anti-communists became aware that their efforts in convincing the American public of Communism’s evil nature were not successful. Therefore, they introduced a conception of the Soviet Union as a colonizing empire and the Eastern Europeans’ struggle against it as a form of anticolonialism. This political idea was equally employed by all types of Latvian anti-communists. Their argument was that while the peoples of Africa and Asia had gained their independence, many European nations continued “to suffer under the Russian boot that destroys them in the most sophisticated and secretive ways.”19 It was hoped that this interpretation of Soviet domination could generate more support and credibility for ethnic anti-communism among

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the Westerners. The conception of Soviet colonialism aimed to broaden the issue of Latvia’s liberation from a specific ethnic concern to a global problem of imperialism and colonialism.20 In the early 1970s, some of the loudest Latvian anti-communists, such as the nationalist journalist Ernests Blanks, wrote that the Soviet Union had conflated Marxism with Russian nationalist chauvinism and turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian, nationalist, and colonizing state.21 As showed by Blanks, the Soviet state had consciously relocated large numbers of ethnic Russians to areas inhabited by other ethnicities, deported whole ethnic groups from their historical lands, forced members of ethnic minorities to use Russian and switch to the Russian alphabet, while discouraging Russians from learning the language and culture of ethnic groups among which they resided. Such actions had to be understood only as a form of colonization. Also among those making the argument that the Soviet Union was a colonial power was the Baltic Appeal to the United Nations (BATUN). It targeted the UN’s permanent missions, diplomats, and U.S. politicians with a message that the Baltic nations needed to be decolonized just as the Third World countries. To back up this demand, BATUN activists used historical evidence and information about human rights violations inside the Soviet Union. An intrinsic part of this Soviet colonialism argument in general was the revelation that the true nature of Soviet policies was Russification. Ethnic anti-communists did not see Communism as a violation of individual liberty as such. Latvian anti-communists intended to show that Communism’s essence was institutionalized domination of Russians over other ethnic groups. Driven by this goal, the World Federation of Free Latvians began to collect and disseminate vast amounts of information illustrating the nature and scope of Russification in the Baltic countries in the late 1970s.22 They presented evidence about the declining number of ethnic Latvians and how the Latvian language was pushed out of the educational system and public sphere. The Latvian anti-communists were keenly aware that their argument of the Communist qua Russian colonization had to be presented very carefully. For example, Americans did not usually see any problem with the use of a single language throughout the country and, therefore, they did not understand Latvians’ concerns about the disappearance of their language from the public sphere. The Westerners also had a hard time believing that the Soviets would purposefully relocate ethnic Russians to the Baltic countries in order to destroy the Baltic ethnic uniqueness. To most Americans, all Soviet citizens were

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“Russians” anyway and they saw more of an economic benefit in the population relocation than a sinister ethnic oppression. Latvian organizers of the anti-Russification campaign had to prove the Westerners wrong and prevent embarrassing xenophobic slander of ethnic Russians. This was often difficult to avoid and some of the more zealous extremist Latvian anti-communists crossed the line. Some of them argued that there was no meaningful distinction between Russians and Communists: “A Russian is a Communist and a Communist is a Russian.” Moreover, “the Communist system was born and created in Russia. There was no other country that imposed it upon Russians. Therefore we cannot consider Russians as a captive nation in the same way as we perceive the nations, which Russians dominate with their military power.”23 To such extreme Latvian anti-communists, the ultimate goal was national liberation from the Russians and their pro-communist culture, not mere destruction of Communism. They were also convinced that the pro-Russian Soviets intended to destroy the ethnic identity and unity of Latvians in exile.24 In the late 1970s and 1980s, moderate Latvian anti-communists suggested a less controversial conception that emphasized the struggle for human rights. As the Baltic Appeal to the United Nations had discovered, the anti-colonialism argument did not find supportive ears in the UN. The new ideological strategy focused on human rights violations within the Soviet Union, arguing that should human rights be observed inside the Soviet Union, the people living there would be able to free themselves and improve their lives on their own. Another take on this idea emphasized the nation’s rights as an intrinsic element of all human rights. It proposed that the conception of human rights also incorporated the rights of whole ethnic groups and nations as collectivities. The Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries was interpreted as a human rights violation of a nation. This argument was actively pursued by the American Latvian Association (a large umbrella organization uniting close to all Latvian groups in the United States), the World Federation of Free Latvians, as well as the World Association of the Baltics. According to these groups, anti-communism was a struggle on behalf of the right to free speech, the right of assembly, the right to political dissent, freedom of religion, and the right to protect one’s ethnic identity. To prove that the Soviet Union violated these rights, they collected information about dissidents and political prisoners who had been persecuted for asserting their ethnic identity and for fighting for national independence. Armed with this evidence and the UN documents and conventions, the

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ethnic anti-communists accused the Soviet Union of violating the rights of individuals and nations.25 This anti-communist approach was greatly inspired by the process of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, and its documents that acknowledged national sovereignty as inalienable human right. The Helsinki accords were intended to protect the dissidents and demand observance of individual rights in the Soviet Union. Latvian anti-communists, who attended every meeting of the European Conference on Security and Cooperation, focused specifically on the ethnic aspect. Their goal was to demonstrate that the Soviet state was a nationalistic power that destroyed and discriminated against ethnic diversity within its own borders. Finally, throughout the cold war era, politically active Latvian exiles remained appalled by the West’s vehement rejection of everything related to Nazism combined with simultaneous acceptance of Communism. On numerous occasions, Latvian anti-communists felt that the Westerners used a double standard in regard to these two dangerous ideologies. The émigrés took it upon themselves to prove the equivalency of the two murderous ideologies. Latvian anti-communists were determined to show that the tactics used by Communists and Nazis when victimizing ethnic groups and whole nations were similar. In this context, Latvian anti-communists could not understand why the Nazi attacks on European countries had been defined as criminal and denounced, while equivalent actions of the Soviet Union had remained unpunished.26 Latvian anti-communists aimed to demonstrate that the Soviet regime imposed as great a suffering on particular ethnic groups as the Nazis had done. The refugee community set forth to tell the story of what they called “the Baltic Holocaust,” according to which about 600,000 Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians had been arrested, subjected to mass deportations to Siberian labor camps, or executed by the Soviet authorities since 1940.27 From the 1970s onward, Latvian anticommunists collected information about Latvians and residents of Latvia who had been killed or died under the Soviet rule.28 The result was a book, These Names Accuse, published in Sweden. In its numerous editions, the book presented evidence to the American and Western public that the numbers of those destroyed by the Soviets were equivalent to the murder of Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Therefore, if the West had denounced Nazism, it had a moral obligation to do the same for Communism. On some occasions, ethnic anti-communists’ attempts to catch Americans’ attention on this were successful, as when the California State Board

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of Education recommended that the history of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania be included in the curriculum of Holocaust and genocide studies in California schools.29 Also, New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean established an educational commission on the history of Eastern European and Captive Nations in order to generate discussion of their fate in the history books used in New Jersey schools.30 Unfortunately, the ethnic anti-communists themselves did not always practice what they preached, that is, they were frequently willing to criticize Communism more than denounce Nazism. Their own double standard was due to the complicated role of the Latvians in World War II and persistent sentiment among the exiles that the Nazis had “liberated” Latvia from the Soviet occupation in 1941. Some of the exile political activism was influenced by the presence of possible Nazi collaborators. Parts of the exile community had preserved anti-Semitic beliefs from the pre-World War II Latvia. Additionally, a notable section of the Latvian community was made up of soldiers who had been drafted into the German Waffen-SS (called “Legion”) with their own difficult history of collaboration and resistance. In fact, the complicated history of this group created serious controversy in and around the Latvian community in the United States, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Office of Special Investigations began hunting down former Nazis hiding in the United States. While only a few of the former Waffen-SS soldiers could possibly have been war criminals, it was very difficult to sort it out. Afraid to accept collective guilt and fearing sweeping accusations, many Latvian anti-communists rejected the possibility of an open discussion about the Latvian role in the Holocaust.31 They were concerned that should they admit the Nazi past of some of the members of Latvian community, their anti-communist arguments would lose credibility. For example, a journalist and dedicated Latvian nationalist, Ernests Blanks, insisted that the Latvian soldiers, most of whom were forcibly conscripted into the Nazi military service, had fulfilled a historical mission of “protecting” Western Europe from the threats of Communism.32 Blanks and other anti-communists writing for the Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts (a publication of the organization of Latvian World War II veterans Daugavas Vanagi—The Hawks of Daugava) argued that the Legion and other Latvian formations during World War II had to be understood as desperate attempts to protect the Latvian nation.33 They believed that Latvians had been merely victims of oppression during the Nazi occupation. They were not responsible for the Nazi crimes and therefore any discussion of the role that some Latvians had played in Holocaust was

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not needed. Nevertheless, there were some attempts within the émigré community to address these issues. Historian Andrievs Ezergailis from Ithaca College in New York called on the exiles to disentangle the truth about the Holocaust in Latvia. During the early 1980s, he criticized exile Latvians’ ignorance about the Nazi collaborators in its leadership and suggested that these people must come forward and admit their faults in order to help the émigré community clear its image.34 Ezergailis’ publications were met with criticism and doubt. In the mid-1980s, a longtime Latvian anti-communist activist and former officer of independent Latvia’s army, Ēriks Pārups, invited the refugee community to create a new movement that would explicitly be both anti-communist and anti-Nazi. Pārups suggested that the earlier émigré activities had been tainted by the presence of Nazi collaborators but that those Latvians who had suffered from both the Communist and Nazi occupations were obligated to establish an organization dedicated to fight against all forms of totalitarianism.35 Pārups’ project did not meet support. Still, the writings of Ezergailis and Pārups indicated that Latvian anti-communism had a complicated underside of nationalism, occasional Nazi sympathizing, and anti-Semitism. Even if the moderate anticommunists from the American Latvian Association did not endorse the more extreme attitudes of Daugavas Vanagi and there were occasional disagreements in their publications, the two organizations never publicly criticized each other. Thus, there were notable differences among the Latvian anti-communist positions, but the Latvian community worked hard to remain united around the goal of liberating Latvia. Consequently, all shades of Latvian anti-communism ended up harboring elements of Latvian nationalism, the conception of Latvians as mere victims of Russian Communism and German Nazism, and the idea of the nation’s rights. Strategies and Activities Although the Latvian community had no disagreements about its mission to fight Communism, there were discussions about the forms, strategies, and intensity of this struggle. Latvian émigré anti-communists of the older generation sent their representatives to the “All-American Conference to Combat Communism” and contributed information to the U.S. Congress’ Baltic Committee, which had been appointed to research the Soviet Union’s domination over the Baltic countries and other captive nations. The Committee published a 678-page volume of testimonies from the Baltic refugees that revealed the true nature of the Communist regime

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and countered the Soviet propaganda.36 These Latvian anti-communists targeted the American political establishment with memorandums and information materials. They thought of themselves as a government-inexile and worked hard to build personal contacts with American politicians sympathetic to the cause of Baltic independence. Unfortunately, the immediate results of their efforts were quite modest. Disappointed with the political strategies of the older generation, middle generation American Latvians developed more assertive forms of political activism during the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of their more innovative strategies was using contacts with the authorities in Latvian SSR to travel to Latvia and generate subversion from within. However, contacts with the occupied Latvia caused a major rift among the émigrés. The older generation of anti-communists staunchly opposed the relations with Latvian SSR as a Soviet provocation, Communist attempt

Figure 6.1. Latvian anti-communist demonstrators hand out information in Boston, Massachusetts (the 1950s or 1960s). Photo by Northeastern Portrait Service. Courtesy of Herta Grāvītis.

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to exploit the émigré society for propaganda purposes and mere political manipulation. The middle generation of “realists” such as Uldis Grava and Ilgvars Spilners from the American Latvian Association were aware of the dangers involved in building contacts with the Soviet authorities, but they also believed that both the émigrés and Latvians under the Soviet rule could reap some benefits from the Soviet-controlled relations with each other. Still, the debate over visits to Latvian SSR, accepting visitors, or allowing the Soviets to introduce the émigrés to the “Soviet Latvian culture” grew into a deep conflict. The main contradiction was among those who considered Latvians under Soviet rule important agents of national liberation and those who believed that exile Latvians alone held the key to freedom and the renovated statehood.37 The conflicts within the Latvian community were also greatly influenced by increasing efforts on the part of the Soviet intelligence and security institutions to control and use the émigré organizations for propaganda purposes. The Soviets pursued a negative campaign against the leadership of Latvian émigré groups and collected and disseminated all sorts of compromising information about anti-communists in the United States in order to disorganize the émigré society. At the same time, they continuously tried to recruit émigrés as informants. The Soviets deliberately tried to destroy émigré anti-communism as a political force. Although the efforts of the Latvian émigrés to protect themselves occasionally took on some antidemocratic features, such as suspecting everyone who visited Latvian SSR of being a Soviet spy, there were undoubtedly legitimate grounds for their fear of Soviet influence on their community. The youngest or so-called third generation of Latvian refugees in the 1970s and 1980s introduced an additional strain. They proposed an increasingly aggressive program, such as creating underground groups, taking up arms, and using terrorist methods to blow up embassies and shoot the Soviet authorities. The enemy of these young extremists was not only the Soviets but also the exile society’s overinvestment in song festivals, cultural programs, and picnics. They suggested destroying expensive Latvian community centers and churches as symbols of the exile’s political inefficiency, feebleness, and apathy. The young émigrés called for Latvian nationalist and anti-communist fanaticism qua Mujahideen or Haganah.38 This unprecedented initiative came from some of the representatives of the American Latvian Youth Association, particularly those connected to the publication Brīvības Talcinieks (Freedom Worker).

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Although the terrorist types remained a minority, other young anticommunists seemed impacted by the calls for more outside-the-mainstream political actions. Also, the eye-catching methods of political struggle of the American 1960s and 1970s antiwar and freedom of speech activists encouraged young Latvians to try more innovative approaches. Some of them enacted scenes of political theater on the streets while others chained themselves to U.S. government buildings or burned the Soviet flag in front of the embassy of the Soviet Union in Washington, D.C. In 1976, these actions landed some of the young Latvian anti-communists in court, where they were accused of violating the laws of the District of Columbia. The demonstrators were acquitted, which earned them new supporters.39 American émigré Māris Ķirsons stepped on the Soviet flag and let the blood from his veins drip on it during the meeting of the European Conference for Security and Cooperation in Madrid, Spain. This performance of protest lasted only about ten minutes, yet it attracted the world media’s attention. Another innovative protest was the international tribunal organized by the World Federation of Free Latvians. It took place in Copenhagen in 1985 where numerous witnesses (dissidents, victims of Communist repressions, refugees, etc.) testified in front of the panel of volunteer judges about the Soviet crimes committed against the Baltic peoples. The tribunal reached a verdict that the occupation of the Baltic States had indeed been a violation of international laws and agreements. The event attracted attention in the West and received loud denunciations from the Soviets.40 Overall, the appeal of more extremist anti-communist strategies seemed to intensify with each generation of Latvian émigrés in the United States. One of the most important Latvian anti-communist strategies was getting involved in the captive nations’ activities and organizations. The concept of captive nations was introduced by Eisenhower in his Captive Nations Resolution, adopted in 1959. At the time, it contained strong language that condemned the Soviet Union for enslaving Eastern European peoples and called for self-determination behind the Iron Curtain. Together with other Eastern European refugees, Latvian anti-communists supported the resolution with a variety of events.41 And just as other refugees, they became concerned when the U.S. rhetoric and attitude toward the captive nations issue, starting with Kennedy’s presidency, became increasingly vague. One of the most notable organizations that promoted the concept of the “captive nations” was the Assembly of Captive European Nations, which received both encouragement and financial support from the U.S.

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government. Among the cofounders of the ACEN was the Committee for Free Latvia. It was funded by the Free Europe Committee, which was closely linked to the CIA and headed by John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State in the 1950s. The membership of the Committee for Free Latvia was quite small and ranged from three to eight people over the years. According to its reports, the Committee for Free Latvia was dedicated to combating Russification and strengthening anti-communist elements in the occupied Latvia. For this purpose, the CFL published a paper, Latvijas Brīvībai (For Latvia’s Freedom), and informational booklets that were dispatched to Soviet Latvia through various underground channels. These materials described the absurdities of the Communist regime and the exploitation and destruction of the Latvian people under Soviet rule. The CFL also targeted Western audiences with its research on life behind the Iron Curtain. The CFL had the linguistic and cultural skills and unique connections that kept them well-informed about the conditions under Communist rule and enabled them to serve as valuable sources of information for the West. In the 1960s, the CFL paid particular attention to spreading information about what they identified as Russian imperialism and aggressive Communism among the Asian and African peoples. It provided the Latin American press with materials about the dangers of Communism and the suffering of Latvians under Soviet rule. The CFL established contacts with the few Soviet Latvian tourists in the West and gathered information from rare exiles traveling to Soviet Latvia. Finally, the CLF served as a source of information to the Latvian émigré community. One of the CFL’s contributions to anti-communism was its assertion that there were distinct differences in opinion between Russian Communists and the national Communist parties of the Soviet-controlled countries. The anti-communists of the CFL were convinced that nationalist sentiments remained strong and could be used for generating anticommunist movements within the Soviet Union. Although these ideas were later employed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, in the late 1950s and 1960s, they found few supporters among the American foreign policy decision makers. Consequently, the CFL’s work greatly declined in the mid-60s. With only three members remaining, Vilis Hāzners alone worked full time.42 The CFL was in crisis, yet no additional funding came as the U.S. government changed its views on the usefulness of Eastern European refugees in the struggle against Communism. Then, Nixon’s administration allocated personal grants to the senior leaders of the ethnic

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exile communities, which served as an invitation for them to retire.43 By the early 1970s, both the ACEN and CFL had been disbanded. Some of the captive nations activities continued in the Latvian community in the 1980s, though on a much smaller scale and with more dubious content. They were mainly related to another organization—the Captive Nations Committee, established to commemorate and propagate the Captive Nations Resolution by Ukrainian-American Lev Dobriansky. The Latvian section of the Captive Nations Committee in St. Petersburg, Florida, included an extremist Latvian anti-communist priest, Andris A. Lamberts, who disseminated a controversial resolution demanding to halt funding for the Office of Special Investigations that found and prosecuted World War II criminals.44 In July of 1982, during a celebration of the Captive Nations Day, Andris Lamberts thundered that while so much had been heard about the Nazi Holocaust, there was silence about the Communist Holocaust.45 Although organizations such as the ACEN, the CFL, and the CNC were very active and articulate, they achieved few tangible results beyond symbolic influence. Moreover, American mass media either paid very little attention to the Captive Nations Weeks or ridiculed the whole concept of the “captivity” of Eastern and Central European countries. Seeing such a reception, the Latvian anti-communists considered Americans naïve and incapable of understanding that they could be the next “captive nation” in the near future.46 At the same time, Latvian anti-communists had some successes. They were particularly skillful at employing American legislative and political channels for their cause. For example, in the early 1960s, they were inspired by the possibility of the Senate adopting a resolution that would call upon the U.S. president to bring the question of the liberation of the Baltic States before the United Nations. In order to support this initiative, Baltic activists organized the Americans for Congressional Action to Free the Baltic States in August 1961. Its goal was to get many such resolutions introduced in the Congress, so it organized relentless letter writing campaigns and routine visits to senators and congressmen. By the end of 1962, twelve resolutions had been submitted to the Congress, and by September 1, 1964, the total number of such resolutions reached seventy. Latvian and other Baltic émigrés were good at targeting the UN, too. The Baltic Appeal to the United Nations (BATUN) was charged with tasks such as informing the UN members about the conditions in the Baltic region and encouraging them to support national independence.

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The founders of BATUN also made it clear that their organization was going to be a cross-Baltic and unifying force, completely independent of any government funding. BATUN’s activists were inspired by the American radical movements of the 1960s and wanted to depart from the traditional cold war political methods of the Baltic émigré communities. BATUN wrote letters to numerous Western governments, paid regular visits to the UN, and organized protest actions commemorating the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939.47 It was unique in ensuring fully equal representation of the interests of all three Baltic nations.48 Another important area of anti-communist struggle was dissemination of information about the Soviet Union and émigrés’ political activities. For example, the Conference of Americans of Central and Eastern European Descent (CACEED) was created with a purpose of informing the American public about Eastern European refugees’ position on the Soviet Union. In 1967, it published a manifesto appealing to fellow Americans not to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and to observe November 7, 1967, as a day of mourning.49 This appeal was issued during the Vietnam War and explicitly stated that the continuance of the war was ultimately the Communists’ fault. This view placed Latvian anti-communists in a controversial position vis-à-vis increasingly antiwar-oriented American public opinion. Finally, as late as the early 1980s, Baltic anti-communists sought new ways to strengthen their struggle against the Soviet regime. They argued that the situation in the Baltic countries was continuously worsening. In order to inform the West about this, they established the Baltic American Freedom League and hired a professional public relations company to start a systematic informational campaign throughout the United States.50 Another area of activism was Latvian anti-communists’ support for the Republican Party. It began in the 1950s, when some of the Latvian exiles responded with enthusiasm to the politics of Republican senators Knowland and McCarthy, while others cautioned that such politicians were politically irresponsible and opportunistic and that it could be political suicide to support them.51 Overall, most exile Latvians tended to support the Republican Party because they never forgave the Democrats for selling out the Baltic States to the Soviet Union during the Yalta Conference after World War II.52 Latvian engagement in American partisan politics became particularly relevant in the 1960s, when a large number of Latvians obtained U.S. citizenship and realized that they now possessed valuable political power. American political parties, especially the Republicans, understood that,

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too, and reached out to the refugees by creating ethnic committees. A notable group of prominent Latvian émigrés, including Voldemārs Korsts, Laimonis Streips, Ilgvars Spilners, and Ēriks Dundurs, became seriously interested in changing the American political scene from within.53 In 1964, Latvian Republicans actively supported Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for the U.S. presidency and participated in his campaign in New York City and Minneapolis. They supplied Goldwater’s campaign with statements made by the Democratic vice presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey in 1945, where he talked about the acceptance of the Soviet Union and suggested granting the Soviet Union’s demands regarding the inclusion of the Baltic States and the Polish and Rumanian borders.54 This was politically powerful evidence that could turn the Eastern European refugee vote away from the Democratic Party candidates. The Latvian community sympathized with Goldwater’s staunch anti-communism and his opposition to busing, which reminded them of the Bolshevik methods of taking children away from their parents and blindly following dubious political ideals. One of the most active Latvians in the Republican Party was Ēriks Dundurs, who established and led a Citizens Committee of Nationalities for the Goldwater-Miller Presidency in the 1964. He was also appointed to the advisory committee of the Nationalities Division of the Republican National Committee and served in the Nationalities Division of Republican Party of Minnesota. He was an editor of GOP Nationalities Reporter from 1960 to 1972 and a vice-chairman of the Latvian American Republican Committee of Minnesota.55 In 1969–70, he led the Coalition of Patriotic Americans in Minnesota, which included such groups as Young Americans for Freedom, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Minnesota Captive Nations Committee. Its goal was to provide public support to Nixon’s policy in Vietnam and demand American victory. Dundurs was an unwavering anti-communist and, in 1964, he campaigned on behalf of the House of Un-American Activities Committee when it held its hearings in Minnesota. He participated in the public debate about the HUAC on the pages of the magazine Means with a spokesman for Citizens Against HUAC, Denis Wadley. Dundurs stated that the HUAC hearings in Minneapolis had been fair, objective, and successful in establishing that there was indeed a Communist Party in Minnesota and that it had plans to infiltrate universities.56 Another notable Republican in the Latvian community was Voldemārs Korsts, the founder and leader of the Latvian Republican Federation. For

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many years, Korsts worked as the chairman of the Political Committee for the National Republican Nationalities Groups’ Council. Throughout his political career, he argued that Latvians could not afford to pursue their struggle against Communism in isolation. He urged Latvian exiles to become involved in party politics and create a block with other captive nations. He believed that Latvians had an obligation to make America strong and anti-communist because Latvia’s liberation depended on unity and the military, political, and economic strength of the United States.57 In the 1980s, Korsts promoted Ronald Reagan as the “true supporter of people’s freedom” and greeted his election with excitement. Korsts advocated Reagan’s economic policies, defended him against the attacks of the liberals regarding the military spending, and supported Reagan’s refusal to sign agreements with the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons control.58 Unfortunately, after the deaths of Dundurs and Korsts, the presence and visibility of Latvian anti-communists in the Republican Party dramatically declined. Some even suggested that the whole experiment of trying to influence American politics from within had failed and Latvians had completely miscalculated the support of their supposed allies.59 Successes and Failures Although Eastern European émigrés maintained a very politically active position, they often did not have much to show for it. Although their countries’ liberation had been promised to the Eastern Europeans during the 1952 election, by 1955, most of them had abandoned such hopes. Nevertheless, they pressed on and created numerous organizations that targeted decision-making bodies in the American government. As the Americans seemed to settle down to a sentiment of coexistence with the Soviet Union, Latvians, along with other Eastern European refugees, realized that they had to fight even harder to be heard. The American press usually ignored the activities of Latvian and other ethnic anti-communists. Occasional articles appeared here and there but there was no systematic attention paid to them. Nevertheless, there were occasions when Latvian and other Baltic anticommunists were successful in gaining political support. In this respect, an interesting case was the saga regarding the attempts of Baltic émigrés to convince the U.S. government to fund Radio Free Europe broadcasts to Baltic countries. During the 1950s and 1960s, Latvian and other Baltic émigré activists were not too successful, mainly because they failed to adjust to the intricacies of U.S. foreign policy and were somewhat

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inflexible in what they wanted of the U.S. government and what they could offer to it. Eventually, thanks to their ability to pressure congressional representatives and due to the émigrés’ willingness to make pragmatic political compromises, they accomplished the goal of bringing broadcasting to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in their native languages in 1975.60 Among the leading American political figures, Baltic émigrés had the support of President Ford. Another well-known supporter of the Baltic anti-communist cause was Senator Bob Dole, who not only sharply criticized the Soviet Union’s treatment of the Baltic peoples but also openly used the exile activists as his advisors. Another ally of the Baltic anti-communist cause was President Ronald Reagan, who signed a Presidential Proclamation of the Baltic Freedom Day on June 13, 1983. The text of the proclamation included statements about the illegal Soviet occupation of the Baltic States and reasserted that the United States had never accepted the destruction of these countries’ independence. Finally, the proclamation declared June 14 as Baltic Freedom Day and invited Americans to commemorate this day, thus reaffirming their commitment to the freedom of all peoples. The Latvian and other Baltic anti-communists perceived this proclamation as a major political victory. It has to be noted, however, that the supporters of the Baltic cause were usually politicians or activists who already possessed quite articulate anticommunist beliefs. In other words, ethnic anti-communists were able to effectively connect themselves to some of the forms of cold war American anti-communism but they did not generate support for their politics in their own right. Conclusion Very soon after their arrival in the United States, it became clear to Eastern European anti-communists that although the American government talked about the “rollback” and “liberation” of Eastern Europe, it was not willing to deliver on these promises.61 Even Eisenhower assured the Baltic refugees that their nations had all the rights to national independence, yet was careful to promise military support and instead promoted an idea of causing internal strains within the Soviet Union.62 While the American government was essentially “playing East and Central European émigré politics as a card in the Cold War,”63 the American public knew little about the refugees or ethnic anti-communists as such. Most of the Latvian anti-communist activities were received with little interest by the American political establishment and the public. The

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essential complexity of the Latvian anti-communist position was captured in the words of the anti-communist Latvian intellectual Laimonis Streips, who wrote in 1967 that “Latvia has no friends” because “there is no nation in the world whose representatives explicitly argue for its liberation.”64 Latvian and other Baltic anti-communists felt that their struggle took place in the context where neither anti-communism nor the Soviet occupation in Eastern Europe bothered anyone. Nevertheless, their activism was an important element of the cold war period for the Latvian nation. They preserved Latvian nationalist thought and developed it further by incorporating more democratic elements. Anti-Communism of Latvian and other Baltic émigrés was not merely anti-Soviet or nationalistic. It was a fairly well developed political doctrine that was able to effectively respond to the changes in the international, Soviet, and American political contexts. It also served as a political training ground for the next generation of Latvian political leadership. Unsurprisingly, many of the ethnic anti-communists were deeply involved in the establishment of Latvian statehood in the 1990s and contributed to the creation of postindependence political and diplomatic institutions. In the long run, these refugees managed to leave an important mark on the political history and history of ideas in the United States and independent Latvia. Largely thanks to them, Latvians in Latvia, to this day, perceive the United States as their most important international ally.

Notes 1. Mihael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 296–323. 2. For a quite detailed description of the experience of Baltic DPs specifically, see Victoria Marite Helga Eastes, The Illusion of Peace: The Fate of the Baltic Displaced Persons, 1945–1952 (master’s thesis, Texas A&M University, 2007). 3. Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 194. 4. David Reimers, “Post-World War II Immigration to the United States: America’s Latest Newcomers,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, no. 454 (1981): 2. 5. Haim Genizi, America’s Fair Share: The Admission and Resettlement of Displaced Persons, 1945–1952 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 152–60. 6. Juris Veidemanis, “The New Immigrant: A Challenge to an Older Theory” (paper presented at the Midwest Sociological Society, Des Moines, 1962), 13. 7. Visvaldis Klīve, “Dažas piezīmes par mūsu cīņu pret komūnismu,” Jaunā Gaita, no. 1 (1955): 28–29.

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8. Joint Baltic American Committee, “Statement Presented to the U.S. Department of State,” December 12, 1961, ALA/CFL Archives, Vilis Hāzners Papers, Box 4, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 9. ALA’s Centrālā Valde, “Izraksts no ALA’s Centrālās Valdes sēdes protokola,” August 3, 1958, Erik A. Dundurs Papers, Box 6, Folder 11, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; American Latvian Association, “Resolution Adopted at Special Session of the Board of Directors New York,” August 5, 1959, Erik A. Dundurs Papers, Box 6, Folder 11, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; American Latvian Association, “Resolution Adopted at Special Session of the Board of Directors,” August 1959, Erik A. Dundurs Papers, Box 6, Folder 11, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 10. Jānis Peniķis, “Darbs brīvībai un mūsu uzskati,” Jaunā Gaita, no. 23 (1959): 204–8. 11. See, for example, Ernests Blanks, “Cilvēks grib dzīvot brīvībā,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 3 (1966): 49–51. 12. Jānis Brūns, “Uzbrukums turpinās,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 1 (1975): 8–10. 13. Jānis Brūns, “Sarkanās varas balstītāji,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 1 (1971): 9–16. 14. See, for example, Voldemārs Korsts, “Brīvības centieni un hipokrīti,” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 2 (1977): 4. 15. Arnolds Strautnieks, “Quo vadis America un brīvā pasaule?” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 5 (1980): 1–2. 16. See, for example, Ojārs Kalniņš, “The Forgotten War,” Chicago Latvian Newsletter, no. 1 (1985): 2–3. 17. Visvaldis Klīve, “Par mūsu draugiem un sabiedrotiem,” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 13 (1988): 5–6. 18. J. Grodnis, “Par ko pasaule klusē,” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 11 (1986): 5–6. 19. Ernests Blanks, “De Jure,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 1 (1971): 6–8. 20. World Federation of Free Latvians, “Memorandum to the United Nations International Conference on Human Rights,” April 1968, ALA/CFL Archives, Vilis Hāzners Papers, Box 2, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 21. Ernests Blanks, “Lielkrievu šovinisma purvā,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 2 (1973): 7–9. 22. Ilgvars Spilners, Mēs uzvarējām! Pasaules Brīvo Latviešu Apvienība Eiropas Drošības un Sadarbības Konferencē un daži citi laikmetīgi notikumi, 1972–1986 (Rīga: Elpa, 1998), 153–63. 23. Rita Liepkalne, “Mērķi un ceļi,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 5 (1977): 3–5. 24. Jānis Frišvalds, “Tēvzemei un brīvībai,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 1 (1976): 1–4. 25. Vija Klīve and Visvaldis Klīve, “Mums vēl daudz jādara,” Laiks, April 9, 1980, 2, 6.

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26. Baltic States Freedom Council, “Manifesto,” June 1968, Raimunds Caks Papers, Box 5, Folder 12, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 27. Anonymous, “The Baltic Holocaust,” Latvian News Digest 2, no. 5 (1978): 2. 28. Anonymous, “Latvians to Collect Data about Victims of Soviet Oppression,” Latvian News Digest 1, no. 1 (1976): 1. 29. Anonymous, “Baltic Holocaust Recommended for California School Curriculum,” Latvian News Digest 11, no. 3 (1987): 8. 30. Anonymous, “Historical Justice,” Chicago Latvian Newsletter 8, no. 4 (1984): 1. 31. On this, see Ieva Zake, “’The Secret Nazi Network’: Post World War II Latvian Emigres and the Hunt for Nazis in the US,” Journal of Baltic Studies (forthcoming). 32. Ernests Blanks, “Baltijas valstu vēsturiskā loma,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 1 (1967): 14–16. 33. Ernests Blanks, “Latvijas valstssvētkos,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 5 (1972): 1–3; V. Lagzdiņš, “Tagad jācīnās ar patiesības ieročiem!” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 1 (1980): 1–4; Irma Dankere, “Latvietība,”Treji Vārti 98 (1984): 1–3; A. Silgailis, “Latviešu leğiona nozīme,” Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, no. 2 (1988): 3–7. 34. Andrievs Ezergailis, “Domājot par Lešinski—II,” Jaunā Gaita, no. 129 (1980): 22. 35. Ēriks Pārups, “LNPK kandidātu pieteikšanās pirminformācija,” Saulainā Krasta Vēstis, no. 1–2 (1986): 29–31. 36. Bruno Albats, “Latviešu sabiedriskais un kultūras darbs Amerikas Savienotajās Valstīs,” in Latviešu trimdas desmit gadi, ed. H. Tichovskis (Astras Apgāds, 1954), 350; Vilis Māsēns, “ASV Kongresa tautas vietnieku nama Baltijas komisija,” in Okupācijas varu nodarītie postījumi Latvijā 1940–1990, ed. Tadeušs Puisāns (Stokholma: Memento Daugavas Vanagi, 2000), 544–47. 37. For more on the conflicts over the contacts with the Latvian SSR, see Ieva Zake, “Controversies of US-USSR Cultural Contacts During the Cold War: The Perspective of Latvian Refugees,” Journal of Historical Sociology 21, no. 1 (2008): 51–87. 38. See, for example, the June 17, 1983, issue of Brīvības Talcinieks. 39. Spilners, Mēs uzvarējām!, 76–77. 40. Ibid., 224–26. 41. See, for example, I. B. “Apspiestās tautas prasa verdzības izbeigšanu: apspiesto tautu nedēļas sarīkojums Čikāgā,” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 10 (1985): 6–7. 42. Vilis Hāzners, “Memo Regarding the Work of the Committee for a Free Latvia,” January 25, 1965, ALA/CFL, Vilis Hāzners Papers, Box 2, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 43. Uldis Grava, “Letter to President Richard Nixon,” January 4, 1972, American Latvian Association Archives, Box 14, Folder 1, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. See also Uldis Grava, “Letter to President Richard Nixon,” December 22, 1971, American Latvian Association

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44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

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Archives, Box 14, Folder 1, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Anonymous, “Svarīgs paziņojums,” Saulainā Krasta Vēstis, no. 5–6 (1982): 20. Speech reprinted in Saulainā Krasta Vēstis, no. 10 (1982): 24. Zdg., “Kura būs nākošā,” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 12 (1987): 13. Baltic Appeal to the United Nations, August 30, 1967, Raimunds Caks Papers, Box 5, Folder 1, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Baltic Appeal to the United Nations, “Annual Report,” May 3, 1969, Raimunds Caks Papers, Box 5, Folder 1, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This information was received at the workshop during the 21st conference on Baltic Studies, organized by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, May 29 to June 1, 2008, Indiana University, Bloomington. Conference of Americans of Central and Eastern European Descent, “Manifesto,” November 7, 1967, Raimunds Caks Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. “Baltic Freedom League,” Saulainā Krasta Vēstis, no. 1 (1982): 18. Jānis Peniķis, “Darbs brīvībai un mūsu uzskati,” Jaunā Gaita, no. 23 (1959): 206. According to a Latvian émigré activist and historian, Uldis Bluķis (discussion with the author, May 30, 2008), there was also a Latvian Democratic Club; however, it was quite small. There was no evidence of its activities in the archival materials used in this research. Visvaldis Klīve, “Latviešu organizācijas Amerikas Savienotajās Valstīs,” Archīvs, no. 12 (1972): 118. Jānis Gaigulis to Ēriks Dundurs, October 8, 1964, Erik A. Dundurs Papers, Box 9, Folder 5, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. See materials in Erik A. Dundurs Papers, Box 8, Folders 3 and 10, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Erik Dundurs, “HUAC,” Means, November/September (1964): 9–12. See also Council for the Liberation of Captive Peoples from Soviet Domination, “Press Release regarding HUAC’s visit to Minneapolis,” June 23, 1964, Erik A. Dundurs Papers, Box 6, Folder 7, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Voldemārs Korsts, “Skatīsimies patiesībai acīs,” Saulainā Krasta Vēstis, no. 6 (1980): 9–11. Voldemārs Korsts, “Ar Regenu pretī labākai nākotnei,” Čikāgas Ziņas, no. 5 (1980): 4. Kārlis Vanagu, “Trimdinieka piezīmes,” Svešos Krastos 46 (1983): 14. On this, see Jonathan H. L’Hommedieu, “Broadcasting to the Baltic, 1950– 1976: U.S.-Baltic Émigré Relations Concerning the Role of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty Broadcasts and U.S. Foreign Policy” (master’s thesis, The University of Turku, 2006).

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61. On this, see Istvan Deak, “Did the Revolution Have to Fail?” The New York Review, March 1, 2007, 46–49; Charles Gati, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Stanford University Press, 2006). 62. Chris Tudda, “‘Reenacting the Story of Tantalus’: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Failed Rhetoric of Liberation,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (2005): 3–35. 63. Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 196. 64. Laimonis Streips, “Domas par Latvijas valsti,” Jaunā Gaita, no. 62 (1967): 42.

CHAPTER 7

Small but Vociferous Bulgarian Ethnic Anti-Communist Groups

Vasil Paraskevov

The activism of Bulgarian émigré anti-communists in the United States emerged during the cold war. Their beliefs contained anti-communist and nationalist convictions that were inherited from the interwar politics in Bulgaria and evolved in response to the policies of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in 1944–48 and Bulgaria’s alliance with the Soviet Union. Most of the twentieth century in Bulgaria was marked by collisions between the Communists and their opponents. During the interwar period, the Communist revolutionary flame provoked social turmoil, such as the September Uprising in 1923, which the authorities vigorously suppressed. When the end of World War II presented new opportunities, leaders of the Communist Party grasped them decisively. They gained popularity while the former regime and monarchy, discredited by their alliance with Nazis during the World War II, were losing social respect. Then, in the late 1940s, the BCP took the control of the state. It banned political opposition; gradually consolidated one-party rule; nationalized private companies, mines, and banks; and substituted Bulgarian national values with the Communist ideology. Although these changes completely reshaped Bulgarian society, some Bulgarians remained firmly anti-communist. Their position was based on an ultimate disagreement with the Communist Party’s policies, a feeling of threatened personal freedom, uncertainty about the new situation, and sentiments of hurt national pride due to Bulgarian subordination to the Soviet Union.

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These anti-communists sought refuge in exile, and many of them found a home in the United States. America, with its old traditions of democracy, provided the best conditions for anti-communist political activity,1 was interested in supporting anti-communist émigrés, and was the most influential opponent of the Soviet Union. Being in the United States offered émigrés opportunities to meet American officials and to appeal for their support to the anti-communist cause. Brief History of Bulgarian Immigrants in the United States The flow of Bulgarian immigration to the United States began in the nineteenth century in response to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the upsurge of national liberation movements. It is difficult to determine the exact number of Bulgarians in the United States. Several scholars claim that until World War II, around 100,000 Bulgarians had immigrated to North America and about 40,000 of them lived in the United States. About 80 percent of these people were Bulgarian peasants, merchants, and intellectuals from Macedonia. Their national and social background predetermined the direction of their political and social organizing.2 The Communists’ rise to power changed the social structure and ideology of Bulgarian immigration to the United States. The first wave of new émigrés began after the Communist coup of September 9, 1944. The advance of the Soviet army toward Bulgarian borders and the Communist upsurge clearly indicated to the representatives of the old regime that their future was threatened.3 When the Communists took over, politicians, diplomats, military officers, policemen, and supporters of nationalist and pro-authoritarian organizations were among the first political refugees. Most of them were highly educated people with some financial wealth and contacts abroad. Another group of post-1944 exiles were Bulgarian students and workers who were abroad at the time of the coup in Sofia. Some of them were fortunate to be able to continue their lives in the West. Stephane Groueff, an eminent exile figure in the United States, later wrote with sadness and fear, “I am asking myself what would have happened to me if I had departed a day earlier, as it had been planned.”4 The Communists executed his father in 1945 and his brother faced repressions, while Groueff himself was lucky to receive the letter that stopped his return to Bulgaria on time.

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By the late 1940s, the Communist Party had succeeded in consolidating all power in its hands. There was no longer a multiparty political system, private property, and pluralism in cultural life. The BCP had followed the pattern of Stalinist totalitarianism and liquidated all elements of the prewar social and political order. Additionally, the country had lost its independence in international affairs and now obediently replicated the Kremlin’s course. These postwar developments caused another wave of immigration.5 The statistics on how many Bulgarians emmigrated during Communist rule and how many of them settled in the United States vary. According to the information from the Ministry of Interior, 1,829 people left between 1944 and 1949. In 1953, the number increased to 4,542.6 In the following decades, the number of emigrants slowly rose. According to the Ministry of Interior, around 10,500 Bulgarians fled to the West by 1977.7 By 1989, around 13,500 Bulgarians had left the country.8 The social composition of Bulgarian émigrés in the United States changed over time. While the first wave of post-1944 exiles consisted of officials of the previous political regime, those who left in the late 1940s were peasants and petty bourgeoisie. Those who immigrated during Communist rule were mainly Bulgarian intellectuals who took advantage of the regime’s decision to increase contacts with Western countries in the 1960s. Intellectuals visited the West, where, according to the Communist authorities, they became victims of “hostile ideological diversion”9 and stayed abroad.10 As a result, the population of Bulgarian émigrés and anti-communist activists was socially quite diverse. The leadership of exile organizations included lawyers, doctors, and military officers, while its membership consisted of artisans and peasants.11 The Bulgarian National Front versus the Bulgarian National Committee Two organizations—the Bulgarian National Front (BNF) and the Bulgarian National Committee for a Free and Independent Bulgaria (BNC)— were the main exponents of Bulgarian ethnic anti-communism in the United States. They were very different in terms of both their constituency and their ideas. The BNC, led by Dr. G. M. Dimitrov, united the leftist part of Bulgarian emigration, namely, agrarians, social democrats, and others who supported the Republic and opposed both the prewar political system and the current Communist regime. It had an ambitious program of

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contributing to the collapse of Communism and reinstituting Bulgarian national independence. According to the BNC, the Communist regime was repressive, and it had been imposed by the Soviet Union. It was antiBulgarian, anticonstitutional, dictatorial, and based on terror and abuse of power. The BNC thought that the most negative consequences of Communist rule were the destruction of political freedom, freedom of speech and meetings, and religious freedom.12 For the BNC, democratization and prosperity in Bulgaria essentially depended on removing the BCP from power.13 The BNF was led by Hristo Statev, Ivan Dochev, Dr. Dimitar Valchev, and others who had belonged to or supported the pre-World War II regime. In 1959, the BNF split into two groups—the BNF Borba (Struggle) and the BNF Svoboda (Freedom), led respectively by Dochev and Statev. The split happened due to the conflict between the two leaders about the BNF’s support of monarchism. In the late 1950s, the former monarch Simeon II made an attempt to unify political émigrés by establishing the so-called Temporary Bulgarian Representation (TBR). It included Statev, Dr. Kalin Koichev, and other prominent exiles. Dochev refused to support the TBR, claiming that it did not represent all democratic émigré groups, and instead organized his BNF Borba.14 Overall, the BNF’s ideology combined opposition to Communism with monarchism and a romanticized view of pre-1944 Bulgaria. Its main goal was liberation of Bulgaria from Communist rule. It rejected the laws and constitution of the Communist regime because they “were not the results of the free will of the people, but imposed by force.” Instead, the BNF recognized the Turnovo Constitution of 1879 as the basis of Bulgarian legal system and proclaimed that it would obey this constitution, even in exile. Since, according to the Turnovo Constitution, Bulgaria was a monarchy, the BNF recognized the monarch Simeon II as the legitimate head of the Bulgarian state.15 The BNF and the BNC agreed on their overall negative attitude toward the Communist Party and the current regime in Bulgaria. Their political programs were based on principles that were openly opposite to those of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, they found it impossible to overcome differences and establish good communication with each other. Their disagreements had an ideological character. For example, Dr. G. M. Dimitrov was an orthodox adherent of Aleksandar Stamboliisky, the emblematic Agrarian leader and prime minister of Bulgaria in the early 1920s. Dimitrov refused to alter his belief in Stamboliiski’s basic thesis about the fundamental contrast between the old bourgeois parties

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and the Agrarians.16 The BNC and the BNF also disagreed about the most appropriate form of government for Bulgaria. While the BNC vehemently criticized monarchy and its supporters,17 the BNF had a positive attitude toward the last monarch, Simeon II. The BNF viewed monarchy as the symbol of true anti-communist struggle, although it did not reject the right of people to choose the form of state governance.18 The conflict between the BNF and the BNC was also rooted in Bulgarian political history, particularly the Communist coup of 1944. The BNC had a somewhat positive attitude toward the coup because it had overthrown the monarchy and allowed the Agrarian Union19 to gain power. The BNC’s criticism was oriented toward the anticonstitutional measures with which the Communist Party pushed the Agrarians aside after the coup.20 The BNF had exactly the opposite stance and used the initial collaboration between the Agrarians and the Communists to discredit the BNC as a center of Bulgarian anti-communism. According to the BNF, the BNC had no legitimacy as either an anti-communist movement or a representative of Bulgarian nation in interactions with American officials.21 Relations with the U.S. Government Political émigrés knew that East European nations could not liberate themselves without foreign assistance. Therefore, they tried to maintain close contact with the Americans, whom they saw as the most effective opponent of the Soviet Union. The BNF disseminated its magazine to politicians, journalists, and libraries and regularly sent memorandums to the State Department and Western diplomatic missions. The BNF built good relations with American politicians, journalists, military officials, and scholars. Among such figures were the mayors of New York City, Robert Wagner and John Lindsey, and Senator Larry McDonald. The émigrés’ confidence was boosted by their meetings with American presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. The BNF even claimed that their conversations with American politicians had led to the adoption of Public Law 86–90, concerning the annual Captive Nations week, in 1959, and the issuance of annual American greetings on the day of Bulgarian national liberation.22 The BNC also worked hard to establish contact with American officials because Dr. G. M. Dimitrov considered the United States to be the crucial force in the liberation of Eastern Europe from the Soviet-Communist tyranny.23 The BNC had good relations with the State Department and

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the American diplomatic corpus. In fact, it received better reception in the United States than the BNF since Dr. Dimitrov had collaborated with the British during World War II24 and was trusted by the Americans.25 On August 11, 1948, the State Department registered Dr. Dimitrov’s committee as an anti-communist organization and treated it as an official representative of all Bulgarian émigrés in the United States.26 In the following decades, the BNC’s leadership maintained contact with Maynard Barnes, an American representative in Sofia from 1944–47. Barnes had supported the Agrarian opposition in the postwar period and was personally involved in Dimitrov’s escape from Bulgaria. He remained sympathetic toward Bulgarian democrats during the cold war, and Dimitrov considered him a valuable friend.27 An important area of cooperation between the émigrés and the U.S. government was Radio Free Europe (RFE). Designed as an instrument of psychological warfare, RFE was an effective weapon of ideological intervention in the Soviet bloc.28 Exiled Bulgarians who worked there used RFE as a “home service from abroad” where they could reach average Bulgarians and bring up a wide range of issues without the restrictions of Communist censorship. Émigré broadcasts talked about the weaknesses and failures in the Communist regime. Their reports did not call for a revolution but presented insightful observations and commentaries about life under the Communist system.29 From the beginning, the BNF and the BNC agreed that the United States had a crucial role in the liberation of Bulgaria from Communism. They were convinced that Americans would support their anti-communism. However, the actual American policy toward the Soviet satellite states was a disappointment to them. The 1956 events in Hungary were a perfect example of how hopes for a decisive American policy in Sovietcontrolled Eastern Europe could not be justified. The 1960s, when the United States failed to take a firm stand in the struggle against Communism and lost its interest in supporting émigré organizations, were a turning point.30 Détente between the Soviet Union and the United States caused disillusionment, and some émigrés reoriented their activities from the realm of politics to more neutral spheres of culture and charity work.31 Bulgarian Communist authorities noticed this shift and labeled it “the tactic of quiet counterrevolution.” In their minds, political émigrés had not stopped their “ideological diversion” against Bulgaria and had preserved their close relations with the CIA.32 To a certain extent, the Communists were correct, as neither the BNF nor the BNC gave up their

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anti-communist stance. Still, the émigrés’ expectations of an immediate liberation of Bulgaria had to be put aside. This decline in émigrés’ hopes was also a reflection of what was happening in Communist Bulgaria itself. The BCP had initiated a few cautious economic reforms without substantially altering the planned economy. The Communists had also softened their political domination and repression of dissidents while preserving totalitarianism and oneparty rule. Culturally, the Communist Party alternated years of moderate freedom with periods of tightened control over the intellectuals.33 In response to these alternations, political émigrés began demanding more radical reforms, such as immediate democratization, weakening of the Soviet Union’s influence, constitutional governance, freedom of speech, private property, and autonomous Bulgarian foreign policy.34 Nevertheless, in the period from the 1960s to 1980s, the BCP was a confident master of the situation, and no one predicted any changes in the nearest future. Therefore, in spite of their frustration with the U.S. government, Bulgarian émigrés had no choice but to continue appealing for American support.35 The Anti-Soviet Element of Bulgarian Anti-Communism During the cold war, Bulgaria was considered the Soviet Union’s closest satellite. Its subordinate position undoubtedly created a sense of wounded national pride among Bulgarian ethnic anti-communists. They perceived Bulgarian Communism not only as a violent and oppressive force but also as a Soviet instrument of control. Therefore, a significant part of émigrés’ criticism was directed against the continuous Soviet interference in Bulgarian domestic affairs. The émigrés never questioned Russian contributions to the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turkish rule in 1878, and their anti-communism did not contain anti-Russian elements. However, most émigrés thought that dependence on the Soviet Union contradicted Bulgaria’s national interests. Their anti-communism was built around a strong sentiment of antiSovietism. To be sure, political émigrés looked for a multidimensional explanation of Bulgaria’s dependence and did not limit their critique to the Soviet aggression alone. They also held responsible Bulgarians who had collaborated with the Soviets as well as European Great Powers who had abandoned Bulgaria in the post-World War II era.36

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Political émigrés believed that the supposed friendship with the Soviet Union damaged Bulgaria’s international image and left a devastating impact on its internal politics and economy. Dependence on Moscow also negatively affected such sensitive spheres as culture and education that suffered from Sovietization, rejection of world achievements, and intolerance toward diverse ideas and Bulgarian patriotism. Tsenko Barev, a prominent member of the BNC, summarized the émigré view of the Communist government’s policy by saying that the main objective of the BCP was to diffuse Bulgarian people’s national culture, language, traditions, and popular customs in “the vast Soviet communist sea.”37 Dr. Dimitrov, in his turn, focused on the economic aspects of the Soviet influence in Bulgaria. He argued that the BCP allowed the Soviet Union to exploit Bulgaria and condemned the fact that the Communist Party detached Bulgaria from the European economy and international organizations. Dimitrov concluded that Sofia’s total subservience to the Kremlin had a negative impact on Bulgarians because they were “forcefully isolated from the spiritual and political tendencies of liberty-loving peoples.”38 The émigrés also feared that their homeland could lose its national sovereignty altogether. There were good reasons for such concerns. In 1963, Todor Zhivkov, the Communist Party leader, presented a somewhat contradictory idea of Bulgaria joining the Soviet Union as its sixteenth Soviet Republic. This proposal was not implemented, but it generated a massive propaganda for the enhancement of Soviet-Bulgarian brotherhood. Just a mention of such a possibility affirmed the worst of émigré expectations and provoked vigorous criticism. In the 1970s, the BNF, along with other emigrant organizations, called the BCP’s promotion of closer Soviet-Bulgarian relations an “encroachment on the national and territorial integrity of Bulgaria” and classified the possible inclusion of Bulgaria into the Soviet Union as a “barbaric deed.”39 The Bulgarian State Security and the Émigrés The State Security (Darzhavna sigurnost or DS) kept a close watch over the development and activities of Bulgarian émigré organizations. The State Security system functioned as a political police force that strived to suppress any Bulgarians who questioned the Communist Party’s authority both domestically and abroad.40 Also, the DS apparatus and the Communist Party’s leadership were convinced that the Western intelligence services used émigrés for espionage purposes. Thus, on August 1, 1950,

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the Politburo (the highest decision-making body) of the BCP ordered the Bulgarian foreign intelligence services to watch “the treacherous emigration” and its organizations as they would an enemy.41 On June 14, 1952, the Politburo allowed the DS apparatus to examine correspondence and parcels that were exchanged by the émigrés and their relatives in Bulgaria in order to stop the flow of “hostile propaganda” from the United States, Great Britain, France, and other Western countries.42 Undoubtedly, Bulgarian émigrés were in a precarious situation. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States and Great Britain began several covert operations against the Soviet bloc.43 In Bulgaria, for example, authorities captured groups that came from Greece and Turkey in support of Gorianite (Forest People), an illegal anti-communist resistance movement.44 In response, the DS conducted special operations to examine the methods of American intelligence. The DS sent agents who pretended to be émigrés to the West. They found that Americans interrogated émigrés for detailed information regarding political, social, and economic conditions in Bulgaria.45 At the same time, Americans were suspicious that the DS was maintaining close contact with a number of exiles and had sent them to the West for espionage.46 Thus, both the Bulgarian Communist Party and the American government thought that the émigrés were untrustworthy spies. In this situation, the leaders of émigré organizations firmly rejected any implications that they collaborated with the American, or any other, secret service. Although the BCP and the DS believed that the United States instigated émigré activism, it is clear that most of the prominent exiles did not need additional motivation. Yet some of them might have had contacts with the CIA. Moreover, Spas Raykin, a member of the BNF, even claimed that the American intelligence services interfered in émigré activities in order to control them.47 In the light of all this, the Communist authorities targeted the émigrés in a variety of ways. The DS’s activities against political refugees were supported by a highly restrictive legislation of the Communist state. The antiémigré legal norms were so strict that they in fact received much criticism from the West. In response, the Bulgarian Parliament sanctioned a few amnesties for the refugees.48 They failed, as only eighty-six people returned to Bulgaria in the mid-1960s. Most émigrés perceived the amnesties as a form of Communist propaganda.49 The failure of these measures demonstrated that the Communists could not influence the émigrés if the émigrés themselves did not see real political change taking place in Bulgaria.

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Overall, the DS perceived Americans as the most dangerous enemy because of their well-developed intelligence-gathering system. Therefore, a considerable amount of the DS effort was directed toward the United States, including the émigrés who lived there. During the 1950s and 1960s, the struggle against the so-called traitors of the Fatherland in the United States was defined as one of the central tasks of the DS and the Ministry of the Interior. According to the DS, any critique of Bulgaria’s political and economic conditions was defined as ideological diversion by the capitalist imperialism.50 The notion of imperialist diversion was used to explain away some of Bulgaria’s economic and social problems as well as justify the regime’s vehement ideological propaganda and the increase in the DS’s activities. However, the émigré organizations persisted, political refugees did not return, and more Bulgarian citizens were leaving Bulgaria for the West. These failures further increased the DS’s maniacal misconceptions about the enormous influence of the American intelligence services and anti-communist political émigrés. Guided by such beliefs, the DS modified its policy toward the émigrés in 1966. On August 3, 1966, Angel Solakov, the head of the DS, suggested to the Politburo of the BCP to pursue a more decisive campaign of demoralization and isolation of the “hostile Bulgarian emigration.” The goal of this campaign was to prevent and minimize the émigrés’ influence in Bulgaria. According to Solakov, the American and other Western intelligence services controlled the chief Bulgarian émigré organizations. Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts were defined as a “hostile activity” because they tried to turn the Bulgarian citizens’ opinion against the BCP and enticed discontented individuals to join anti-communist activities.51 The DS’s increasingly negative attitude and relentless propaganda against the émigrés were motivated both by the ideological convictions of the Communist leadership and by certain foreign and domestic factors. First, the policy of peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union improved the chances for the Bulgarian citizens to visit capitalist countries. Consequently, the DS became concerned that the Western intelligence services might try to influence visiting Bulgarians. Second, the Stalinist circles in the leadership of the Communist Party perceived the cautious changes in the totalitarian system as a result of Western influence. Therefore, in 1966, after the 9th Congress of the Communist Party, the liberalization was stopped and the struggle against the foreign impact in Bulgaria expanded.52 The events in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 intensified the fears of the Communist Party that similar uprisings could begin in Bulgaria, too. Additionally, the

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persistent escape of Bulgarian citizens to the West strengthened Bulgarian authorities’ anti-Americanism and sense of endangerment. In 1977, the attitude of the Communist Party and the DS toward the political émigrés acquired a new dimension because the ruling circles worried that Western intelligence services had attracted new Bulgarian émigrés with “higher intellectual capacities, with better connections and influence in the country.” Therefore, Dimitar Stoyanov, minister of the interior, suggested a more purposeful policy according to which the DS would focus on discrediting and demoralizing the émigré organizations from within and restraining the most prominent exile figures. The Resolution B No. 17, adopted on June 27, 1977, took Bulgarian citizenship away from the most distinguished emigrants, thus blocking their connections with Bulgarian citizens. Meanwhile, the DS became friendly toward émigrés who were not involved in anti-communist activities. They were given the right to contact their relatives and even send them foreign currency.53 In the 1980s, the attitude of Bulgarian authorities toward the émigrés did not change. However, their rule was facing serious problems,54 which in turn fueled both domestic and foreign anti-communist activities. The émigrés found new occasions for opposing the Communist regime, such as its murder of writer Georgi Markov,55 the forced change of names of Bulgarian Turks,56 and the suppression of even the slightest opposition. Now the émigrés announced that the regime was no longer capable of sustaining economic stability and that the Turkish resistance had demonstrated popular alienation. According to the exiles, the Communists’ last remaining instrument of social control was constant repression, which indicated its ultimate weakness.57 In November of 1989, the leader of the Communist Party, Zhivkov, resigned, and the country started a slow transition toward parliamentary democracy and market economy. The émigrés put a lot of hope in the emergence of domestic opposition to Communism. They saw it as the best instrument for overcoming the consequences of the Communist Party’s rule. Therefore, both the BNC and the BNF supported such domestic opposition movements as the Union of Democratic Forces in the 1990s. During the late 1980s, the émigré anti-communist activity gradually declined. The long exile had weakened contact between the émigrés and their homeland. Many of them had been preoccupied with the immediate daily tasks of work, taking care of their families, and financial issues and did not participate in political activism. After 1989, the vast majority of them had no inclination of returning to Bulgaria.58 Many anti-communist

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émigré organizations gradually dissolved since the basic reason for their existence—that is, struggle against the Communists—had lost its relevance. Some émigré political leaders such as Dochev returned to Bulgaria, but other prominent figures such as Groueff preferred to live abroad but visited the country several times. Conclusion Communism in Eastern Europe ended due to the internal processes in the Soviet bloc and Mikhail Gorbachev’s disinterest in preserving the imperial status of his country by force. 59 The activism of Bulgarian anticommunist émigrés in the United States played a minimal role in this historical change. Nevertheless, analysis of their activism reveals a number of interesting points. It is clear that émigré organizations such as the BNF and the BNC did not generate any new trends in Bulgaria’s politics. Instead, their activities merely reflected changes taking place within Bulgaria. Bulgarian political émigrés did not have the capacity for making a real impact on Bulgaria’s internal affairs because their organizations were too weak and disunited, while the BCP was monolithic and powerful. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the anti-communist émigrés were a serious opponent to the Communist regime. They were able to talk to Bulgarians about the true condition of their country through RFE broadcasts. The émigrés also brought issues of the Bulgarian situation to the attention of American politicians, diplomats, and journalists even though they were unable to gain any practical support from the U.S. government. The ideology of Bulgarian émigré anti-communism was characterized by its distinct rejection of the political, economic, and cultural order under the Communist rule. Their political programs consisted of two major elements—clearly articulated anti-communism and moderate nationalism. The exiles were merciless critics of all Communist actions. According to the BNF and the BNC, the Communist government contradicted the Turnovo Constitution, it lacked real social support, it used oppressive methods to assert its power, and, most importantly, it had been installed by, and depended on, the Soviets. According to the Bulgarian ethnic anti-communists, the continuous Soviet interference in Bulgarian domestic affairs meant that the Communist Party acted according to Moscow’s will, and the country, for all practical purposes, had lost its national independence.

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In the end, there are number of issues that require further exploration. It is necessary to learn more about the impact of foreign powers on political émigrés. It is also poorly understood how other Bulgarians, not just political activists, adapted to life in the United States after World War II. It remains unclear what their economic, cultural, and social engagements and preferences were. Finally, it would be interesting to learn how average Bulgarian citizens perceived the émigré anti-communist propaganda and whether it had the intended impact. Notes 1. Ivan Dochev, Shest desetiletiya borba sreshtu comunisma za svobodata na Balgaria (New York: Knigoizdatelstvo G. Zagorsky, 1993), 150. 2. Trendafil Mitev, Balgarskata emigratsia v America i borbite za osvobozhdenie na Makedonia 1919–1945 (Sofia: Sv. Georgi Pobedonosets, 1993), 4; Veselin Traikov, Istoria na balgarskata emigratsia v Severna America (Sofia: Universitetsko izdatelstvo Sv. Kliment Ohridsky, 1993), 26; Konstantin Gardev, Balgarskata emigratsia v Kanada (Sofia: Akademichno izdatelstvo Marin Drinov, 1994), 76; Boika Vasileva, Balgarskata politicheska emigratsia sled Vtorata svetovna voina (Sofia: Universitetsko izdatelstvo Sv. Kliment Ohridsky, 1999), 150. 3. Stefan Popov, Bezsanitsi (Sofia: IK Letopisi, 1992), 166. 4. Stephane Groueff, Moyata Odisseya (Sofia: Obsidian, 2002), 91. 5. Arhiv na Ministerstvoto na vatreshnite raboti, fund 13, file 3, unit 804, 1, Sofia, Bulgaria. 6. Arhiv na Ministerstvoto na vatreshnite raboti, fund 13, file 1, unit 948, 97, Sofia, Bulgaria. 7. Elena Statelova and Vasilka Tankova, Prokudenite (Plovdiv, Bulgaria: IK Janet-45, 2002), 15. 8. Meeting of the Collegium MVR re: The Hostile Emigration, 25. 04. 1989, in Bulgarian Intelligence & Security Services in the Cold War Years, ed. J. Baev (Bulgaria: Cold War Research Group, 2005). 9. Arhiv na Ministerstvoto na vatreshnite raboti, fund 22, file 1, unit 1, 3; fund 22, file 1, unit 108, 42, Sofia, Bulgaria. 10. Traikov, Istoria na balgarskata emigratsia, 128–36. 11. Statelova and Tankova, Prokudenite, 47. 12. Memorandum na BNK “Svobodna i nezavisima Balgaria” do OON za polozhenieto na Balgarskiya narod pod komunisticheska upravlenie, September 1950, in Drugata Balgaria, 34–35; Drugata Balgaria. Documenti za organizatsiite na balgarskata politicheska emigratsia 1944–1989 (Sofia: Anubis, 2000). 13. Nashata declaratsia, January 20, 1949, in Drugata Balgaria, 18–19. 14. Ibid., 119–27. 15. Ideologicheski principni pozitsii na Balgarskiya natsionalen front, SeptemberOctober 1958, in Drugata Balgaria.

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16. Charles Mozer, Dr G. M. Dimitrov. Biografia (Sofia: Sv. Georgi Pobedonosets, 1992), 246. 17. Tsenko Barev, S pero v izgnanie, vol. 1 (Sofia: IK Robinzon, 1993), 183–85; Vasileva, Balgarskata politicheska emigratsia, 163. 18. “Misli po nyakoi printsipni vaprosi,” January–March 1971, Drugata Balgaria, 180. 19. The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union emerged in 1901. The Agrarians supported interests of small property owners and opposed big business and monarchy. After September 1944, the Agrarians presented a real alternative to the Communist Party; however, the political struggle led to a division. One part remained in opposition, while the other joined the Communist-led coalition. The opposition was banned in 1947, while the other Agrarian union became integrated into the Communist Party. 20. “Memorandum na BNK ‘Svobodna i nezavisima Balgaria’ do OON za polozhenieto na Balgarskiya narod pod komunisticheska upravlenie,” Drugata Balgaria, September 1950, 26–27. 21. “Rezoliutsia na varhovnoto rakovodstvo na BNF s apel kam balgarskata emigratsia za Sazdavane na zadgranichno natsionalno predstavitelstvo,” Drugata Balgaria, July 10, 1952, 117–18. 22. “Pet godini Balgarski natsionalen front v America,” Drugata Balgaria, MarchApril 1956, 122–26; Statelova and Tankova, Prokudenite, 219; Spas Raykin, Politichesko pateshestvie sreshtu vetrovete na XX vek, vol. 7 (Sofia: Pensoft, 2000), 406–8; Dochev, Shest desetiletiya borba sreshtu comunisma za svobodata na Balgaria, 158–60, 181, 206. 23. “Obrashtenie na Dr. G. M. Dimitrov kam chlenovete na BNK otnosno zadachite na organizatsiyata i otnoshenieto na SASHT kam problemite na emigrantite,” Drugata Balgaria, January 1, 1956, 40–41. 24. The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, HS 7/ 103, S.O.E. in Bulgaria. 25. See, for example, S.O.E. in Bulgaria, HS 7/ 103, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew. 26. Drugata Balgaria, 7; Vasileva, Balgarskata politicheska emigratsia, 18–19. 27. G. M. Dimitrov, Spomeni (Sofia: Otvoreno obshtestvo, 1993), 269–70, 280–81. 28. See, for example, Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (London: Brassey’s, 1997). 29. See Georgi Markov, The Truth That Killed (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983); Atanas Slavov, With the Precision of Bats (Washington: Occidental Press, 1986); Dimitar Bochev, Homo Emigrantikus (Sofia: BAN, 1993). 30. Raykin, Politichesko pateshestvie, 307; Popov, Bezsanitsi, 273–76; Vasileva, Balgarskata politicheska emigratsia, 32; Statelova and Tankova, Prokudenite, 77–78, 151. 31. Statelova and Tankova, Prokudenite, 215–16. 32. Arhiv na Ministerstvoto na vatreshnite raboti, fund 22, file 1, unit 3, 2, Sofia, Bulgaria. 33. See, for example, Martin Ivanov, Reformatorstvo bez reformi. Politicheskata ikonomiya na balgarskiya comunizam 1963–1989 (Sofia: Ciela, 2008); Nataliya

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35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

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Hristova, Spetsifika na balgarskoto ‘disidentstvo.’ Vlast i inteligentsia 1956–1989 (Sofia: Litera, 2006). “Ustav na BNF—Borba, priet prez 1956 g. i izmenen prez 1960 i 1961 g.; Vashingtonska declaratsia na Balgarskiyat natsionalen front—Borba,” Drugata Balgaria, March 31, 1963, 164–67, 172–74. Statelova and Tankova, Prokudenite, 190–91; Dochev, Shest desetiletiya borba sreshtu comunisma za svobodata na Balgaria, 239–40. “Rech na Tsenko Barev,” in Balgarsko osvoboditelno dvizhenie. V bitkata mezhdu dvata svyata (Sofia: Izdatelstvo Badeshte, Universitetsko izdatelstvo Sv. Kliment Ohridski, 2001), 150. Barev, S pero v izgnanie, vol. 1, 94. “Rezoliutsia na BNK za polozhenieto v Balgaria i vanshnata politica na komunisticheskoto pravitelstvo,” Drugata Balgaria, June 2, 1963, 57–58. “Rezoliutsia na konferentsia na emigrantski organizatsii za opasnostta ot prisadinyavane na Balgaria kam Savetskiya saiuz,” Drugata Balgaria, October 6–7, 1979, 191–93. Momchil Metodiev, Mashina za legitimnost. Rolyata na DS v Komunisticheskata darzhava (Sofia: Ciela, 2008), 286–87. Veselin Angelov, ed., Da se zapazi za vechni vremena. Informacionen buletin, vol. 1 (Sofia, Commission for Declassification of Secret Documents, 2002), 38. Tsentralen darzhaven arhiv, Sofia, Bulgaria, fund 1B, file 64, unit 168, 1, 4–5. Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), 160–74. Jordan Baev and Konstantin Grozev, “Bulgaria,” eds. Krzysztof Persak and Lukasz Kaminski, A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, 2005), 60. Arhiv na Ministerstvoto na vatreshnite raboti, Sofia, Bulgaria, fund 13, file 1, unit 1029, 35–36; fund 2, file 1, unit 1550, 46–47; Aleksenia Dimitrova, Voinata na shpionite (Sofia: Ciela, 2005), 207, 209. Perhaps much more important for the United States were Bulgarians who had worked for the DS. These defectors supplied American intelligence with valuable data about the DS objectives, structure, staff, buildings, and branches throughout the country. See Dimitrova, Voinata na shpionite, 173–81. Dimitrova, Voinata na shpionite, 205–7, 209. Raykin, Politichesko pateshestvie, vol. 5, 5. In 1945, the Law in Defense of People’s Power stipulated the death penalty or life imprisonment for the leaders of domestic and foreign organizations that aimed to undermine Communist power. The sanctions were diminished to strict confinement and financial penalty in the subsequent penal codes of 1948, 1951, and 1968. Raykin, Politichesko pateshestvie, vol. 4, 325–26. Tsentralen darzhaven arhiv, Sofia, Bulgaria, fund 1B, file 64, unit 210, 3–4; Metodiev, Mashina za legitimnost, 269. Angelov, Da se zapazi za vechni vremena, 161–67. See also Arhiv na Ministerstvoto na vatreshnite raboti, fund 22, file 1, unit 52, 3.

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52. Vladimir Migev, Prazhkata prolet’68 i Balgaria (Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2005), 85–87. 53. See Angelov, Da se zapazi za vechni vremena, 239–49. 54. Ivaylo Znepolski, Socio-kulturni cherti i vlastova traektoriya na balgarskiya comunizam (Sofia: Ciela, 2008), 38–39, 319–31. 55. G. Markov was a famous Bulgarian writer. In the late 1960s, he fled the country and lived in Great Britain. While working for the RFE, he criticized the Communist regime and Zhivkov personally. Recent research suggests that the DS sent a special agent to “neutralize” the writer in 1978. In September 1978, Markov was murdered in London. See Hristo Hristov, Ubiite “Skitnik.” Balgarskata i britanskata darjavna politica po sluchaia Georgi Markov (Sofia: Ciela, 2005). 56. In December 1984, the authorities began to replace the names of Turkish minorities with Bulgarian ones. This caused protests and clashes between the Turks and security forces. The Turkish minority also organized several terrorist attacks. Although the government suppressed the protests, ethnic tensions remained. 57. “Rezoliutsia na BNK ‘Svobodna i nezavisima Balgaria’ po vatreshnoto i mezhdunarodnoto polozhenie,” Drugata Balgaria, May 21, 1985, 63–65. 58. Spas Raykin, quoted in Vasileva, Balgarskata politicheska emigratsia, 182. 59. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), 627–33; Robert Service, Comrades. Communism: A World History (London: Pan Books, 2008), 428–36.

CHAPTER 8

“The Voice of the Silenced Peoples” The Assembly of Captive European Nations

Anna Mazurkiewicz

The voice of even the tiniest new state in Asia and Africa is given respectful attention in the General Assembly. It cannot ignore the voices of ancient European nations crying for freedom. —“The ‘Little U.N.,’” New York Times, September 21, 1961

World War II fostered conditions of a new geopolitical division of the European continent. Countries from the Baltic to the Mediterranean faced an impossible choice between two aggressive and totalitarian powers— the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany. By the end of the 1940s, none of the Eastern European states, the majority of which had gained their independence only after World War I, could hope to retain it. At the end of World War II, Soviet expansion in Europe had reduced the heterogeneous region to a common denominator, namely, a bloc of “friendly” countries with identical political systems and one puppet master.1 This plan could not have succeeded without ripping out of Eastern European soils the genuine aspirations for political self-determination and centuries-old ethnic cultures. The political, religious, cultural, and intellectual elites of the war-torn Eastern European nations lucky to escape the Nazi brutality were now faced with yet another blast of coercion and terror. The Soviets decapitated any potential for national resistance with intimidation and elimination of independent-thinking individuals,

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replacing them with Moscow-trained “automatons.”2 In response to these changes, the already significant stream of wartime refugees and politicians fleeing to the West turned into a tidal wave. After leaving their homelands under dramatic circumstances during the late 1940s,3 the arriving émigrés faced indifference in the United States. To Americans, Eastern Europe was, to a large extent, terra incognita. In the spring of 1948, the U.S. government’s Policy Planning Staff concluded that, due to the Soviet expansion, American knowledge regarding Eurasia actually had shrank instead of grown.4 In this context, the exiled parliamentarians, diplomats, party leaders, journalists, and lawyers from Eastern Europe were an excellent source for enhancing both the popular knowledge of Communism as well as providing valuable intelligence to the U.S. government. In the advent of a military conflict, the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe were considered a likely source of unrest that could aid the West.5 Already in March 1948, the Policy Planning Staff wrote, “among the refugees in this country and western Europe are political leaders from the Soviet world, men like Mikolajczyk, Nagy and [G. M.] Dimitrov. These men and lesser political figures among the refugees are the potential nucleus of possible Freedom Committee encouraging resistance movements in the Soviet world and providing contacts with an underground.”6 The refugees were aware of this American attitude and promptly seized the opportunity by advancing their goal of restoring their homelands’ independence. Additionally, their hopes and expectations for imminent return home were rising as the United States emerged as the main adversary of the Soviets. Political differences, a variety of ideological outlooks, and historical divisions and hostilities among the different groups that arrived from Eastern Europe after World War II posed some trouble for both the American authorities and local ethnic communities. The post-World War II cohort was unlike any of the previous groups of Eastern European immigrants and often found it hard to blend into the communities of Americans of Eastern European origin. For these former political, intellectual, and even military elites of Eastern Europe, assimilation and definite settlement in America was out of the question. The recent national independence was too fresh in their memory, and its loss was too dramatic. Consequently, various groups of émigrés, often from the same country, attempted to influence the American government with unwavering perseverance by flooding its branches with appeals and calls for meetings.7 This was a potential source of embarrassment for the Americans. On the one hand, the U.S. government’s support of the exiles was likely to worsen

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relations with Moscow, since the Americans had already recognized the Eastern European puppet regimes (except for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). On the other hand, the dramatic plight of Eastern European refugees was widely discussed in American press and radio, brought up on the Congressional floor and in the UN and could not be ignored.8 Moreover, the exiles presented an excellent opportunity for Americans to effectively counteract Soviet propaganda carried out in the United States.9 National Committee for a Free Europe By 1949, the American plan was ready—the Eastern European committees and councils that had emerged in exile, often with American assistance, were to be brought together under the auspices of one organization.10 The groundwork for the formation of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) was laid by George F. Kennan, who, upon consultation with an experienced diplomat and a former undersecretary of state, Joseph C. Grew, recommended that the exile problem should be tackled outside the official government. Secretary of State Dean Acheson agreed that J. Grew should lead a “private corporation” to deal with the refugees.11 In the light of the complex domestic and foreign agenda of the day, “private” obviously did not mean independent of the U.S. government. The control over NCFE was exercised jointly by the CIA and the Department of State.12 Policy guidelines were set by the organization’s president in collaboration with the NCFE’s executive committee.13 The NCFE’s board included former diplomats (J. C. Grew, Dewitt C. Poole, and A. Bliss Lane), renowned generals (Lucius D. Clay and Dwight D. Eisenhower), government officials and advisors, such as the former assistant secretary of state, Adolf A. Berle, president Truman’s political advisor, Clark Clifford, and intelligence experts such as Frederick Dolbeare, Allen W. Dulles, and many others.14 This body, which Larry Collins described as “a coalition of corporate and government elite” with “a significant personal interchange between NCFE and the federal government,”15 held regular meetings with its patrons. The meetings were usually of a very general character, dealing with budgetary matters and overall character of NCFE’s programs. On June 1, 1949, J. Grew publicly announced the incorporation of the new organization, established chiefly to “assist refugees from the six Iron Curtain nations of Eastern Europe so they can furnish democratic leadership when these countries regain their freedom.”16 Citing NCFE’s certificate of incorporation, he spoke about helping the exiles and refugees

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to “maintain themselves in useful occupations” while in the United States, thus suggesting that they should put their voices on air behind the Iron Curtain and get their message out by printed word.17 With this purpose in mind, the NCFE established four divisions—Radio Free Europe (RFE), Free Europe Press, the Exile Relations Division, and the Mid-European Studies Center, supervised by the NCFE’s executive committee, which encompassed the chairman of each division.18 It was the Exile Relations Division that took on the responsibility of working with various émigré political organizations and “gave the government a means of controlling the East European exiles and orienting their efforts into areas supportive of American foreign policy.”19 Much has been said on the emergence and abandonment of the U.S. government’s “liberation doctrine.”20 It essentially misled the exiles to believe that their return to freed homelands was forthcoming. In reality, Stalin’s death, the June uprisings in the German Democratic Republic, and the dead-end armistice in Korea fostered significant changes in American policy and demanded new cold war tactics.21 By the second half of 1953, American policy was departing from the talk on liberation and it openly declared the detachment of any major European satellite from the Soviet bloc as impossible without an open war with the Soviet Union.22 In response to these changes, the focus of NCFE’s activities was transformed as well. After the initial success of the radio broadcasts to Eastern Europe, it now advanced a broad psychological warfare.23 It was at this moment of transition that the Assembly of Captive European Nations was established.24 Unifying the Émigrés—The Creation of ACEN Why did the National Committee for Free Europe decide to bring the exiles under one umbrella? John F. Leich, assistant director of Exile Relations at the NCFE from 1950 to 1960, explained that the NCFE’s reasoning was to “use them as a propaganda tool, first, in case of change in governmental structure in Eastern Europe, secondly as a source of information for use by the CIA and RFE (Radio Free Europe), and finally, especially in Europe as a means of gaining friends for U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe. Only at the very beginning were the national councils regarded as possible future governments in Eastern Europe.”25 Istvan Deak, an American historian born in Hungary, suggested that “at least one reason for creating the Assembly was to have a group of democratically inclined, Western-oriented East European political leaders whom

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one could consult if necessary, and whom the State Dept as well as the CIA could trust not to have extreme nationalist, pro-Nazi tendencies.”26 Another historian—Bennet Korvig, who served as director for research and analysis with RFE in 1980s—noticed that as “the rhetoric of liberation galvanized refugee politicians . . . the ostensible purpose of the new body [ACEN] was to coordinate activity in service of the goal of liberation . . . For the purposes of domestic politics, the ACEN was a useful safety valve and display of public concern for the satellites. It helped to keep the fractious émigré politicians in line and pacify congressional crusaders.”27 Regardless of the reasons behind the establishment of the ACEN, beginning with September 20, 1954, the East European émigré milieus acknowledged a new, powerful voice in which they could speak on behalf of their subjugated compatriots. It served as a cohesive information headquarters, research center, and a lobbying group. As one Polish statesman, wartime leader of Polish civil resistance and the last chief of the Polish Underground State, Stefan Korboński, described, the ACEN was a “mixture of people and languages, a Tower of Babel on a small scale.”28 ACEN’s Structure From its inception, the ACEN was comprised of delegations representing Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. Obviously, there were other captive nations in Europe besides these but it appears that the selection of ACEN’s membership had been made by the sponsors. For example, in February 1953, the Department of State issued a memorandum recommending American noninvolvement in the internal politics of Soviet Russia. It was based on the assumption that “the Russians will always fight if they are told that Mother Russia is in danger and that a foreign country intends to split Russia up.”29 Hence, the document included a recommendation to play down “separatist movements” (including Ukrainian) in order not to give ammunition to Soviet propaganda. “Point 3” recommended that “we term as ‘satellite’ the countries to the west of the frontier established prior to World War II, whilst all nationalities living to the East of that line ought to be considered as Nationalist groups.”30 ACEN’s members were hardly satisfied with their inability to answer the disappointment of excluded Ukrainian and Byelorussian émigrés. The excluded Yugoslav émigrés applied for membership in the ACEN as well31 but due to the American policy guidelines, they were never invited to join. This, however, did

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not stop ACEN’s delegations from cooperating with the unincorporated groups, as in the case of a rally staged together with Ukrainian émigrés to protest Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States.32 ACEN’s membership consisted not only of national delegations (councils or committees in exile33) composed of sixteen delegates with one vote per delegation34 but also of so-called associated member organizations and consultative members. Their participation in discussions of the latter was limited and they did not have the right of vote.35 In its formal structure, the ACEN bore some resemblance to the United Nations (UN), that is, it was comprised of a plenary assembly, secretariat, and working committees.36 The Assembly’s one-year sessions began in September and they usually convened in New York. A few special sessions were also organized in Strasbourg.37 The assembly’s plenary sessions were presided over in rotation by the chairmen of national delegations or by members of the general committee. The term was set for one year. Each national delegation had one seat on the general committee, and General Committee’s meetings were presided over by ACEN’s chairman, also elected for a oneyear term. This position was arguably the single most important post in the whole organization. The chairman represented the ACEN in relations with international, governmental, and private organizations. The chairman was helped by the permanent secretariat. The secretary general could serve for more than one term, as it was the case with Romanian diplomat Brutus Coste, who was in that position from 1954 to 1965.38 This elaborate formal structure was designed to present the Assembly of Captive European Nations as a true and democratic representation of Eastern European peoples. The preamble to ACEN’s charter stated that its goal was “to uphold, serve and further the rightful aspirations to freedom, national independence, and social justice of our peoples, now enslaved under alien domination, and unable to speak for themselves.”39 In 1957, Vilis Māsēns, a Latvian diplomat and ACEN’s first chairman, introduced the ACEN as an “exile organization speaking in one voice for almost 100 million silenced peoples.”40 The signatories of ACEN’s charter agreed that their job was to sustain the morale of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain, strengthen their will to resist, preserve democratic ideals, promote research on Eastern Europe, provide assistance to refugees, and supply the free world with information on the Soviet methods of domination. Moreover, the ACEN sought the international support for the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe. Its goal was to cooperate with the organizations working toward all-European integration, such as the Council of Europe and the European Movement,

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with the aim “of preparing the way for the integration of these nations to a United Europe, following their liberation.”41 According to ACEN’s statements, its mission would be fulfilled with the “restoration to our respective nations of national independence and of the right to determine freely, through democratic process, the political, social, and economic form of government under which they wish to live.”42 Challenges of the Present and Ghosts of the Past In the first months of its existence, the ACEN faced numerous tests. Representatives of nine East European nations had gathered for the first time in history for a joint political action of such a scope. The hardest task was to “keep them together, despite divisions and misunderstandings of the past.”43 The turbulent history of the interwar years in northeastern, central, and southeastern Europe had created deep cleavages between Hungarians and Romanians, Poles and Czechs, Czechs and Slovaks, Lithuanians and Poles, Ukrainians and Poles, peoples of Yugoslavia and Bulgarians, and so on.44 There were also “traditional disagreements engraved in the mentality of the exiled politicians.”45 Furthermore, almost all national groups had internal frictions dating to prewar times. This made compromises among the national delegations increasingly harder to achieve.46 All national delegations underwent changes over time; however, the Polish delegation to the ACEN faced the most complicated situation.47 Since the assembly’s inception, there were two Polish delegations with eight people in each. One represented the Polish National Democratic Committee, headed by Karol Popiel, while the other spoke on behalf of the London-based Political Council, headed by Stefan Korboński. This duality reflected the divisions among the Poles gathered around the London-based Polish government in exile. In an attempt to unite the divided Polish exile, a new body—the Provisional Council of National Unity—was established on July 31, 1954. Its New York City chapter was formed on December 11, 1955. In response, the ACEN acknowledged only one delegation of London-based exiles, headed by Stefan Korboński, in 1956.48 This delegation consisted of eleven members. The remaining five seats were reserved for the former Polish vice-premier, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, should he ever wish to fill them.49 Then, the link with London was terminated on March 18, 1958, due to both American and internal pressures. On December 6, 1959, the Polish Council of Unity (independently of London) was formed and thus the Polish delegation to the ACEN changed again.50

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In addition to internal conflicts, all Eastern European exiles were haunted by the ghosts of war-torn Europe. Accusations of collaboration with either Nazis or Soviets were not uncommon. These émigrés were “driven by a belief that their demand for national independence is a struggle for freedom,” yet they often faced “a surprising realization that they are perceived as a suspicious anti-freedom force in their new country.”51 Local ethnic communities also attacked the émigrés by accusing them of having either the right-wing (that is, fascist) or the left-wing (that is, Communist) allegiances.52 In addition, there were also Soviet agents in the United States whose sole mission was to discredit the exiles in the eyes of the Westerners. Nevertheless, although Eastern European émigrés represented heterogeneous cultures and histories, they also brought with them sets of similar attitudes, such as patriotism, willingness to return home, and hatred for Communism.53 All Eastern Europeans had a common enemy and a shared vision of a free and united Europe. These factors helped to create a remarkably powerful bond among them. As a representative for those who had been denied genuine representation in the world organizations, the ACEN directed many of its efforts toward the UN. ACEN’s most intense campaigns targeted both the national delegates and the UN officials and dealt with issues such as Eastern European refugees in Western Europe, blocking the admission of Eastern European regimes to the UN, and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and its aftermath.54 However, very soon, the ACEN became disenchanted with the UN and shifted its attention from the whole organization to its particular members. The most visible example of ACEN’s presence at the UN’s doorstep, at least from the popular perspective, was the ACEN House. It was a two-story building at 769 First Avenue vis-à-vis the UN building in New York City. The rented garage was to serve as an exhibition hall as well as a convocation hall for the meetings of both the ACEN and the Free Europe Committee. While nine Eastern European architects worked on the design, the assembly’s friends worked on the fundraising. Ten flagpoles were installed on the roof, with nine national flags at half-mast and an American flag flying high. A 24x20-foot canvas was displayed on the front of the building. A sample poster read: “UNITED NATIONS: WE DEMAND THE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL SOVIET FORCES AND FREE ELECTIONS—HELP US! The peoples of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania. Assembly of Captive European Nations.”55 The idea of renting an old

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garage for the sake of using it as a huge billboard turned out to be very successful. ACEN’s goal was to make sure that “no visitor to the UN, no delegate or official working in the UN skyscraper can fail to notice the ACEN sign. The sign truly acts as a permanent reminder of the demands which, as proven during the events in Hungary and Poland, constitute the basic points of the aspirations of captive peoples.”56 Although the rundown house never became the captive nations’ center, as it was planned,57 the flagpoles on its roof and the huge posters that covered its façade and changed with each UN session achieved the original goal, i.e., to capture the public’s attention. Apart from the UN, the ACEN also sought to influence the Council of Europe.58 However, it was clear that in the bipolar world of the 1950s, the exiles in America were principally focused on encouraging the U.S. government and lobbying any possible group or individual to help liberate their countries. Political Lobbying Efforts Generally, according to the rules imposed by the Free Europe Committee, the ACEN had to refrain from becoming involved in partisan politics.59 A typical answer sent by ACEN’S officials in response to any given American request for political support read, “I would like to call your attention to the fact that our Assembly is an international organization of nine national and five international exile groups and not an organization of American citizens. As such, it can in no way be involved in matters which pertain to the domestic affairs of the US or any other free nations.” 60 Nevertheless, the ACEN worked on influencing the U.S. foreign policy agenda on the issues related to Eastern Europe. They exerted pressure on the American political scene by using, for example, organizations that consisted of American citizens, such as the American Friends of Captive Nations (AFCN) and the Conference of Americans of Central and Eastern European Descent (CACEED). The ACEN provided these organizations with its views and information, hoping that this would help their members in contacts with the candidates of both political parties. There were a number of cases when the ACEN used this network of friends to influence American domestic politics.61 The ACEN also maintained very close relations with the AFL/CIO labor union as well as organizations with activities and goals similar to its own such as the Asian People’s AntiCommunist League (APACL).

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Still, the exiles largely relied on their own kin. Although the émigrés could not fully integrate into the communities of the hyphenated Americans of Eastern European descent, the exiles still saw them as useful channels for influencing the American government. At the same time, the exiles were cautious not to overtly ally themselves with any organized immigrant ethnic group, as it could be interpreted as “involvement in matters which pertain to the domestic affairs of the US.” They did not want to endanger their special status as foreign nationals and lose the support and special attention granted to them by the U.S. government. Established under the auspices of the National Committee for Free Europe, the ACEN originally enjoyed full support of the American government.62 Between January 18–20, 1955, ACEN’s delegation was, for the first time, received by a number of members of the Congress. The meeting of the assembly’s general committee with Secretary of State John F. Dulles on January 9, 1956, was arguably the uppermost attention that the American government ever gave to the ACEN.63 However, as the American cold war doctrine underwent significant transformations, the American policy toward exiles changed its direction, too. Already by 1956, American policy toward the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly disappointing to the émigrés. As they campaigned for “peace through freedom,” they received the last letter of open support from President Eisenhower.64 Still, the ACEN’s position seemed secure as long as John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State. The year 1956 certainly was no ordinary year in cold war relations. It began with Poznan riots and closed with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest. In regards to ACEN, 1956 marked both well-organized joint political actions as well as serious divisions among its members. Most importantly, by 1957, the ACEN’s members had already realized that the U.S. government policy toward Eastern Europe was no longer about the restoration of freedom and democracy but about freezing the status quo and maintaining so-called peaceful coexistence. The ACEN did not agree to go along with this plan. It insisted on a firm “no” to the status quo. Due to this, the ACEN appeared to the American supporters of dialogue with the Communists as an uncompromising group that was out of touch with geopolitical realities of the day.65 In response, the ACEN attempted to strengthen its voice, relentlessly presented as unanimous. But despite the funds provided by its sponsors, the ACEN did not have the means to reach the masses in the free world. After the initial fascination with the ACEN, the press accounts of the assembly’s activities were becoming scarce. It took a lot of effort for the ACEN’s press officers to insert articles,

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letters, or even news mentions on the ACEN in the American dailies and magazines.66 Nevertheless, there were some victories. In July 1959, the U.S. Congress adopted a joint resolution that authorized and requested the president to issue a proclamation designating the third week in July each year as Captive Nations Week.67 Although the ACEN was not directly involved in drafting the first proclamation of Captive Nations Week, it joined the Ukrainian émigrés’ effort, promoted the proclamation, and devoted much effort to lobbying its continuance.68 The celebration of Captive Nations Week often pulled Eastern European ethnic groups together and strengthened their influence. Ironically, however, as the term “captive nations” received more attention and as the Ukrainian leader and author of the proclamation’s first draft, Lev Dobriansky, established his own Captive Nations Committee,69 the ACEN became confused with it. Furthermore, the proclamation significantly expanded the list of the captive nations,70 thus gradually diminishing ACEN’s influence and impact on public opinion. The ACEN continued to regard the struggle with Communism as a global one. It took an active part in organizing the Asian Peoples’ Freedom Day, which commemorated, every year, “the bravery of 22,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war in custody of the UN forces in Korea who on January 23, 1954 refused to return to their homelands and chose to remain in the free world.”71 The assembly’s publications, such as ACEN News, contained ample evidence of worldwide cooperation and solidarity among anti-communist forces. The publications also made references to the speeches of the leaders of Taiwan and South Korea who visited the ACEN quarters and described ACEN’s anti-communist propaganda initiatives in Latin America.72 At the end of 1950s, the organization evidently changed its tactics. Its new approach was based on the assumption that academics and media professionals were among the most important public opinion makers on foreign policy issues. Therefore, the ACEN put significant effort into disseminating its publications and suggestions, recommendations, opinion statements, and commentaries on both historical and current events among those who had the most political power, starting with the U.S. Congress. ACEN’s leaders also decided to strengthen its ties with American nongovernmental organizations and reach out beyond America’s shores. On January 20, 1958, an impressive collection of photographs and data on Soviet atrocities was presented at the opening of the exhibition, “Soviet Empire 1917–1958.”73 This exhibition traveled around the

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United States, Europe, Asia, and even Australia. Encouraged by a positive response, ACEN’s delegates set off on a trip around the world with the aim of gathering support for bringing the captive nations issue to the UN in January 1959.74 However, they faced new challenges upon their return. It was John F. Dulles’ death that “closed an era on unwavering American administration’s support for the ACEN.”75 Once the American cold war policy had shifted toward the doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the Soviets, ACEN’s activities ceased to be compatible with it. ACEN’s secretary general from 1966 to 1985, F. Gadomski, noticed that ACEN’s usefulness for American policy was decreasing and so was ACEN’s budget.76 The first painful blow to ACEN’s future came in June 1965 in the form of a 56 percent budget cut. As a result, the ACEN had to end many of its activities. Its principal and most popular periodical, ACEN News, went from a monthly to a bimonthly publication, and its longtime editor, Paul Vajda, retired. Other publications such as Survey of Recent Developments in Captive Nations, East European Papers, and ACEN News in Arabic and Swedish were simply terminated. The record of ACEN’s tenth plenary session was never published. Most of ACEN’s foreign bureaus were closed while the remaining three severely limited their activities. The final blow came in December 1971. After the press revelations about receiving CIA money, Free Europe, Inc.—the former Free Europe Committee—gained a lot of public notoriety. Consequently, both the ACEN and Free Europe, Inc., lost governmental funding and were forced to close. The only survivors were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which were merged and supervised by the Board for International Broadcasting appointed by the U.S. president. Given the complexity of interests, ideological positions, and historical animosities, and the fact that, by the 1970s, many of ACEN’s elderly members were not getting any younger, it is remarkable that they decided to continue its existence. On May 22, 1972, the assembly was incorporated to create ACEN, Inc., and as such, it was registered by the justice of the Supreme Court of the state of New York, with all nine Eastern European nations represented. Despite significant financial burdens, ACEN, Inc., continued its operations.77 Its budget was so small that not only were salaries out of the question but desperate émigrés decided to establish annual dues in order to support its modest functions. According to the secretary general, ACEN, Inc.’s office was first set up in the Lithuanian Committee’s quarters and then moved to the Albanian Committee’s office, limiting its space to one shared desk. Its plenary meetings took place in the Estonian House on 34th Street in New York City.78

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As an organization independent of American government, the ACEN continued to be well received in the State Department. Some U.S. congressmen did not abandon the captive nations’ activists, eagerly using their appeals and articles published in the American press. Conclusion Having directly experienced Communism, Eastern and Central European exiles knew too well that it was more than political subjugation of their homelands. They also understood that Communism was engaged in a battle for people’s minds. It aimed to create a new man who would be stripped of any individuality and deprived of free will. The Soviet attack on the intellectual, political, and religious elites of the occupied nations was powerful enough to bury their ethnic differences along with most political divisions. Therefore, exiles believed that they carried the last hope for the survival of their nations’ cultures and traditions and saw their exile as just a temporary situation. Believing in the ultimate victory of West, the émigrés never gave up plans to return to their homelands once they were liberated. In addition to the goal of freeing their homelands, exile organizations such as the ACEN strived to integrate Central and Eastern European nations into Europe and create closer cooperation among them. The history of the ACEN as an émigré organization is largely exceptional because of its close connection to the U.S. government. It is in those special circumstances created by the hospitable host that the ACEN became a united body consisting of a variety of national organizations. It proved that multiethnic cooperation was possible, attainable, and, interestingly enough, that it could last longer than the limited American funding. All nine of ACEN’s member countries, with their often-troublesome history of mutual conflicts, wrote a chapter of cooperation that may have paved the way for the future. In other words, it is possible to see the ACEN foreshadowing the participation of Central and Eastern Europeans in the European Union. Notes 1. On this, see, for example, Arthur Bliss Lane, I saw Poland Betrayed. An American Ambassador Reports to the American People (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948); Ferenc Nagy, Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Rape of Poland: Pattern of Soviet Aggression (London: Whittlesey House, 1948); Maj. Tufton Beamish, Must Night Fall? (London:

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

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Hollis and Carter, 1950); Stefan Korboński, Warsaw in Chains (New York: Macmillan, 1959); Thomas T. Hammond and Robert Farrell, eds., The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997); Bela K. Kiraly, Wars, Revolutions and Regime Changes in Hungary, 1912–2004: Reminiscences of an Eyewitness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). A. Bliss Lane, “How Russia Rules Poland,” Life, July 14, 1947, 98–111. For American help provided to the escapees, see: [on Stanisław Mikołajczyk] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, vol. 4, Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), 400–10, 460–66; [on George M. Dimitrov] Cyril E. Black, “The Start of the Cold War in Bulgaria: A Personal View,” The Review of Politics 41, no. 2 (1979): 163–202; [on Zoltán Pfeiffer] Márta Pellérdi, “Their Man in Budapest, James McCargar and the 1947 Road to Freedom,” The Hungarian Quarterly 17, no. 161 (2001), http://www .hungarianquarterly.com/no161/038.html Policy Planning Staff PPS-22, “Utilization of Refugees from the Soviet Union in the U.S. National Interest,” February 5, 1948, General Records of the Department of State Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. On the American government’s covert activities in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and their use of exile populations see: John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars; CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through the Persian Gulf (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 13–60, and H. W. Brands, Jr., “A Cold War Foreign Legion? The Eisenhower Administration and the Volunteer Freedom Corps,” Military Affairs 52, no. 1 (1988): 7–11. Policy Planning Staff PPS-22/1, March 14, 1948, General Records of the Department of State Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. Krzysztof Tarka, “W oczekiwaniu na wyzwolenie. Rząd Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na uchodźstwie o sytuacji międzynarodowej na przełomie lat czterdziestych i pięćdziesiątych,” Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość 2 (2002): 209–31; Igor Lukeš, “Československý politický exil za studené války: první roky,” Střední Europa 119 (2004): 1–10. Melvin Small, “How We Learned to Love the Russians: American Media and the Soviet Union During World War II,” The Historian 36 (1974): 455–78; Alvin Richman, “Poll Trends: Changing American Attitudes Toward the Soviet Union,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1991): 135–48. “The most effective kind of propaganda is when the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons he believes to be his own” (Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters [New York: The New Press, 2000], 4). See also Larry D. Collins, “The Free Europe Committee. American Weapon of the Cold War” (PhD diss., Carleton University, 1975). I would like to thank John F. Leich for his advice and invaluable information. J. F. Leich is a former diplomat, former assistant director of the Exile Relations division of NCFE (1950–60), former deputy director of the organization’s West European Operations in New York (1960–65), and later in London (1965–67).

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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He is the author of the best account of the NCFE’s relations with the committees and councils in exile to date (John F. Leich, “Great Expectations: National Councils in Exile 1950–60,” The Polish Review 35, no.3 [1990]: 183–96). Collins, “The Free Europe Committee,” 113. “Intellectually dependent on Department of State directives, financed by the CIA” (Justine Faure, “Croisade Américaine en 1950: La délivrance des ‘Nations captives’ d’Europe de l’Est, Vingtième Siècle,” Revue d’histoire 73 [2002]: 6). John F. Leich, letter to the author, October 14, 2007. Ibid.; Collins, “The Free Europe Committee,” 115–21, app. 2. Ibid., 115–18. “New Group Formed to Assist Refugees,” New York Times, June 2, 1949, 29. Ibid.; Certificate of Incorporation, National Committee for a Free Europe, May 11, 1949, quoted in Leich, “Great Expectations,” 183. See also Collins, “The Free Europe Committee,” 114. Leich, “Great Expectations,” 183; Collins, “The Free Europe Committee,” 114. Collins, “The Free Europe Committee,” 128. Bennett Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation: East-Central Europe in U.S. Diplomacy and Politics since 1941 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973); Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Bennett Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges. The United States and Eastern Europe (New York, London: New York University Press, 1991), 63–65; Faure, “Croisade Américaine en 1950,” 5–13. On this, see, National Security Council 162/2, October 1953, in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 155. Faure, “Croisade Américaine en 1950,” 5–13; Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War. Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 41. The events preceding the establishment of ACEN are described in J. F. Leich, letter to the author, October 14, 2007. See also Feliks Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich Narodów Ujarzmionych. Krótki Zarys” (unpublished manuscript, 1987, 1991). See also Feliks Gadomski Papers, 108/2002/1–2, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław, Poland; Collins, “The Free Europe Committee,” 98–134; Józef Łaptos, “Miejsce ‘krucjaty wolności’ w amerykańskiej polityce wobec Europy Środkowo—Wschodniej (1949–1953),” Polska Akademia Umiejętności, Prace Komisji Środkowoeuropejskiej 12 (2004): 103–25. J. F. Leich, letter to the author, October 14, 2007. Istvan Deak, letter to the author, January 31, 2008. Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges, 65. Stefan Korboński, Warsaw in Exile (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 103–4. Psychology Strategy Board, Executive Secretariat, “Psychological Warfare and the Soviet Union, Working File 1951–1952,” February 10, 1953, Box 6, E

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32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

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Series, General Records of the Department of State Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. Ibid. Interestingly, the Romanian delegates to ACEN insisted that the assembly used “satellite” to solely describe the Soviet installed governments in the Soviet orbit and not the captive nations. See “Draft Memorandum Concerning the Report on Soviet Economic Integration of the Captive Countries,” March 16, 1960, ACEN Papers 136, box 41, file 7, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Alexander D. Bunescu, undated letter, ACEN Papers 136, Box 42, File 4, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. As of January 1956, their membership continued “to be on the agenda.” See V. Masens to Z. Stypułkowski, January 23, 1956, ACEN Papers 136, Box 6, File 6, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. It took place on September 20, 1959, in New York. See “Rally Bids President Put Issue Of Captive Nations to Premier,” New York Times, September 21, 1959, 19; Korboński, Warsaw in Exile, 268–69; Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 35–36. For listing and changes in national representations, see Leich, “Great Expectations,” 185–92; Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 6–14. Charter of the Assembly of Captive European Nations,” September 20, 1954, ACEN Papers 136, Box 1, File 2, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The consultative members were, for example, Conseil de la Jeunesses Libre de l’Europe Central et Orientale, the Baltic Women Council, the Council of European Women in Exile, the Central European Federation of Christian Trade Unions, the International Free Academy of Sciences and Letters, and others. See Box 44, Folders 1–7, ACEN Papers 136, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Originally, there were six working committees, namely, Political, Social, Cultural, Economic, Legal, and Information. Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 18–28. On this, see information in ACEN Organization, Resolutions, Reports, Debate 1–9 (1954–1963). The chairmen of ACEN were Vilis Māsēns from Latvia, Stefan Korboński from Poland, Petr Zenkl from Czechoslovakia, Vaclovas Sidzikauskas from Lithuania, Ferenc Nagy from Hungary, George Dimitrov from Bulgaria, Alexander Kutt from Estonia, Vasil Germenji from Albania, Jozef Lettrich from Czechoslovakia, and Alfrēds Bērziņš from Latvia. “Charter of the Assembly of Captive European Nations,” September 20, 1954, ACEN Papers 136, Box 1, File 2, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Vilis Māsēns, speech, March 15, 1957, ACEN Papers 136, Box 23, File 3, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. “Charter of the Assembly.” Ibid. The charter’s text states, “ACEN may be dissolved when all of its members are liberated.”

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43. “Vilis Māsēns’ obituary,” ACEN News, July-September (1964): 2. 44. Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003); Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974). 45. Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 2. 46. Ibid., 2–3; Leich, “Great Expectations,” 183–92. 47. Feliks Gadomski Papers, 108/2002/1–2, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław, Poland. 48. ACEN’s members attempted to work with the Poles in order to achieve a compromise with Mikołajczyk. Unfortunately, these efforts were futile. See “Memorandum of Ferenc Nagy,” July 24, 1962, ACEN Papers 136, Box 40, File 4, Immigration History Research Center. 49. He never did. Stanisław Mikołajczyk (the president of the PNDC) was involved in ACEN on the grounds of his presidency over International Peasant Union only and refused to fill the open seats. He trusted the West would guarantee Yalta’s promise of free elections. He briefly returned to Poland between 1945 and 1947, only to escape again. He found no comfort among fellow exiles who disapproved of his participation in a Communist-led government. See A. Paczkowski, Klęska realisty. Zarys biografii politycznej (Warsaw: Agencja Omnipress, 1991). 50. Polish Delegation to ACEN, ACEN Papers 136, Box 40, File 4, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 51. Ieva Zake, “‘The Secret Nazi Network’: Post World War II Latvian Émigrés and the Hunt for Nazis in the United States,” available at http://users.rowan.edu/~zake/ papers. See also Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988). 52. See, for example, “Memorandum of The Romanian-American National Committee, Union and League of Romanian Societies of America Inc. and Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America,” ACEN Papers 136, Box 41, File 9, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 53. I. Portis Winner and R. M. Susel, eds., The Dynamics of East European Ethnicity Outside of Eastern Europe (Cambrige, MA: Schenkman, 1983), vii; Paweł Machcewicz, Emigracja w polityce międzynarodowej, Druga Wielka Emigracja 194–1990, vol. 2 (Warszawa: Więź, 1999), 43. 54. For a complete record of ACEN’s activities, see the record of nine sessions and ACEN News. ACEN published eight volumes of “Hungary Under Soviet Rule,” which were widely distributed among the UN delegates and U.S. Congressmen (see ACEN Papers 136, Box 156, File 3–4, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). 55. Das Parlament. Die Woche im Bundeshaus (Bonn), January 23, 1957; Morgenbladet (Oslo), February 2, 1957; Daily Telegraph (London), March 13, 1957; El Pais (Montevideo), August 15, 1957. 56. “ACEN House Progress Report and an Outline of Alternative Solutions,” September 1956, ACEN 136, Box 1, File 10, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

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57. Due to financial strains, the lease was not renewed in 1965. See Special Subcommittee of the General Committee of ACEN, “Suggestions on Budgetary Matters,” February 18, 1965, February 24, 1965, ACEN Papers 136, Box 1, File 6, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 58. On ACEN’s presence in Strasbourg, see Józef Łaptos, “Postawa Rady Europy wobec ‘krajów ujarzmionych’: Zagadnienie funduszu kulturalnego dla środkowoeuropejskich uchodźców politycznych (1949–1954),” Prace Komisji Środkowoeuropejskiej 6 (1999): 39–55. 59. Once George M. Dimitrov, a Bulgarian, addressed the famous democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, but this was a rare exception. 60. Brutus Coste to Polly A. Yarnall, February 12, 1963, ACEN Papers 136, Box 15, File 5, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 61. Brutus Coste to Christopher Emmet and Vladas Barciauskas, October 15, 1956, ACEN Papers 136, Box 7, File 2, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 62. “The Voice of Freedom,” New York Times, October 1, 1955, 18; “Text of Reply on Satellites,” New York Times, December 31, 1955, 3. 63. “Dulles Bans a Deal In Freeing States,” New York Times, January 10, 1956, 1. 64. “President Voices Free World Hope,” New York Times, May 26, 1956, 10; Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 22–23. 65. Yale Richmond, interview by the author, January 6, 2008; Barbara Wierzbiańska, letter to the author, November 22, 2007. 66. ACEN’s scrapbook collection alone contains over 2,500 articles from both the American and foreign press. See ACEN Papers 136, Box 160–66, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 67. The first Proclamation of the Captive Nations Week was prepared by Lev Dobriansky and announced by D. Eisenhower on July 17, 1959. See “Joint Resolution Providing for the Designation of the Third Week of July as a ‘Captive Nations Week,’” July 17, 1959, ACEN Papers, Box 142, File 9, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. It became Public Law 86–90 and Captive Nations Week has been proclaimed every year. In 2007, the list of captive nations included Belarus, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. See White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Release,” July 10, 2007, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2007/07/20070710–5.html. 68. B. Coste to G. O. McMillin, May 25. 1964, ACEN Papers, Box 17, File 3, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 69. Roman Kashuba, “Dobriansky Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award and Truman-Reagan Mead of Freedom,” The Ukrainian Weekly, August 14, 2005, available at http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2005/330510.shtml. 70. Ukraine, Byelorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkestan, East Germany, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Tibet, Idel Ural, and Kozakia. 71. A.Budrekis to P. Kihs, January 19, 1968, ACEN Papers, Box 20, File 4, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

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72. ACEN News, no. 1–93 and 95–153. 73. The exhibition in New York was opened by Senator Jacob Javitis. Later in Washington, D.C., it was opened by George Meany, leader of AFL-CIO. See ACEN Papers, Box 138, File 4 and Box 139, File 1, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 74. The meetings with the highest-level political leaders are colorfully described in Stefan Korboński, Wimieniu Polski walczącej (Warszawa: Bellona, 1999), 377–498. 75. John F. Dulles died on May 24, 1959. Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 34. 76. Ibid., 15. 77. Feliks Gadomski Papers, 124/2002, Zakład Narodowy im Ossolińskich, Wrocław, Poland. 78. Gadomski, “Zgromadzenie Europejskich,” 69.

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PART II

The Struggle Continues Facing Communism around the World

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CHAPTER 9

“Better Dead than Red” Anti-Communist Politics among Vietnamese Americans

C. N. Le

Among many Vietnamese Americans, there is a saying that “the boat that took us out (of Viet Nam) will one day takes us home.” Sentiments like that clearly illustrate that for many Vietnamese Americans, the events that ultimately forced them out of their homeland are still fresh in their minds, as are the prospects of returning home. Like many famous (or infamous) wars throughout human history, the effects of the Viet Nam War have been intense and enduring. As a result of the conclusion of the Viet Nam War, an entire nation became even more fragmented, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese became country-less, and the seeds of bitterness, resentment, and a thirst for revenge and justice were permanently sown. This chapter describes the sociological context of anti-communist political activities among Vietnamese Americans since the end of the Viet Nam War. Using their refugee experiences and collective hatred of the Communists as sources of ethnic solidarity, many Vietnamese Americans have engaged in activities designed to subvert the Communist regime in Viet Nam and continue to do so. This chapter describes some of the historical events that form this anti-communism’s foundation, its initial and continuing motivations, its impact on social cohesion among Vietnamese Americans, how it fits within the context of the American democratic system, and how it may evolve as Viet Nam becomes increasingly integrated into the global economy.

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The Collective Broken Heart: The Viet Nam/American War The most immediate cause of the Vietnamese refugee experience, of course, was the end of the Viet Nam War in 1975. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe or even summarize all of the events leading up to and taking place during the Viet Nam War. Therefore, this chapter will only briefly highlight the significant events that contributed to the mind-set of the Vietnamese refugees that in turn formed the basis for their anti-communism in the United States. This chain of events began when Viet Nam was divided in half in 1954 and the people of Viet Nam were given one year to move to the other half of the country—from the north to the south and vice versa. As a result, about one million Vietnamese who had previously lived in the northern half of Viet Nam chose to abandon almost everything that they and dozens of generations before them had owned and built in order to move to the south and live in a democratic society without Communist control. Conversely, only about 10,000 southerners moved the other way into North Viet Nam. This mass migration not only uprooted families from their ancestral lands but also contributed to the growing antagonism between Vietnamese in the north and south. The nationwide elections of 1956 were planned to reunite the country. They were ultimately cancelled, and at this point, the fighting between the Communists and their allies (the Viet Cong) and the nationalists intensified and raged for the next nineteen years in South Viet Nam. U.S. military involvement ended in early 1973 when a peace accord was signed that called for an immediate cease-fire, for all U.S. fighting forces to be withdrawn, and for South Viet Nam to determine its own future. Nonetheless, fighting between the North and the south continued. When the U.S. Congress voted to drastically reduce military aid in August 1974, the defeat of South Vietnamese nationalists was all but guaranteed. In the spring of 1975, the North launched a full-scale offensive into South Viet Nam. This culminated in the surrender of the South Vietnamese government and the capture of South Viet Nam’s capital, Saigon, on the eventful day of April 30, 1975. This led to the frantic departure of all remaining U.S. military personnel and the beginning of the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from their lands and lives in South Viet Nam.

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The Exodus and Resettlement in the United States Once the Communist forces took control of Saigon, South Viet Nam’s capital, they publicly announced that all U.S. military personnel and Vietnamese families who worked for them had twenty-four hours to leave the country. Although this day had been anticipated, chaos and panic nonetheless enveloped the city as thousands of Vietnamese desperately scrambled to find any means available to evacuate the country. In the first several months after the fall of Saigon, approximately 125,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled into the United States as part of “Operation New Life.” This first wave of evacuees mostly left by way of cargo ships that initially sailed to the primary processing station in Guam. Secondary processing stations were located in the Philippines, Thailand, Wake Island, and Hawai’i. After the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) issued their official documents, virtually all evacuees were flown to one of four resettlement centers: Camp Pendleton (California), Fort Chaffee (Arkansas), Fort Indiantown Gap (Pennsylvania), or Eglin Air Force Base (Florida). Once inside the United States, the refugees were matched with one of nine voluntary agencies (otherwise known as “volags”) that coordinated the refugee’s eventual resettlement with local family sponsors. The bulk of Vietnamese who came to the United States during this first wave arrived by late 1975 and almost all were resettled by early 1976. In the few years following the Communist victory, Vietnamese citizens faced continuing political instability, increasing corruption, natural disasters that reduced crop yields, increasing political suspicion against ethnic Chinese, little if any infrastructural development, and brutal retaliation against those associated with the U.S. government or the South Vietnamese military. All of these factors eventually caused an increasing number of Vietnamese to become desperate to escape. These push factors led to the second wave of Vietnamese emigration in late 1978. These émigrés popularly became known as “the boat people” because many of them escaped onboard overcrowded, underequipped, and dangerously constructed boats. Along with ethnic Chinese and those associated with the former South Vietnamese government, this second wave also included a significant number of Hmong, Lao, Cham, Montagnard, and Khmer ethnic minorities. These vessels sailed to the nearby shores of Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Unfortunately, it was not uncommon for entire boatloads of Vietnamese escapees to die at sea. In addition, there are innumerable personal tales of

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robberies, rape, beatings, and death associated with those who made the desperate voyage. Eventually, almost 400,000 Vietnamese escaped. Their entry into the United States was facilitated by the Refugee Act of 1980, which modified the original Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 and categorized refugees and refugee resettlement as a separate policy with its own framework and numerical limits. Similarly, in consultation with the United Nations, the Vietnamese government organized the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) in 1979 that facilitated the exit of those who were associated with the former South Vietnamese government and military and had been subjected to years of imprisonment and systematic discrimination. By the mid-1990s, over 200,000 Vietnamese had entered the United States through the ODP. The 1988 Amerasian Homecoming Act and the 1989 Humanitarian Operation Program further led to the exit and resettlement of children fathered by American military personnel and the last remnants of former South Vietnamese prisoners, respectively. Beginning in the 1990s, immigrants from Viet Nam have entered the United States mainly through family reunification provisions. Planting the Seeds of Hate Against the Communists Back in Viet Nam, as the Communist government consolidated their power and began asserting their control over their newly “unified” country, it began implementing several new economic, political, and agricultural policies. Among them were closing businesses owned by ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, seizing control of farmland and redistributing it, and mass relocation of citizens between urban and rural areas. Further, many who were associated with the former South Vietnamese government or military, and anyone else whom the Communists considered “war criminals,” were rounded up and imprisoned in the so-called reeducation camps designed to punish, humiliate, and indoctrinate them. Many were told that depending on their rank in the South Vietnamese government or military, they would spend anywhere from a few days to a month in such camps. In reality, vast numbers of those admitted to such camps remained imprisoned for several years. These camps usually involved forced confessions, exhaustive physical labor, psychological manipulation and cruelty, poor living and health conditions, and political propaganda. Also common were various forms of physical punishment, beatings, and torture. Ultimately, approximate estimates place the total number of prisoners between 500,000 and 2 million. The total number of deaths due to disease,

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starvation, torture, execution, and working accidents has been estimated in the tens of thousands to over 100,000. It was during this time that the most intense hatred of the Communists was galvanized. It is impossible to adequately describe or express the level of suffering, anguish, and horror that many Vietnamese experienced during this time at the hands of the Communists. It is also difficult for those who did not experience such events firsthand to fully comprehend and appreciate the raw pain that countless Vietnamese endured. Those who were connected to the South Vietnamese and U.S. military saw their families permanently broken apart and their relatives and friends psychologically destroyed, brutally tortured, and murdered. It is within this context that we can begin to understand the basis for much of the deep-seated and extreme revulsion that many Vietnamese Americans have against the Communist government. Fueled by decades of conflict and chaos, deprivation, and physical suffering directly inflicted at the hands of Communist officials, this indelible anti-communist hatred led many Vietnamese to use desperate measures to leave the country. When safe outside Viet Nam and settled in the United States, the Vietnamese Americans kept the painful memories fresh in their minds and used them as the kindling to stoke their vehement and fearsome anger back East. Starting Their New Lives as Vietnamese Americans The first wave of Vietnamese refugees was initially dispersed throughout the country. The U.S. government’s policy aimed to resettle the Vietnamese in as many different parts of the country as possible so that they would not overburden a particular city’s social resources and services at one time. This was also meant to encourage their quick assimilation into mainstream American society. But the government did not count on the refugees’ fundamental need to be part of their own larger community. They also did not anticipate that many Vietnamese were not used to living in cold, northern climates where they were initially settled. By the 1990s, large numbers of Vietnamese migrated from their initial settlement locations to join friends and family members in metropolitan areas that were beginning to develop ethnic Vietnamese communities. Their destinations were Orange County, California, where almost 40 percent of all Vietnamese Americans now live, and smaller communities located in San Jose, Houston, and Washington, D.C./Alexandria. Similar to other Asian American enclaves, these Vietnamese American communities have

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transformed and revitalized urban areas. Vietnamese Americans became more like other Asian Americans in that many obtained the U.S. citizenship and began sponsoring relatives and family members from Viet Nam. As noted, the single largest initial resettlement destination for the first Vietnamese refugees was southern California. Combined with the second wave of immigration, a burgeoning Vietnamese American community began to coalesce in and around the neighboring cities of Westminster and Garden Grove in central Orange County, about thirty miles southeast of Los Angeles. Up until the late 1970s, both cities were considered sleepy “bedroom” suburbs with almost all-White resident populations and many acres of farmland. However, as more Vietnamese Americans moved into the area, the Vietnamese American-owned businesses and Vietnameselanguage newspapers, such as Nguoi Viet Daily News, were established, mainly along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster. This thoroughfare eventually became the epicenter of the largest concentration of Vietnamese residents and businesses outside of Viet Nam. Today, this Little Saigon is a sprawling mixture of suburban-style strip malls and shopping centers that has spilled over into the adjacent communities of Anaheim, Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and Stanton. Such businesses include retail, groceries, restaurants, media and entertainment, banks, and professional offices, all catering to Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese alike. In the late 1980s, freeway off-ramp signs were erected, thus officially recognizing the cultural and economic status of Little Saigon. In addition, other prominent Vietnamese American communities have also developed in San Jose, Houston, and Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, along with smaller enclaves around the United States. Nonetheless, the Little Saigon in Orange County, as the oldest and largest community, is considered to be the heart of the Vietnamese American population. It is here that much of the anti-communist activities have taken place. Many Vietnamese refugees encountered prejudice, hostility, and violence soon after their resettlement into the United States as many Americans still had a bitter aftertaste of the Viet Nam War and American involvement in it. As a result, many incorrectly assumed that Vietnamese refugees were Communists, that is, America’s enemies.1 Due to a general economic recession at the time of their resettlement and a fear that the Vietnamese newcomers would take American jobs, many Vietnamese had to endure a rather cold reception. However, as the Vietnamese gradually became assimilated into the American mainstream and practiced their emerging anti-communism, Americans gradually came to see that the

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Vietnamese refugees were in fact their allies. Interestingly, in some cases, American veterans of the Viet Nam War were the first to befriend Vietnamese refugees. While documented activities are rather hard to come by, anecdotal evidence tells that American veterans of the Viet Nam War and Vietnamese refugees have sometimes united and built bridges between their communities through their shared experiences in fighting the Communists. Perhaps the most well-known example of this was the creation of the Viet Nam War Memorial, located across the street from Westminster City Hall in California. American and Vietnamese veterans worked together to raise funds for this monument that was initially proposed in the late 1990s as a way to commemorate American and Vietnamese soldiers who fought as allies against the Communists. It was completed in 2003 and it stands as a symbol of the friendship and shared experiences that bring Americans and Vietnamese together. The Politics of Anti-Communism in Little Saigon Almost immediately upon their settlement in the United States, many Vietnamese refugees began plotting on how to reconstitute their military resources, wage a campaign to reinvade Viet Nam, and reclaim their country from the Communists. While this particular strategy never came to fruition, the formation of Little Saigon in Orange County served as the catalyst for the first coordinated and overt acts of anti-communism among Vietnamese Americans. As the Little Saigon community began to grow and more Vietnamese Americans began living, working, shopping, and socializing with each other there, their shared pain and contempt for the Communists formed the basis for their ethnic solidarity. It found a growing collective voice in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The philosophy behind the anti-communism of Vietnamese Americans is rather simple—hatred of the Communist regime in Viet Nam as the enemy that drove them from their homeland and brutalized their family members, relatives, and friends. Their goals include the overthrow of the Communist regime and restoration of democracy and individual freedoms for all Vietnamese. To achieve these goals, Vietnamese Americans have been willing to use a variety of strategies—overt and covert, legal and illegal. While their anti-communist actions have changed and evolved over the years, their intensity has remained the same. During the development of the Vietnamese American community around Little Saigon, events back in their homeland occupied a central part of their lives in the United States. Many Vietnamese Americans still

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had family, close relatives, and other loved ones back in Viet Nam. Additionally, the late 1970s and early 1980s was a traumatic time for many Vietnamese due to the government’s drastic economic, political, and cultural policies and their severely negative impact in the former South Viet Nam. Emotions were still raw for many Vietnamese Americans. Therefore, any suggestion that the overseas Vietnamese population (popularly referred to as the Viet Kieu) should learn to accept the current situation as permanent, consider the Communist government in their homeland legitimate, or advocate normalized relations between the United States and Viet Nam provoked much resentment.2 In this time period, any Vietnamese American who dared to make such a statement or engage in any activity that was perceived as legitimizing or strengthening the Communist regime in Viet Nam (including business ventures) was publicly denounced as a traitor or a Viet Cong. In many cases, individuals perceived to be sympathetic to the Communists were harassed, physically assaulted, had their property vandalized, and in some extreme instances, kidnapped, murdered, or they just disappeared. A December 7, 1992, Los Angeles Times article found that between 1980 and 1992, at least a dozen of such disappearances had occurred, mostly in California.3 One of the most highly publicized deaths was that of Tap Van Pham who, at the time, was editor of Mai, a Vietnamese-language entertainment magazine. In the early hours of August 9, 1987, Pham died of smoke inhalation when his office in Little Saigon was firebombed, apparently for running advertisements for companies that did business with the Communist government (to this day, and despite the FBI becoming involved, the case remains unsolved). On March 8, 1999, Orange County Weekly summarized many of the assaults and killings committed against Vietnamese Americans who were perceived as Communist sympathizers in the 1980s and 1990s: “Liberal Vietnamese community leaders found themselves forced to wear bulletproof vests, hire armed bodyguards, and ignore the insults and curses shouted by demonstrators outside their offices. Some had to take out full-page advertisements in Vietnamese-language newspapers denying rumors that they were communist sympathizers.”4 During this time, numerous political groups and organizations developed, numbering approximately 140 in the 1980s.5 Some were small and informal, consisting of friends, neighbors, relatives, and former colleagues in South Viet Nam, while others were large, well funded, and more formal in nature. Almost all were organized around the general goal of pursuing anti-communist activities that could destabilize the Vietnamese

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government, incite the Vietnamese people to rebel against the regime, and promote democracy in Viet Nam. One of these groups, the Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation actually claimed responsibility for Tap Van Pham’s death in 1987 and several other assaults and murders of suspected Communist sympathizers. One of the largest and most organized among these early movements was Viͧt Tân, originally called the National United Front for the Freedom of Vietnam. During its early years, Viͧt Tân primarily relied on raising money from Vietnamese exiles to fund a liberation force and subversive operations in and around Viͧt Tân. Their goal was to facilitate a popular uprising inside the country. Its leader, Hoang Co Minh, was a former vice admiral in the South Vietnamese navy. However, Hoang was killed during a covert operation inside Viet Nam in 1987. For several years afterward, and perhaps due to accusations that its overseas operations were rife with fraud, Viͧt Tân kept a low profile. It reemerged in 2004 using a new name—the Vietnam Reform Party. It pledged to use only peaceful means to advocate for democracy in Viet Nam, such as lobbying American political leaders to maintain a hard-line stance against the Vietnamese government. While its goal of working toward an overthrow of the Communist government and the restoration of democracy in Viet Nam has not changed, Viͧt Tân’s evolution toward pursuing a more moderate agenda mirrors the general trend in the Vietnamese American community. In 1994, President Clinton lifted the trade embargo against Viet Nam that had existed since the Communists unified the country in 1975. A 1994 Los Angeles Times survey of Vietnamese in Southern California showed that 54 percent of respondents approved of the action, with a similar proportion favoring fully normalized relations between the United States and Viet Nam.6 Nonetheless, while Vietnamese Americans may be moderating their strategies on how to best deal with the Communist government in their homeland, many remain sensitive to overt expressions of sympathy to Communism within their own community. No other incident illustrates this continuing more than the Ho Chi Minh portrait incident in Little Saigon in 1999. High Drama at Hi Tek TV and VCR In January 1999, after returning from a tourist trip to Northern Viet Nam, Truong Van Tran, owner of a nondescript video store Hi Tek TV & VCR, located in one of Little Saigon’s many minimall strip centers, put

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up a poster of Ho Chi Minh, along with the flag of the current Vietnamese Communist government, inside his store. In subsequent interviews, Tran claimed that he felt Ho Chi Minh had some beneficial impact on Viet Nam, that the portrait was meant to provoke discussion in the Vietnamese American community, and that ultimately, as a resident of the United States, he had the right to freely express himself. Members of the Vietnamese American community did not agree. As word of Tran’s action spread throughout Little Saigon and beyond, it unleashed a flood of anger and outrage directed at Vietnamese Communists in general and Tran in particular. Soon, the store was beset with daily protests and demonstrations, with enraged protesters coming from San Jose and other locations outside of Southern California. Vietnamese Americans were periodically joined by several U.S. Viet Nam War veteran groups. At its height, approximately 15,000 demonstrators gathered outside his store, shouting “Viet Cong!” and carrying signs “Our Wounds Will Never Heal!” and “Be Aware! Communists Are Invading America!” Effigies of Ho Chi Minh and Tran were a common sight as were U.S. and South Vietnamese flags along with makeshift sidewalk shrines paying homage to Vietnamese and American victims of the Communist regime. At times, the crowd became so large and agitated that police in riot gear had to be called in and hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. Emotions ran especially high during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year celebration in late January, as many demonstrators broke through barricades to physically assault Tran outside his store. As a Time magazine article from March 8, 1999, described, Vietnamese American protestors argued, “we respect his freedom of speech, but he abuses that freedom. Exercising your First Amendment rights is one thing; causing dissension in your community is another.”7 Although a county judge declared his display a legal First Amendment expression, his business was eventually evicted by its corporate landlord for unpaid rent and insurance violations after two months of continuous protests outside the store. The offending display was removed and, soon afterward, thousands of Vietnamese Americans gathered in and around the location of the former store for a candlelight healing ceremony and gathering. This entire episode was subsequently portrayed in a documentary entitled “Saigon USA” that was produced by a local PBS station and that received national attention and critical acclaim. If Tran’s goal was indeed to start a discussion in the Vietnamese American community, he succeeded spectacularly. For many Vietnamese, especially those who had a direct connection to the events that led to

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their exile, Tran had a right to personally believe whatever he wanted to believe. Nonetheless, they felt that he had crossed the line by publicizing his beliefs. By praising Ho Chi Minh, he had been blatantly disrespectful of the painful memories of many members of his own community. Therefore, they had to exercise their freedom of expression to denounce Tran as a communist traitor. Others said that Tran had been rather naïve, and perhaps even crazy, thinking that he could put up a picture of Ho Chi Minh in public view without provoking anger in Little Saigon. Consequently, he deserved the scorn leveled at him. Other Vietnamese Americans, who are more likely to be younger and of the one-and-a-half generation or later, felt that Tran had a right to express his opinion and that protesters overreacted over a simple picture. Many noted that in their efforts to squelch dissent, anti-communist Vietnamese Americans were replicating the same form of oppression for which they consistently condemned the Communists. Living in the United States, the Vietnamese had to be more tolerant of dissenting views. For instance, Andrew Lam, a well-respected Vietnamese American syndicated writer and an editor of New America Media stated, “If you want to bring democracy back to Vietnam, if you advocate more freedom in Vietnam, you are going to have to learn to practice it first in your own community here in the U.S. I support their rights to protest but I do not think that many Vietnamese Americans understand democratic principles. There are too many examples in which opposite view points are shouted down. It’s not conducive at all to real democratic ideals.”8 The Evolution of Vietnamese American Anti-Communism Even before the Ho Chi Minh poster episode in 1999, Vietnamese Americans had been gradually moderating their political views toward the Vietnamese government. Many had come to the realization that the Communist regime was not likely to be overthrown anytime soon. Instead, they offered a more constructive strategy to work toward greater democracy. First, they suggested using their newly acquired economic resources in the United States to travel back to Viet Nam or send remittances to help their family and friends directly. Second, they proposed to employ their emerging political power to lobby legislators and politicians at all levels to pressure the Vietnamese regime to improve its democratic participation and human rights record.

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Regarding that last strategy, the Vietnamese government has given their overseas community plenty of fodder by repeated and highly publicized incidents of political repression, severe restrictions on freedom of speech, and other human rights abuses. As summarized in Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2007: Despite having one of Asia’s highest growth rates, Vietnam’s respect for fundamental human rights continues to lag behind many other countries, and the one-party state remains intolerant of criticism. Hundreds of political and religious prisoners remain behind bars in harsh conditions. During 2006, the government released a handful of prisoners of conscience but arrested dozens more, including democracy activists, cyber-dissidents, and ethnic minority Christians. Authorities continue to persecute members of independent churches, impose controls over the internet and the press, restrict public gatherings, and imprison people for their religious and political views. Media, political parties, religious organizations, and labor unions are not allowed to exist without official oversight, or to take actions considered contrary to Party policies. The year saw unprecedented labor unrest, official efforts to muzzle an emerging democracy movement, and ongoing repression of Buddhists and ethnic minority Christians.9

In recent years, the Vietnamese government has made some efforts to improve their overall human rights record, much of which may be a reflection of its growing economic power and general increase in living standards. The government’s efforts may also have been a strategy to help win entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was accomplished in November 2006. Viet Nam continues to exercise harsh control over its citizens and this is what Vietnamese Americans seize upon in continuing their harsh condemnation of the Communist government. Similarly to China, Viet Nam has pursued a socialist-controlled capitalist economy and offers its citizens access to the Internet and email inside the country. Despite freeing several well-known pro-democracy cyberdissidents in 2005, Vietnamese authorities still maintain strict censorship over both forms of media. They can block any website and track emails that they define as antigovernment, pro-democracy, or otherwise threatening to their power. Perhaps the best-known recent human rights abuse episode was the arrest and trial of Father Nguyen Van Ly. Father Ly is a prominent Roman Catholic priest, a pro-democracy activist, and a vocal supporter of Bloc 8406, a group of 118 pro-democracy activists inside Viet Nam, named for the date of its founding—April 8, 1986. The group issued the famous Manifesto on Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam that advocated democratic reforms in Viet Nam. Based

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on his support for this group, Father Ly was arrested, tried for “harming national security,” found guilty, and sentenced to eight years in prison on March 30, 2007. In an unusual move, the Vietnamese authorities allowed foreign reporters to attend his trial and televised it nationwide. During the proceedings, Father Ly began to shout “Down with Communism” before security police silenced him by smothering his mouth and physically holding his jaw shut. Video clips and images of that particular scene quickly became widely circulated through print media and the Internet. As Father Ly’s plight became internationally known, enraged Vietnamese Americans quickly seized upon his case as another blatant example of the Vietnamese Communists’ utter disregard for basic human rights and personal freedoms. As Vietnamese Americans further publicized Father Ly’s situation in their rallies and protests, they caused the U.S. State Department to criticize Viet Nam’s treatment of Father Ly as a deeply troubling development. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice specifically brought up Father Ly’s case with the Vietnamese foreign minister, Pham Gia Khiem, in March 2007.10 Soon afterward, and due to intense pressure from Vietnamese Americans, U.S. Representative Christopher Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, and twelve cosponsors introduced H.R. 3096, the Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2007, that passed with a vote of 414 to 3. Among other provisions, it called for no increases in nonhumanitarian aid to Viet Nam unless it would make “substantial progress” in improving its human rights record. In December 2007, the bill was reviewed in the Senate by the Committee on Foreign Relations. Groups such as Bloc 8406 demonstrate that political dissidence and activism inside Viet Nam are alive and well, if constantly under attack and persecution from the Communist authorities. Bloc 8406 and the Committee for Human Rights in Viet Nam are well known, while many other groups and organizations prefer to remain covert in order to evade harassment and arrest. Several well-known Vietnamese dissidents have been arrested in recent years for various alleged “anti-government” activities: “Vietnam intermittently plays a cat and mouse game with its political dissidents, arresting and releasing its most famous activists while those less visible are disappeared.”11 Additionally, several Vietnamese Americans have been arrested for similar “antigovernment” activities, although many are later deported back to the United States. One prominent recent example is Cong Thanh Do, who, unbeknownst to even his own family, founded the underground People’s Democratic Party several years ago and wrote many pro-democracy essays and maintained a regular newsletter distributed on the Internet using the pseudonym

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“Tr͏n Nam.” Do was vacationing in Viet Nam with his family in August 2006 when he was arrested by local authorities. During his six-week stay in prison, his case eventually led notable American politicians such as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Senator Diane Feinstein to call for his release. Several other state and national politicians worked publicly and behind the scenes for his release, which occurred in September 2006. Do received a hero’s welcome upon his return to the United States.12 Nguoi Viet 2 News, the English language sister newspaper of the more established Vietnamese-language Nguoi Viet, noted that the Viet Tan organization still conducts numerous pro-democracy activities inside and outside of Viet Nam (some more covert than others). It continues to actively recruit Vietnamese Americans to help its cause.13 However, besides Viet Tan, not much is known about such activities, their level of success, or whether any U.S. agencies are also involved. Similarly, while there are occasional suspicions of Vietnamese Communists trying to influence, fragment, or recruit spies from the Vietnamese American community, there is little empirical evidence or documented instances to confirm such rumors (beyond public accusations made in the heat of protest). While some Vietnamese Americans, like Do, manifest their anticommunism by directly engaging the Communist regime, including in Viet Nam, most anti-communist activism involves lobbying in the United States. The main focus of political activity among Vietnamese Americans today is more peaceful and conventional, aimed at influencing national political leaders. In this sense, Vietnamese Americans are no different than other racial/ethnic or cultural groups working toward greater political power. Vietnamese Americans have historically been more closely linked with the Republican Party, which they perceive as more anti-communist. This preference was confirmed during the 2004 Presidential election when New California Media (now known as New America Media) conducted a comprehensive national survey of voter preferences among various Asian American ethnic groups. They found that 71 percent of Vietnamese Americans surveyed planned to vote for George W. Bush’s candidacy, while 11 percent planned to vote for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.14 Nonetheless, Vietnamese Americans will seek to influence any politician who they feel could be useful to their cause of promoting democracy in Viet Nam. This objective has been increasingly put into action as the Vietnamese government continues to expand its international presence and stature. For example, in June 2005, Viet Nam’s prime minister, Phan Van Khai,

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made an official state visit to meet with President Bush. He was the highestranking Vietnamese leader to visit the United States since the Communist takeover in 1975. His goal was to shore up U.S. support for Viet Nam’s entry into the World Trade Organization, meet with American business leaders—including Microsoft’s Bill Gates—and further encourage American business investment in Viet Nam’s economy. During Khai’s visit at the White House, several hundred, mostly Vietnamese American, protesters gathered outside the White House gates, carrying signs reading “Khai is a terrorist” and demanding that the United States give no trade or political concessions to Viet Nam unless it cleaned up its record on human rights and democratic expression. Similar throngs of Vietnamese American protesters also greeted Khai at virtually all his other stops during the weeklong visit around the United States. Such scenes were repeated two years later in June 2007 when Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet paid another official visit to the White House. Again, he was greeted by several hundred, mostly Vietnamese American, demonstrators just outside the White House gates, carrying flags of the former South Viet Nam and loudly denouncing Nguyen and his regime. Reporters noted that this was apparently the largest demonstration against a foreign leader in the nation’s capital in recent memory.15 During the course of his visit, Nguyen’s strategy was to keep the focus on Viet Nam’s strong trade relationship with the United States, but Vietnamese American protesters may have finally had success in convincing lawmakers that fighting for human rights and democracy was important: Senior U.S. lawmakers repeatedly took Triet to task for claims by rights groups that Vietnam has ramped up repression of political activists and religious leaders. ‘Human rights was overwhelmingly the dominant issue,’ Republican Rep. Ed Royce said. ‘We’ve got to see a stop to this conduct if this relationship is going to improve.’ When asked about Triet’s response, Royce answered: ‘Evasion’ . . . Rep. Roy Blunt, the No. 2 House Republican, said Triet told lawmakers that Vietnam ‘had lots of human rights, but the dissidents were somehow endangering the security of the country. We pressed hard for more information about exactly what that means.’16

In a bold move, Nguyen also visited Orange County, California, just a few miles from Little Saigon, to meet with members of the Orange County-based Vietnam Business Association and Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In expectation of his arrival, Vietnamese Americans organized busloads of protesters, many from as far away as San Diego and San Jose, to confront Nguyen at every stop during his visit. Observers

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estimated that the crowd gathered outside the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort and Spa in Dana Point totaled in the thousands over a two-day period. As further examples of the power of the protesters’ anger and passion, Nguyen’s limousine arrived at the resort without displaying the customary Vietnamese diplomatic flags. Also, as attendees left in their cars at the conclusion of the events, many nervously covered up their faces and sped away from the crowds shouting at them. In both of these instances, it is rather remarkable that Vietnamese Americans were able to sit down with national leaders such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and U.S. representatives and senators from both parties. Vietnamese ethnic anti-communists were able to convince American politicians that while trade, investments, and accounting for soldiers missing in action were important, the most significant issue for which these Communist leaders should be held accountable was human rights and democracy in Viet Nam. Combined with recent and prominent local and state election victories of Vietnamese Americans such as Van Tran, Janet Nguyen, and Madison Nguyen, it is clear that Vietnamese Americans are emerging as an influential political constituency. What the Future Holds With their emerging political power in mind, many would assume that the future looks bright for the Vietnamese American community. At the same time, two separate forces are likely to complicate matters and to throw into question just how political power will be structured and exercised by Vietnamese Americans in the coming decades. The first is Viet Nam’s economic emergence in the global economy. Ever since Viet Nam’s leaders introduced their doi moi economic liberalization and modernization policies in the late 1980s, designed to encourage increased foreign investment, tourism, and small private enterprises, its economy has been one of the fastest-growing in Asia. It is now approaching 10 percent gross domestic product growth each year. There was a period of stagnation in the late 1990s following the Asian financial crisis of 1997 but since the early 2000s, Viet Nam’s economy is back to being the second-fastest growing economy in the world after China. Bolstered by such sustained growth and continued strong international investment and trade, Viet Nam signed an historic Bilateral Trade Agreement with the United States in 2001 and became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2006, although Viet Nam has yet to win

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permanent and full trade status with the United States. Viet Nam currently has an unemployment rate of only 2 percent, one of the lowest in the world, and its GDP per capita has risen to $3,300. Perhaps its most notable accomplishment is that its level of “deep poverty” (percent of the population living under $1 per day) has declined significantly, down to 8 percent in 2006 from 51 percent in 1990, and it is now smaller than that of China, India, and the Philippines. Such economic advancements have also led to the growth of the middle class among the Vietnamese. Additionally, there is a growing number of Vietnamese Americans who have returned to their homeland to start their own businesses and try to cash in on the economic prosperity in Viet Nam. While Vietnamese American-owned businesses have had financial ties to their homeland for decades (i.e., money transfer services sending remittances to family and friends in Viet Nam), recent years have seen much larger and more frequent business ventures. These involve Vietnamese Americans as the owners and direct proprietors, and as leaders and managers, of large-scale expansion ventures involving corporations from virtually all industries of the Fortune 500.17 In the context of the gradually improving quality of life for its citizens, and the trend of Vietnamese Americans returning to their homeland to do business, the question arises, what effect will this have on the future of anti-communism among Vietnamese Americans? At this point, there are no definitive answers. Nonetheless, the emerging consensus among some key Vietnamese Americans is that these trends might ease anti-communist sentiments among the Viet Kieu.18 One inevitable trend that may have the longest lasting and most significant impact on anti-communism in the Vietnamese American community is the growing numbers of U.S.-raised Vietnamese Americans—those who were either born in the United States or the one-and-a-half generation who immigrated when they were young children. These Vietnamese Americans tend to be more assimilated into mainstream America and they are more likely to have moderate, liberal, or even apathetic views toward the Vietnamese government and Communism in general. These tendencies are reflected in the results of a study of cultural differences by generation among Vietnamese Americans in the San Jose area: “Opposing communism is a ‘top priority’ to more than two in five over the ages of fifty-five . . . However, among younger Vietnamese Americans, the issue clearly less uniformly important, with just one in five of those between 25–34 considering it a ‘top priority.’ The trend is similar on the issue of human rights. When asked if ‘encouraging Vietnam to improve its policy on human rights’ should be a ‘top priority,’ just

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28 percent of Vietnamese Americans under 25 agreed, compared to 48 percent of those over 45.”19 To understand why younger Vietnamese Americans are less likely to be anti-communist than their older counterparts, Anh Do, a well-respected journalist who reports for both the Orange County Register and the Nguoi Viet 2 News newspapers, pointed out that the younger generation did not have direct experiences involving the Communists. Therefore, their understanding of anti-communism is much different than that of the older generation: “‘Anti-communist’ is just a term to [the younger generation of Vietnamese Americans]. It’s not something that they can define or has been defined for them or that they can grasp.”20 Andrew Lam hypothesized that while the younger generation might still have anti-communist tendencies, their way of channeling their views into action would be different from the older generation’s approaches: “The younger generation may still have some understanding but the passion is no longer visceral. Many do not like Communism and would celebrate if Vietnam moves toward democratic system, but I doubt very much that a large number of us live our lives toward that goal.”21 These statements capture the general consensus among observers and scholars about anti-communism’s future evolution among Vietnamese Americans in the twenty-first century. All other things being equal, as the U.S.-raised generation becomes more prominent, the community’s anti-communist stance is likely to gradually moderate or at least become less confrontational. However, in the world of global politics and international events, all other things are not likely to be equal, or in other words, events can be rather volatile and unpredictable. More specifically, although anti-communism among Vietnamese Americans is likely to moderate, it can also easily be reignited and reenergized if the Communist government continues to crackdown on prodemocracy dissidents or if its human rights abuses become even more egregious. As long as the Vietnamese Communists squelch any activity they perceive as a potential threat to their power, anti-communism will be alive and well among Vietnamese Americans. The memories of the Viet Nam War, the reeducation camps, and their refugee experiences continue to be powerful influences for many Vietnamese Americans. Scholars argue that based largely on their wartime and refugee experiences, Vietnamese Americans tend to exhibit the highest levels of ethnic solidarity among all Asian American ethnic groups.22 Further, Vietnamese American political participation has always been more about quality and intensity than quantity. The studies have shown that while Vietnamese Americans have

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lower voter registration rates by comparison to other Asian American ethnic groups, among those who are registered, Vietnamese Americans are near the top in terms of actual voting rates.23 Therefore, even though U.S.-raised Vietnamese Americans may not have the same level of attachment to the trauma of the Viet Nam War, they are still likely to share the anti-communist sentiments of their community. Younger Vietnamese Americans may be more assimilated into mainstream American society. However, as American society moves into the twenty-first century and as the world becomes more globalized, new forms of assimilation will allow them more latitude in simultaneously asserting both a Vietnamese and an American identity.24 With that in mind, younger Vietnamese Americans are not likely to reject or ignore their history. Rather, as Viet Nam’s economic power continues to emerge, as American companies seek partners in Viet Nam, as global quality of life issues such as human rights continue to grow in prominence, as Vietnamese Americans continue on their path of political activism and influence, and as the Communist regime in Viet Nam continues to squelch dissent, anti-communism among Vietnamese Americans may not die out so quickly after all.25 Conclusion The Vietnamese American community is used to fighting against the odds. Throughout the history of their homeland, their ancestors have fought off the Chinese, the French, and other outsiders. After being driven out of their homes and their country by the Communists, Vietnamese refugees fought against desperation and chaos to create large and vibrant ethnic enclaves in their adopted homeland in the United States. Since then, while integrating themselves into many areas of mainstream American society and gradually building their political power, Vietnamese Americans are now fighting against the virtually inevitable tide of assimilation. As many sociologists consistently contend, some form of cultural assimilation is unavoidable for immigrant groups such as the Vietnamese.26 Cultural assimilation is also likely to bring about moderation, if not significant decline, of cultural ties to the homeland and of extreme expressions of political views. It may take time, perhaps generations, but sociologists assert that the social forces of American society and culture will eventually win out. In this context, Vietnamese Americans are fighting to maintain not only their culture but also their ethnic solidarity. It is largely based on

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their passionate hatred toward their enemies, the Communists. Evidence shows that, indeed, younger Vietnamese Americans are already likely to have moderate or indifferent views toward the Communists than firstgeneration refugees. Second, as the Vietnamese economy continues to expand within the global marketplace, many Vietnamese Americans have openly embraced the economic opportunities available to them in Viet Nam. Overall, many Vietnamese Americans have begun to personally, and even publicly, suggest a path toward reconciliation with their hated adversaries. While the social forces of assimilation are undeniable, so are the human rights abuses committed by Viet Nam’s government. Even while they modernize economy and strive to elevate status on the international stage, the Communists continue to deny many basic human rights, individual liberties, and social freedoms to large numbers of their citizens. As long as these abuses exist, Vietnamese Americans will continue to criticize, condemn, and try to undermine the legitimacy of Viet Nam’s government using their own personal experiences as inspiration and their developing political power at the state and national levels. The fires of oppression still burn strong for many in the émigré community, and the Vietnamese government continues to provide fuel to keep the fire burning. While the tactics of anti-communist resistance might change and become focused more on humanitarian efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Vietnamese citizens, the fight against Communism and the wish to return home is not likely to burn out any time soon. Notes 1. C. N. Le, “Fleeing Dragon: The Refugee Experience From a Vietnamese Immigrant Family,” in Minority Voices: Linking Personal Ethnic History with the Sociological Imagination, ed. John Myers (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2004); James M. Freeman, Changing Identities: Vietnamese Americans, 1975–1995 (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1995). 2. Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston, Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998). 3. Zhou and Bankston, Growing Up American. 4. Ibid., 86. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Jeffrey Ressner, “The Man Who Brought Back Ho Chi Minh,” available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,990385,00.html. 8. Andrew Lam, interview by author, October 2007.

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9. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2007,” available at http://www.hrw.org/ wr2k7/wr2007master.pdf. 10. Peter Maer, “Bush Pushes Vietnam Leader On Human Rights,” available at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/22/politics/main2967996.shtml. 11. Andrew Lam, “U.S.-Vietnam Thaw Hazardous to Dissidents,” available at http:// news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=e4468651bad0a f6f2eddd02e5fbddb96. 12. Associated Press, “U.S. Calls Vietnamese Sentence of Catholic Priest Deeply Troubling ‘Negative Development,’” available at http://www.iht.com/articles/ ap/2007/03/30/america/NA-GEN-US-Vietnam.php. 13. Deppa Bharath, “Democracy Activism a ‘Battle Without Boundaries,’” Nguoi Viet 2 News, May 3, 2007, 1, 7. 14. Bendixen & Associates, The Tarrance Group, and New California Media, “National Poll of Asian Pacific Islanders on the 2004 Election,” available at http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=318ff90e54202 09eaa2f8aa20e65d592. 15. Maer, “Bush Pushes Vietnam Leader On Human Rights.” 16. Ibid. 17. James Flanagan, “Little Saigon Exports Its Prosperity,” available at http://www .nytimes.com/2006/01/19/business/19sbiz.html. 18. Andrew Lam, interview by author, October 2007. 19. Christian Collet and Nadine Selden, “Separate Ways. Worlds Apart? The ‘Generation Gap’ in Vietnamese America as Seen Through The San Jose Mercury News Poll,” Amerasia Journal 29 (2003): 199–217. 20. Anh Do, interview by author, October 2007. 21. Andrew Lam, interview by author, October 2007. 22. C. N. Le, Asian American Assimilation: Ethnicity, Immigration, and Socioeconomic Attainment (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007). 23. Pei-Te Lien, M. Margaret Conway, and Janelle S. Wong, The Politics of Asian Americans: Diversity & Community (New York: Routledge, 2004). 24. Le, Asian American Assimilation. 25. Anh Do, interview by author, October 2007. 26. Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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CHAPTER 10

Hmong Anti-Communism at Home and Abroad Chia Youyee Vang

This chapter explores the historical contradictions in Hmong ethnic divisions, beginning with French colonialism, through their involvement with U.S. covert operations in Laos during the American war in Vietnam and their subsequent forced migration to the United States. It examines how their understanding, or lack thereof, of Communist ideologies shaped their political struggles as a stateless people. This chapter argues that Hmong ethnic anti-communist activities have not only been sporadic but divisive and that they have infiltrated into the daily lives of a segment of the Hmong diaspora in America. Historical Context The Hmong are an ethnic minority originally from southern China. In the mid-1800s, some migrated southward due to political instabilities and to seek new opportunities. They mostly settled in the northern mountainous regions of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and, though significantly less, Myanmar. Prior to Laos being incorporated into French Indochina in 1893, Hmong resided in the northeastern part of the country in semiautonomous villages. Before the Second Indochina War, an estimated 350,000 Hmong lived in Laos.1 The stage for divisions and alliances with various foreign powers were set in motion prior to the First and Second Indochina wars. Clearly, ethnic tension among highland ethnic minorities, and between highland dwellers and lowland ethnic Lao, existed prior to French colonialism. However,

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ethnic tensions intensified after France colonized Laos. The French colonial regime found ready allies among the Hmong, who were disenfranchised in Lao society. The French received support from a pro-French Hmong leader, Lo Blia Yao, to put down the revolt led by Hmong messianic leader, Pa Chay Vue, from 1918 to 1921. Lo Blia Yao’s alliance with French officials resulted in great personal, economic, and political gains.2 With French support, a 1939 election for the tasseng3 position of Nong Het district in northeastern Laos transferred the leadership role from the Lo clan to Touby Lyfoung of the Ly clan, thus beginning the Hmong’s political split. When the Japanese occupied Laos in March 1945, Faydang Lo, who was Lo Blia Yao’s younger son, sided with them and helped the Japanese hunt down French commandos. Meanwhile, Touby Lyfoung and his supporters collaborated with the French by hiding them, establishing an intelligence network to inform French commandos of Japanese activities, and organizing Hmong guerrilla bands to ambush Japanese troops.4 Faydang Lo continued the trend of working against Touby Lyfoung and the French by joining forces with the Vietminh after Japan’s defeat. During the First Indochina War (1945–54), the Pathet Lao—the Lao Communist party supported by North Vietnam—seized the opportunity to recruit Hmong ethnic minorities by collaborating with Faydang Lo. He and his supporters were said to have received training from the Vietminh to establish a Hmong guerilla force.5 When Laos achieved independence in 1954, its accommodation of Communists in the coalition government was unacceptable to the United States in the context of the intensifying cold war. When it became clear that Toubly Lyfoung would prefer to work with the Americans when the French left, Faydang Lo expressed his anti-Touby Lyfoung views by joining up with the Lao Issara (Free Lao), a political movement led by Lao nationalists against French control. When the resistance government of Neo Lao Issara (Free Lao Front) was established in 1950, Faydang Lo became one of the two ministers representing ethnic minorities. By 1956, the Front changed its name to Neo Lao Hak Sat (Lao Patriotic Front) and Faydang Lo became its vice president. In the 1958 decision between the NLHS and Royal Lao Government (RLG) to establish a coalition government, a Lo relative was elected to the National Assembly while Touby Lyfoung represented Hmong on the RLG side. When the Americans took the place of the French during the Second Indochina War (1954–75), Hmong in Laos continued to be torn apart. Because Touby Lyfoung had supported then Colonel Vang Pao in the Royal Lao Army (RLA), Faydang Lo continued to align with the Communist Pathet Lao. American withdrawal from Southeast Asia

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meant that those who supported America’s Communist containment policies from the 1950s through the mid-1970s also faced dismal vicissitudes. In retrospect, superpower struggles and foreign intervention in Lao during the Cold War politics gave ethnic minority groups such as the Hmong an opportunity and a need to redefine their relationships with other communities and, to some degree, to redefine themselves. The periods of political collapse at the start and the end of the war facilitated this process, allowing individuals and groups to pursue agendas that would not have been possible under previous circumstances. The Communist revolution led by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) abolished the monarchy and established the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) on December 2, 1975. Since then, more than 400,000 people left the country as refugees or went into exile.6 Prior to the resettlement of Hmong refugees beginning in 1975, no Hmong community existed in the United States. Therefore, anti-communist activities from abroad did not commence until shortly after their arrival. The extent to which the U.S. government and American policy makers supported Hmong anti-communist efforts and resistance fighters remaining in Laos depended on American relations with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Following the Communist takeover of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the United States turned a cold shoulder toward these countries. A trade embargo was implemented against Vietnam while Cambodia and Laos received minimal recognition and support in the international arena. As international relations with these nations began to develop in the aftermath of the cold war in 1991, the United States improved its relationship with these three nations. The closing of the large Ban Vinai refugee camp in 1992 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Thai government, followed by the U.S.-supported repatriation of some Hmong who resided in Ban Vinai, indicated that U.S. officials no longer viewed the LDPR as an enemy. As U.S.-Laos relations continued to ameliorate, the views of Hmong who continued to claim political persecutions andcrossed the Lao-Thai border became contentious. The evils of Communism no longer served as the legitimate grounds for escape as they had during the cold war. However, the never-ending situation with what is claimed by supporters to be remnants of the CIA’s Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs) continue to haunt Hmong exiles, international human rights groups, the LPDR and American foreign policy makers. When the Communists took over in 1975, they declared that they would hunt down the “American collaborators” and their families “to the

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last root.” Some Hmong leaders in exile had been raising this issue for years because they received news from friends and relatives who stayed behind. However, until 2003, when a Times reporter reached one of the Hmong outposts in the Xaysomboune special zone of Laos,7 few in the outside world believed the “extermination campaign” announced in 1975 was still in effect. The LPDR has denied all claims that it is hunting down these “freedom fighters” and describes their activities as those of bandits. However, several groups of Hmong Americans have treated these claims differently, and thus, have forcefully appealed to national and international level leaders for help. Hmong Understanding of Communism Hmong culture and its traditions emphasize communal well-being over individual preferences. Because Marxist ideologies were also based on communal interest, it would appear that Communism was a better fit than democratic capitalism. Although little is known about the Hmong ethnic members who fought on the other side, narratives from Hmong people who traversed the physical and ideological borders reveal that initially, they did not make a distinction between Communism and Western ideals of freedom and democracy. Most of the time, villagers preferred to be left alone, however, remaining uninvolved was not an option for them: “In the areas under the American/Royal control, as well as the ‘liberated zones’ of the north, Royalists and Communists alike were unhappy about the lack of commitment of many mountain people to one side or the other, these ‘pacifists’ therefore being prone to suspicions of sympathizing with the enemy.”8 Hmong “pacifists” frequently became targets of assaults from both sides and thus suffered greatly. As a result, they eventually had to take side in order to receive protection. Some researchers have argued that Hmong ethnic minorities were willing to fight on behalf of the Americans due to their own self-interest—that is, in order to protect their homes and families and because of their dislike of Communism.9 Others argued that despite their interest in protecting their homes, Hmong—particularly Hmong leaders—were not only victims of larger global political forces but also opportunists.10 The question remains, how did isolated ethnic minorities throughout the world, such as the Hmong, learn to distinguish the cold war ideologies? Narratives from former soldiers, military leaders, and other ordinary people of Hmong ethnicity who lived in Laos through this tumultuous time indicate that their affiliation with different political factions had

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less to do with political ideology than economic opportunities and historical ethnic tensions. Dang Her, who was a former soldier and U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) field assistant, explained, “Why Americans? I don’t know how it all happened. You hear from the elders that we must go. The Vietnamese are coming so before you know it, you’re on the American side. As we grew up, then we are automatically with the Americans . . . When I was a young boy, Choua and Pop Buell were already distributing materials in Phong Savan . . . They were the ones who gave us literature about America and American flags.”11 These recollections revealed the intimate ties between American military and humanitarian efforts. While Choua Thao, who was a Hmong ethnic nurse, and Pop Buell, the director of USAID’s rural development and refugee relief program, were best known for medical aid and refugee relief, their distribution of literature promoting America contributed to American efforts to “win the hearts and minds” of Hmong people. Material goods, ranks, titles, and salaried jobs also became available to Hmong ethnic minorities during the 1960s under the auspices of the USAID and the CIA. While the former supported the construction of schools, clinics and hospitals, and refugee relief centers, the latter established the irregular secret army, Special Guerrilla Units. Few American staff arrived in Laos with language skills necessary to communicate with the local people. Lack of language compounded with the sheer diversity of ethnic groups often left Americans in Laos perplexed. While a few eventually stayed longer and learned local languages, most relied on native representatives with some English language proficiency to serve as intermediaries. Perhaps one of the more simplistic explanations for why Hmong risked their lives to align with Americans has been expressed by Yia Lee: “The main reason most Hmong fell on to the American side was because of the food drops and pots and pans. So, it’s not so much the ideology. People didn’t know.”12 However, Choua Thao, who worked directly with USAID staff to develop a curriculum and train ethnic nurses, offered a different view: “We knew the difference, but it was a matter of habit. You know, when you’re with one group and that group says that the other is bad, then you start to believe that those people are bad too. We didn’t really know the difference, but what we did know was that the Americans were helping us with a lot of things.”13 Thus, people’s perceptions depended on which side they happened to join, but there was also a deeper historical explanation. Vietnamese imperialism and domination in government, business, and education since French colonial times had created much resentment by the people of Laos. A legacy

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of hatred and suspicion of all Vietnamese existed, and no distinction was made between Communist and non-communist Vietnamese. Therefore, Hmong and American leaders at the time could frequently explain to the Hmong military recruits that Americans had simply come to help them in their fight against North Vietnamese and the Communist Pathet Lao forces in order to protect their homeland. Such anti-communist sentiments were instituted in the military training.14 Historical ethnic animosity had a visible impact on the peoples’ political alliances. These ethnic perceptions seemed to have been instilled at a young age: “I don’t know but since I can remember, all you hear is that we needed to get away from the Vietnamese . . . All you knew was that Vietnamese was associated with evil . . . When you keep hearing these messages associated with Vietnamese, you start to form your own judgment. When you say it enough, it becomes part of your culture.”15 Such narratives suggest that Hmong had some, but not very clear, understanding of ideological differences between Communism and democracy. However, they understood the benefits of collaborating with American military advisers and humanitarian workers. Overall, years of fighting compounded with intraethnic conflicts generated distrust and exacerbated the struggle for political power. The former General Vang Pao was an influential figure in Hmong anti-communism from the beginning;16 however, it remains unclear how anti-communist sentiments initially developed among the Hmong people. Although very few Hmong studied Communist ideologies in the 1960s, the Hmong anti-communists in the United States have become vocal critics of the Communist regime in Laos. They point out that under Communist rule, their friends and relatives were sent to the so-called reeducation camps and many never returned. Hmong anti-communist exiles also criticize the slow development of the country following the Communist revolution in 1975. Former chair of the U.S.-based Lao Human Rights Council led by Hmong Americans argued that the LPRP’s promise to develop and build highways, hospitals, schools, bridges, and an economic system has been nothing more than propaganda.17 In the early years after resettling in the U.S., many exiles expressed a desire to return to a homeland where the people of Hmong ethnicity would be able to fully participate in their country’s social, economic and political life. Finally, as their narratives suggested, the Hmong on the American side saw the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese-supported Laotians as their main enemy. Exiles regarded Laos’ political and military dependency on Vietnam following the war as a form of Vietnamese aggression. Therefore, in

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response to the signing of the Charter of Paris declaring the end of the cold war, the Lao Human Rights Council chair declared, “the cold war is not over for Hmongs and Laotians because they are still fighting for freedom, human rights, democracy, peace, justice, liberty and equality.”18 Settling in the United States The forced migration from Laos that started in 1975 has remained a neverending crisis. Still today, sporadic groups of Hmong ethnics continue to cross into Thailand, seeking sanctuary and claiming continued persecution. Consequently, Hmong Americans have engaged in “homeland politics” of various forms. Due to their alliance with the CIA and participation in its covert operations in Laos during the 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of Hmong along with other Laotian groups fled after the United States withdrew from Southeast Asia.19 Many became refugees in Thailand beginning in mid-May 1975. Because of their involvement with U.S. officials, the vast majority of the refugees chose to resettle in the United States. From 1975 to 2004, more than 130,000 Hmong refugees immigrated to America. Due to previous colonial ties, more than 10,000 chose to go to France, some of whom were sent to French Guiana, a department of France in the northern part of South America. Canada and Australia each resettled slightly more than 2,000 Hmong refugees. By the year 2000, the U.S. Census counted 186,310 people of Hmong ethnicity.20 Since they began arriving in the United States, Hmong have concentrated in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Initially dispersed throughout the country by refugee resettlement policies and programs, the Hmong practiced chain migration heavily. Consequently, large communities have been established in these three states. Until 2000, the largest concentration of Hmong was in California; however, after 2000, the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis became the largest community of Hmong in the United States. In recent years, Hmong Americans have also increasingly moved to southern states.21 In general, the Hmong have worked hard to rebuild their lives in America. Many in the one-and-a-half and second generations are pursuing postsecondary education and have entered various sectors of the economy. Some of them participate in local and state politics, in Minnesota and Wisconsin in particular, thus energizing others to become involved, too. A growing professional class has emerged during the last decade. In comparison to their socioeconomic status more than thirty-five

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years ago, they have made tremendous gains; however, as a group, the Hmong remain the most impoverished Asian Americans. In addition, their culture has undergone tremendous changes through its interactions with American social norms. United Lao National Liberation Front or Neo Hom Exiled Lao22 leaders of Hmong ethnicity witnessed the abolition of the Lao monarchy and takeover of the country by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party in 1975. They went into exile thinking it would be temporary and they would soon return to rebuild the country. After more than five years in the United States, these leaders increased their disapproval of Vietnam’s presence in Laos. In order to address the situation in their homeland, Vang Pao and other exiled Lao military leaders founded the United Lao National Liberation Front, also known as the Neo Hom, in 1981. In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Vang Pao outlined ULNLF’s objectives as (1) to mobilize all Laotian people, inside and outside of Laos, to overthrow the puppet regime imposed on the Laotian people by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, (2) to fight the expansionist policy of Socialist Vietnam and its territorial ambition in Laos and in Southeast Asia, (3) to mobilize support of world public opinion in favor of a democratic and peaceful Laos, protected by solid international guarantees, and (4) to combat Hanoi’s regional expansionism by promoting a new structure of stability and peace in Indochina based on respect of the fundamental national rights of all people living in the region.23 Notably, Vang’s speech identified the North Vietnamese “devious and wily imperialism” as the enemy and called for an “all-out struggle against the North Vietnamese occupiers.”24 The exiled Hmong leaders regard the Lao Communist party as a puppet regime that is under Hanoi’s control. Therefore, Neo Hom presented itself to the American public as an organization promoting peace and self-determination for Laos without the Vietnamese interference. During the cold war, Neo Hom’s goals were tolerated by American policy makers. Neo Hom resisted Vietnamese expansion, which fit well within American foreign policy interests. The United States itself had used its power to ensure that Vietnam continued to suffer after the American withdrawal from Southeast Asia by, for example, imposing a trade embargo. However, to many Hmong Americans of the refugee generation, Neo Hom represented the hope of a return to their homeland as well as prospects of ranks and titles promised during the “secret war” years.25

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At the height of Hmong anti-communist activities during the 1980s, former General Vang Pao did indeed promise a soon return to Laos. He preached the importance of nation and land. As time went on and many Hmong Americans started to question Neo Hom’s intentions and activities, his public messages to Hmong communities changed from the need to fight for freedom in Laos to the benefits of investing in their lives in America. Throughout the 1980s, Neo Hom collected funds from Hmong in America to support the resistance fighters.26 However, the extent to which Neo Hom made a difference in supporting the resistance fighters who stayed in Laos after the Communist takeover remained unclear. The resistance fighters have been waging sporadic war against, and in response to, attacks by the Communist government of Laos. But overall, the requesters of American support for resistance efforts have been found to exaggerate their strength. Organizations such as Neo Hom have been discovered to serve as mere fronts for fundraising.27 Interest in Neo Hom’s activities was triggered by the intraethnic tensions that became exposed to the American public. In particular, complaints from former members of Neo Hom and young Hmong Americans provoked journalist Ruth Hammond to start an investigation in 1989. It exposed the contentious situation in the Hmong American community. After exploring the inner workings of Neo Hom, it was revealed that Neo Hom’s leaders often overstated its support to resistance fighters in Laos and lied about the American support of their activities.28 In the following years, the American Hmong community became increasingly skeptical of the anti-communist activities.29 Nearly a decade later in 1997, concerns about Neo Hom’s fundraising tactics continued to surface, especially when a disillusioned insider went to the police, claiming that the organization raised money “through fraud and intimidation.” Neo Hom’s activities were scrutinized and it became clear that there was no accountability about where the money had been spent. The most troubling revelation was that members who paid a certain amount were promised particular positions when Laos was liberated from the Communist government.30 This media exposure compounded with the loss of hope for the soon return to Laos among the aging population. They also were experiencing the disapproval of their adult children for supporting suspicious organizations. All of this led to Neo Hom’s loss of appeal. During the early 2000s, Vang Pao and his followers faced yet another controversy. Vang Pao had been known for his opposition to the human

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rights violations conducted by the Communist government of Laos, but in 2001, he began to publicly advocate for normalization of U.S.-Laos relations if human rights concerns were addressed. In response, during late 2003 and into 2004, a tumultuous political split occurred between Vang Pao and many of his former soldiers. The split was followed by a couple of violent incidents.31 A demonstration, shootings, and firebombings occurred, including the arson destruction of Vang Pao son’s home in Minnesota.32 Eventually, it was discovered that the weapon used to shoot at Vang Pao supporter Xang Vang’s house belonged to a Hmong American police officer, Tou Cha. Victims of the shootings and firebombing were somehow related to Vang Pao. Unfortunately, these incidents remain unsolved to this day but the victims speculate that they were works of Communist agents. United Lao Council for Peace, Freedom, and Reconstruction The debate surrounding freedom fighters, who remain in the jungles of Northern Laos, particularly in the Saysombun-Special Zone, has brought up more questions than given answers. A 2004 British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) investigative film, “One Day at War,” generated much anxiety in the Hmong American community.33 Some began to ask why these “freedom fighters” did not just surrender. One organization, the United Lao Council for Peace, Freedom and Reconstruction (ULCPFR), established on July 17, 2004, published a statement that urged exiled leaders in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australian, and New Zealand to cross ethnic lines and collectively come together and appeal for international attention to the oppressed people inside Laos. ULCPFR “called upon all Laotians in the free world to advocate for the freedom fighters and help promote peace, justice, freedom and affect democratic changes to the Laotian people.”34 ULCPFR listed as its leaders Dr. Khamphay Abhay and General Vang Pao. Its council included the Lao People’s Movement for Democracy and worldwide representatives of the exile Laotian communities. The organization’s charge was to work toward addressing the “ongoing conflicts in Laos regarding freedom advocates, human rights violations, humanitarian crisis and government corruption against innocent Laotian civilians, Lao ethnic minorities, in particular the Lao-Hmong and Lao-Khmu.”35 At its International Conference on November 27–28, 2004, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the exiled Lao leaders brought together 439 registered

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delegates from Australia, Canada, France, Laos, and the United States.36 Delegates proposed a new national policy for the future governing of Laos. They also included a section on “intelligence and strategies,” which not only assessed existing equipment in resistance groups’ possession but also outlined internal strategies to support freedom fighters and cause uprising in Laos.37 Alleged Coup to Overthrow the Government of Laos ULNLF’s and ULCPFR’s anti-communist activities were tolerated by American political leaders. During the Reagan era, Vang Pao and his supporters were considered freedom fighters. Vang’s ability to flamboyantly raise money to fund Hmong rebels won the admiration of American conservatives. However, in the post-9/11 era, Washington could no longer tolerate guerrillas in the same way.38 In the past, Hmong veterans were frequently referred to as “America’s most loyal allies.” Then suddenly, on June 4, 2007, they became defined as “terrorists” when Vang Pao and his coconspirators were arrested in California for an alleged plot to overthrow the Lao government. The direct reason for the arrest of the former California National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Harrison Ulrich Jack, a 1968 West Point graduate, Vang Pao and seven other persons remains unclear. According to a press release by the U. S. Attorney-Eastern District of California, the arrests were the result of an extensive investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.39 After a six-month undercover investigation by an ATF special agent who posed as an arms dealer, the coconspirators were arrested for committing offenses against the United States “[in violation of ] the Neutrality Act, Title 18 of United States Code, Section 960, by providing and preparing a means for and furnishing the money for and taking part in a military expedition or enterprise to be carried on against the territory and dominion of the foreign and sovereign nation of Laos, with which the United States is at peace.”40 The undercover agent had apparently made contact with the only non-Hmong individual who then arranged a series of meetings to show the Hmong coconspirators automatic weapons, ammunition, explosives, LAW rockets, RPGs, Claymore mines, and other arms and munitions.41 The press release read, “Hmong insurgency planned to use AK-47 and M16 automatic rifles, Stinger missiles, Claymore mines, anti-tank rockets, C-4 explosives and other arms and munitions to topple Lao government and reduce government buildings

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in Vientiane to rubble.” Although the plot involved one non-Hmong American, the press release identified the plot as a “Hmong insurgency.” U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund Brennan’s denial of bail on June 11, 2007, based on his determination of Vang Pao being a “flight risk and a danger,” sent an uproar throughout Hmong communities across the United States and France.42 “Free Vang Pao” demonstrations took place throughout the United States, including Hmong communities in Sacramento, St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee, and Detroit. Some Hmong American Christians prayed while others emailed biblical verses and prayers. Others who still practice Hmong religion burned incense and asked for the ancestors to help the Hmong people overcome this dark hour. Dialogues and debates in cyberspace energized many in the Hmong American community to reflect about what it was that they stood for. At the same time, these debates also revealed that some were indifferent about the arrests, and to them, Vang Pao’s leadership was irrelevant. Many others advised the community to think carefully about the implications of Hmong Americans’ actions and words when their community received public attention. The debates within the Hmong American society showed the diversity of Hmong American perspectives, including the generational split that divided the opinions on Vang Pao’s role as leader of the Hmong. While the refugee generation remained indebted to Vang Pao’s leadership during the Vietnam War and their subsequent resettlement in the United States, the young Hmong Americans were concerned about going after the American dream rather than returning to Laos. Some of them saw Vang Pao as increasingly less pertinent to their lives and worried that the actions of a few individuals could put the entire community under scrutiny.43 Although some disagreed with his tactics, still many Hmong Americans rallied for Vang Pao’s release. Many of the young Hmong attended the protests while elders drew teary eyes as photographs of Vang Pao were held and speaker after speaker reminisced about his glorious past.44 Informal conversations among participants even generated a rumor that Vang Pao had purposely caused this incident in order to expose the situation in Laos. The rumor claimed that he had become tired of failing to get international attention to the atrocities faced by the Hmong. In the 1960s, CIA Colonel Bill Lair’s exchanges with Vang Pao had resulted in direct support to the Hmong. Also in 2007, an American retired officer had negotiated an arms deal with the undercover ATF agent. The defense team argued that the Hmong leaders could have believed

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that they had the support of the CIA in their effort to arm the Hmong people in the Laos jungles. In the end, Vang Pao and his alleged coconspirators gained bail on July 13, 2007. However, Vang Pao and Harrison Jack were to remain on electronically monitored home detention until their pending hearing.45 In the midst of the organized demonstrations and the worries of some community members about the negative consequences for the Hmong American community, Hmong American scholar Yang Dao urged community members to stay calm. Yang Dao’s promotion of reconciliation between the exiled community and the people of Laos has, at times, put him at odds with die-hard Hmong anti-communists. So, condemning violence of all forms that threaten the life and security of humanity, he wrote: All self-proclaimed ‘Laotian governments’ in exile and resistance organizations based in the United States are illegal and must be disbanded immediately. I urge each and everyone of our multi-ethnic Laotian communities in the U.S. (including Lao, Hmong, Khmu, Mien, Thaidan and Lue Americans) to do their best to become productive U.S. citizens, to build a strong relationship with the local American community, and to work together to make this great nation a better place to live as well as to support our U.S. government foreign policy in promoting peace and international cooperation with all nations of the world, including Laos.46

Yang Dao’s position illustrated the complexity of political divisions in the Hmong American community. While Vang Pao and the coconspirators claimed “ignorance of the law,” Yang Dao suggested such explanations as unacceptable. Previously a Vang Pao supporter, Yang Dao now advocated free market reforms as a path to democracy in Laos. At the 10th Annual Hmong National Development Conference in Fresno, California, on April 18, 2005, he asked the Hmong American leaders to give up resistance and promote peace and national reconciliation in Laos.47 Hmong Americans such as Yang Dao have been accused of being Communist sympathizers. For example, in July 1998, the then-U.S. ambassador to Laos, Wendy Chamberlain, visited St. Paul to emphasize ethnic Lao-Hmong reconciliation and the positive changes underway in Laos. While hundreds of Hmong Americans came to listen, hundreds of others protested the ambassador’s message and argued against normalization of trade between the United States and Laos. The protestors insisted that such actions should not take place until the Lao government terminated its abuses against their relatives. Some brought up specific incidents

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of relatives in Laos who had disappeared for no particular reason and demanded that the U.S. embassy investigate these cases. The ambassador acknowledged that violence between Lao and Hmong was still taking place in Laos but insisted that poverty was the greatest threat to the Hmong.48 While it is difficult to categorize the protesters, it was notable that some wore army uniforms, which indicated that they were former SGU soldiers. Hmong Influence on American Foreign Policy The Hmong community has shown a marked dichotomy in their partisan preference. They have supported Democratic candidates for local and state level offices while preferring Republican candidates for national office: “[Many] Hmong-Americans [believe] that the Republican Party is more likely to pursue foreign policy objectives in Southeast Asia that might result in the weakening of Communist domination of Laos . . . foreign policy considerations are something Hmong-Americans consider quite seriously when making their electoral choices, to a higher degree than the general American electorate.”49 Also, some community leaders have contended that the “Republican preference was held by many older HmongAmericans, but that an overall high level of political independence or a slight preference for the Democratic party would be a more accurate picture of the partisan preference among most Hmong-Americans.”50 Many saw the Democratic Party as having been more responsive to Hmong American concerns in general and that Democratic positions on social welfare and economic policy are in line with Hmong American views on public policy.51 Despite the fact that a division exists within the Hmong American community regarding anti-communist efforts waged by the wartime leaders of the Hmong and Lao military establishment, many Hmong Americans believe that persecution of the Hmong in Laos exists and persists at various levels. Therefore, some have actively advocated for the safe and fair treatment of those in refugee camps and those remaining in Laos. Political activism has perhaps been one of the areas in which Hmong Americans have been most engaged since their arrival in the United States. They have used a variety of strategies at the local, state, and national levels to build alliances, seek resources, and participate in the American political process. From the early years on, they built strong relationships with elected and appointed officials to ensure that the Hmong community’s needs are met. As time progressed, they continued to advocate for those

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left behind by educating their local and national elected officials. While the anti-communist activities of Neo Hom did not attract many in the younger generation, advocacy at the national and international level had a global reach. The Hmong have learned to use American print and television media effectively in order to raise awareness of issues concerning the remnants of the American-backed “secret war” in Laos. As noted, although refugee resettlement practices in their initial stage dispersed the Hmong throughout the country, secondary migration and family reunification options within the U.S. immigration system have created large concentrations of Hmong in certain American cities. The critical mass in particular geographic locations has enabled them to mobilize political power. One of the most instrumental achievements was the passing of the Hmong Veterans Naturalization Act of 2000, nearly a decade after it was first introduced by the late Congressman Bruce Vento, a Democrat from Minnesota. The act eased the American citizenship test for veterans and their families. Also, members of the former Special Guerilla Units, along with groups such as the Lao Veterans of America52 and the Lao-Hmong American Coalition,53 have diligently fought for formal recognition of Hmong people’s role in assisting American advisors in Laos. A “Long Walk for Freedom,” featuring thirteen Hmong American men journeying on foot from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Washington, D.C., was ignited by a desire to shed light on the atrocities against the Hmong stranded in the jungles of Laos. In December 2003, the combination of intense lobbying by Hmong Americans and careful diplomatic exchanges culminated in the United States opening refugee resettlement doors to thousands of Hmong refugees living in a self-constructed village in Thailand’s Buddhist temple, Wat Tham Krabok. Thanks to careful planning by Hmong Americans and their supporters, American delegations visited Wat Tham Krabok to assess the conditions of the refugees in order to better prepare resettlement services in American cities. The State Department action in 2003 was restricted to only those registered in the Wat Tham Krabok compound. However, it caused rumors in Laos that the United States was accepting all refugees again. As a consequence, other Hmong ethnics from Laos fled across the border to Thailand, claiming to be relatives of anti-communist guerrillas who fought with the CIA. Whether or not Vang Pao influenced this latest exodus, LPDR officials blamed him. The Lao ambassador to Thailand stated, “we have had the Hmong problem for a long time at Ban Winai camp, Wat Tham Krabok and now Petchabun, and it is because of

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Vang Pao.”54 Vang Pao denied any involvement and continued to argue that if human rights violations against Hmong were not taking place in Laos then they would not have any reason to flee. Advocacy efforts of Hmong Americans and their supporters have continued to increase awareness of the plight of those detained in Thailand. In September 2007, a group of about 150 refugees was on the verge of being repatriated to Laos. However, promises from Western countries to take them in halted the move.55 When, in 2005, news spread that the graves of Hmong refugees who resided at the Wat Tham Krabok monastery had been desecrated, Hmong Americans once again expressed their concerns.56 Working with the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota, Hmong Americans found that “[contrary] to the claims of the government of Thailand the relatives of the dead were not officially notified but rather the majority of them found from video footage that had been taken by those that remained in the camp.”57 Families of those whose bodies were affected and supporters such as Minnesota State Senator Mee Moua wrote letters to the United Nations, demanding a stop to the unearthing and dismemberment of their deceased loved ones. They also organized town hall meetings in communities around the country with large Hmong American populations.58 A National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee was formed to explore the situation. The city of St. Paul formed its own Hmong Grave Desecration Committee, too. Members of both groups went to the site in September 2007 to explore the options for bringing reconciliation to the families affected by the 2005 desecration of more than 900 Hmong graves in Wat Tham Krabok, Saraburi, Thailand.59 In April 2006, Mayor Chris Coleman proposed a resolution that was unanimously adopted by the St. Paul City Council to support the Hmong community and urge Minnesota’s congressional delegation to work with the State Department to pursue appropriate actions to work with the Thai government to resolve the issue.60 However, within the Hmong American community, difference in opinions about the right approach emerged.61 One group of Hmong American community members, led by activist Michael Yang and former mayoral aide Sia Lo, had formed the National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee, while St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman established another group that included Senator Mee Moua and Mayor Coleman’s policy advocate, Hmong American VaMegn Thoj.62 While the former viewed the issue as cultural, the latter argued that it was a human rights problem. Va-Megn Thoj stated, “this is a human rights issue and a justice issue. The desecration is really reflective

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of the oppression that Hmong people experience in Thailand.”63 Members of the National Committee protested the involvement of elected officials in what they considered a cultural issue that should be dealt with by advice from cultural experts. Prior to the fact-finding mission, they protested the St. Paul City Council meeting by contending that the issue at hand was not the city’s business. Activist Michael Yang argued that the Hmong community should be responsible for solving it: “this is about our culture, the way we bury our loved ones so that their spirits can travel to the next world, and the people in the best position to do that are our Hmong elders.”64 State Senator Mee Moua disagreed with this perspective. She stated that as an elected official who has received many requests from relatives of those whose graves were affected, it was her duty to represent them. In addition, her group believed that only international pressure on the Thai government would bring any results.65 Following the fact-finding mission, both groups organized meetings to share the information with community members. While the issue has not been resolved, the actions of the two groups reflected a conflict between the “homeland politics” of the old and young generations of exiles. The debate surrounding the human rights violations of those hiding in the jungles of Laos has also been prominent for many years in the Hmong American community. Organizations such as the Hmong International Human Rights Watch and, more recently, the Fact Finding Commission posted photographs of men, women, and children fighting for their lives in the jungle.66 Within the last few years, the mainstream media began to cover this issue, too. In December 2007, the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline, “Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding Deep in Laos.”67 Although the LPDR has denied all such allegations, Hmong in America insist that their relatives are still persecuted. A public statement issued by Amnesty International in June 2007 provided evidence for the claims of the Hmong American community.68 As mentioned, since Hmong people set foot on U.S. soil in the mid1970s, they were generally described as “freedom fighters” and American allies. This image was altered by the Patriot Act and Real ID Act of 2005, which contained broad immigration law definitions. The provisions barred anyone who had provided what the law terms “material support” to “terrorist organizations” from asylum or resettlement. The implementation of this act by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice has been exceedingly broad, affecting refugees who did not support terrorism at all. In response, the Hmong community and their Congressional supporters have worked hand in hand to obtain

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special waivers for those affected by this law. They have been seeking an amendment that would modify a provision in the Real ID Act.69 Some victory was achieved in October 2007 when Congressional actions were taken to grant Hmong a waiver on the terrorist designation.70 Conclusion The emergence of new political ideologies and dismal economic conditions of those dominated by imperialist nations formed the basis for a new kind of nationalist fight during the mid-twentieth century. While world leaders such as the United States promoted self-determination for nations across the globe, they also gave support to colonizers who diligently pacified anticolonial uprisings. Perhaps one of the best examples of this inconsistency occurred in the formerly colonized Southeast Asian nations. The aspirations of great nations promoted divisions among the colonized peoples at the same time that they presented opportunities for certain ethnic groups to take part in the global political struggle. The Hmong ethnic minority of Laos was one such group. The Hmong people of Laos have fought in defense of American geopolitical interests during its Communist containment policies in Southeast Asia. Their willingness to protect their homeland and way of life became entangled in global political struggles. Since their arrival in the United States in the mid-1970s, some of the exiles have been involved in sporadic anti-communist activities that fall broadly under the term “homeland politics.” In the early days of their life in America, Hmong Americans supported anti-communists in Laos, and those who contributed financial support did so because they believed that this was what America was fighting against. With the end of the cold war and the ensuing shift in the American viewpoint on the Communist world, Hmong “freedom fighters” were perceived differently. Today, it remains unclear to what extent politics-in-exile by Hmong refugees has influenced American foreign policy. Available data, however, suggest that advocacy by Hmong refugees in the United States has had some influence on U.S. actions toward refugees in Thailand and U.S. relations with Laos. Notes 1. Dao Yang, Hmong at the Turning Point (Minneapolis, MN: WorldBridge Associates, 1993).

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2. Keith Quincy, Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat: The Hmong and America’s Secret War in Laos (Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2000). 3. Tasseng was a district administrator position. 4. Yang, 48–49. 5. Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 142–43. 6. Si-ambhaivan Sisombat Souvannavong, “Elites in Exile: Transnational Lao Culture,” in Laos: Culture and Society, ed. Grant Evans (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1999), 100–124. 7. Andrew Perrin, “Welcome to the Jungle,” Time, April 28, 2003. 8. Christian Culas and Jean Michaud, “A Contribution to the Study of Hmong (Miao) Migrations and History,” in Hmong/Miao in Asia, ed. Nicholas Tapp, Jean Michaud, Christian Culas, and Gary Yia Lee (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2004), 80. 9. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942–1992 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Sucheng Chan, Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America (Bloomington: Temple University Press, 1994). 10. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hills Books, 2003). 11. Dang Her, interview by author, October 29, 2005. 12. Yia Lee, interview by author, September 2, 2005. 13. Choua Thao, interview by author, August 10, 2005. 14. Roger Xiong, interview by author, March 12, 2003. 15. Mao Heu Thao, interview by author, October 7, 2005. 16. See Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains. 17. Pobzeb Vang, White Paper on Human Rights Violations in Laos since 1975 (Denver, CO: Lao Human Rights Council, 1991). 18. Ibid., p. 44. 19. It is important to note that while this paper focuses on the Hmong ethnic group, the Hmong were not the only people in Laos who aligned with Americans. Other ethnic minorities as well as members of the Lao majority were involved in the CIA’s covert operations. 20. Hmong American community leaders have argued that many were not counted due to language barriers. Therefore, they estimate the number to be closer to 300,000. 21. Mark Pfeifer and Serge Lee, “Hmong Population, Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Educational Trends in the 2000 Census,” in Hmong 2000 Census Publication: Data and Analysis, ed. Bo Thao, Louisa Schein, and Max Niedzweick (Washington, DC: Hmong National Development, Inc., 2003), 3–11. 22. The term Lao is used here to describe persons holding Lao citizenship and not of Lao ethnicity.

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23. Vang Pao, “Against All Odds: The Laotian Freedom Fighters.” The Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/HL96.cfm. 24. Ibid. 25. Ruth Hammond, “Rumors of War,” Twin Cities Reader, October 25–31, 1989, 8. 26. Ruth Hammond, “The Great Refugee Shakedown: The Hmong Are Paying to Free Laos—But What’s Happening to the Money?” The Washington Post, April 16, 1989, B1. 27. Ibid. 28. Hammond, “Rumors of War.” 29. Hammond, “The Great Refugee Shakedown.” 30. Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe, “Reality Gets in the Way of Logy to General,” Star Tribune, July 4, 2005. 31. Gregg Aamot, “Old Tension Sparks Violence in Minnesota Area,” Associated Press, May 13, 2004. 32. Jo Napolitano, “Police See Arson in Destruction of Hmong Leader’s Home,” New York Times, April 29, 2004. 33. Ruhi Hamid, “One Day of War,” BBC/Frontlines, May 27, 2004. 34. United Lao Council for Peace, Freedom and Reconstruction, The Lao Conflict: Background, Basic Strategies & Intelligence (Fresno, CA, 2004), 10. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 11. 37. Ibid., 20–22. 38. Joshua Kurlantzick, “Guerrillas in Our Midst,” The Boston Globe, June 10, 2007. 39. United States Attorney Eastern District of California/McGregor W. Scott, “Indictment Handed Down in Plot to Overthrow the Government of Laos,” June 14, 2007, available at http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/cae. 40. United States District Court Eastern District of California Criminal Complaint, United States of America v. Harrison Ulrich Jack; General Vang Pao; Lo Cha Thao, Lo Thao, Youa True Vang, Hue Vang, Chong Yang Thao, Seng Vue and Chue Lo (Sacramento, CA, 2007), 4–5. 41. Ibid., 10–13. 42. Denny Walsh, “Hmong Make their Case: General’s Release Demanded by Crowd, Denied by Judge,” The Sacramento Bee, June 12, 2007. 43. Curt Brown, “Many Hmong Don’t Back the General: ‘This is Our Home Now,’” Star Tribune, June 6, 2007. 44. The author observed one such demonstration held in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 12, 2007. 45. Denny Walsh and Todd Milbourn, “Vang Pao Gains Cail,” The Sacramento Bee, July 13, 2007. 46. Yand Dao, “A Call for Calm,” Asian American Press, June 28, 2007. 47. Dao Yang, “The Hmong Odyssey from Laos to America,” Hmong National Development, 10th Hmong National Conference (Fresno, CA, 2005), available at http://pagesperso-orange.fr/laos/yangdao.htm.

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48. “Envoy to Laos Stands Ground Against Critics,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 3, 1998, 1A. This author was also present at the event. 49. Steven Doherty, “Political Behavior and Candidate Emergence in the Hmong American Community,” Hmong Studies Journal 8 (2007): 1. 50. Ibid., 14. 51. Ibid. 52. Lao Veterans of America (LVA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that includes tens of thousands of Hmong and Lao veterans and their families who played a key role in the U.S. covert war in Laos during the Vietnam War. 53. Lao-Hmong American Coalition (LHAC) was organized after the first U.S. official tribute was conducted in Golden, Colorado, to formally acknowledge the veterans of Lao-Hmong Special Guerrilla Units. 54. Supalak Ganjanakhundee, “Refugee Problem: Hmong Chief Vang Pao Blamed,” The Nation, July 14, 2006. 55. Frederic J. Frommer, “Senators urge U.S. to Help Hmong Refugees in Thailand,” Associated Press, September 27, 2007. 56. “MN Hmong Upset Over Reports of Grave Desecration,” Associated Press, December 1, 2005. 57. Human Rights Program, “Hmong Grave Desecration Facts,” available at http:// hrp.cla.umn.edu. 58. Toni Randolph, “Hmong Protest Grave Desecration,” Minnesota Public Radio, March 3, 2006. 59. Bob Hume, “St. Paul Mayor to Send Mission about Hmong Graves,” available at http://presszoom.com/story_141151.html; Cheryl Sherry, “Hmong Fight over Exhumed Bodies a ‘Human Thing,’” Post-Crescent, October 28, 2007. 60. “Resolution City of Saint Paul, Minnesota,” Hmong Times, May 1, 2007. 61. Myron P. Medcalf, “Hmong Group: Vandalized Grave Sites Not a Political Issue,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 26, 2007. 62. Kathy Mouacheupao, “St. Paul Delegation Reports on Hmong Graves in Wat Tham Krabok,” Twin Cities Daily Planet, October 15, 2007. 63. Ibid. 64. Sao Sue Jurewitsch, “Two Minnesota Delegations Visit Thailand Over Hmong Grave Desecration,” Hmong Times, September 27, 2007. 65. Ibid. 66. Hmong International Human Rights Watch, available at http://www.hmongihrw .org. 67. Thomas Fuller, “Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding Deep in Laos,” New York Times, December 17, 2007. 68. Amnesty International, “Thailand: Forcible Returns of Lao Hmong Must End,” News Service, June 26, 2007, available at http://web.amnesty.org/library. 69. Jean Hopfensperger, “Senate Action is Good News for the Hmong Community,” Star Tribune, September 13, 2007. 70. Frederic J. Frommer, “Some Hmong to Get Waiver on ‘Terrorist’ Designation,” Star Tribune, October 27, 2007.

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CHAPTER 11

Conflict and Cooperation Cuban Exile Anti-Communism and the United States, 1960–2000

Jessica Gibbs and Alex Goodall

In the weeks following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, those veterans of the Brigade 2506 who had not been captured by Fidel Castro’s army gradually made their way to the United States—the place that would, for the vast majority, become their permanent home. Some returned directly, on the U.S. destroyers waiting off the coast of Cuba. Others, who had trained with the invasion forces but not been sent on the initial landing, traveled to Florida from Base Trax, the brigade’s training station in the Guatemalan highlands, now being rapidly disassembled by soldiers and bulldozers, the CIA’s records dumped into a deep hole and covered with earth.1 A few brigade members even escaped the mass captures on the beaches, hiking through swampland and the Cuban countryside and eventually claiming asylum in foreign embassies in Havana. It was via this last route that the brigade’s flag was transported to the United States and ultimately delivered into the hands of President John F. Kennedy during an emotionally charged ceremony at the Miami Orange Bowl in December 1962 to mark the release of all but a handful of the 1,200 Brigade members who had been taken prisoner. The president promised the assembled audience that the flag would soon be raised above a free Havana, and the tail end of his speech was drowned out by the cheering veterans. The veterans’ retreat to Florida reveals something of the complex relationship between anti-Castro Cubans and the United States that would develop over the next three decades. On the one hand, the United States

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offered a home to those who fled Cuba. On the other hand, Kennedy was held responsible for the Bay of Pigs debacle and, if this were not enough, had signed away any prospect of challenging the Castro regime militarily in the deal that resolved the missile crisis. While many in the United States considered the apparent climbdown by Khrushchev to be a triumph for the West, Cuban anti-communists felt differently. They saw the United States abandon the option of war against Castro for the higher priorities of cold war geopolitics. Moreover, exiles saw their own status change by default from temporary residents of Florida to longterm participants in the American polity, a far from welcome development. By the time of his assassination, many even suspected that Kennedy was planning to recognize Cuba.2 Despite providing a haven for Cuban anti-communists, in the folk memory of the exile community, Kennedy became the great betrayer. Cuban exile anti-communism was distinctive to the anti-communism of the Washington establishment, then. For a variety of reasons, many commentators have been inclined to downplay the differences between “Anglo” Cold Warriors and the Cuban anti-communist community that settled in the United States after 1959. But Cuban anti-communists were not simply the puppets of the Washington politicians who used the exiles’ victimhood as rhetorical leverage to further their own political agenda. Nor were they hidden conspirators, secretly directing U.S. foreign policy without accountability. In truth, a complex pattern of conflict and cooperation has characterized the relationship between state and community, in which each party gave the other valuable support when aims coincided but where subtle, but nevertheless significant, tensions emerged when aims diverged.3 The anti-communists of Washington and Miami marched to different drums, only intermittently beating in time. The dominant faction of the exile community has been consistently uncompromising in its anti-communism and focused on regime change in Havana, whilst U.S. cold war policy has varied according to the vagaries of domestic politics and the state of tripartite relations between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Although this pattern of conflict and cooperation has manifestly failed to dismantle Castro’s regime, it does explain the persistent hostility of Washington toward Havana, the integration and prosperity of Cubans in Florida, and the emergence of Cuban anti-communists as influential participants in U.S. domestic politics.

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The Origins of Exile-Government Relations, 1959–72 Since the 1959 revolution, the vast majority of Cubans leaving their country has come to the United States. The 2000 census revealed a Cuban population of 1.24 million, of whom approximately 873,000 were foreign-born.4 While Florida was—for reasons of historical roots and proximity—the natural destination for discontented Cubans, U.S. policy facilitated the inward migration of anti-Castro refugees from the outset, seeing them as the nucleus of a government-in-exile and paramilitary force. As early as March 1960, Eisenhower approved the CIA’s project to replace Castro’s regime “with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US in such a way as to avoid any appearance of US intervention.”5 To this end, the CIA began working with literally thousands of anti-Castro Cubans in southern Florida and elsewhere. The Miami station had, by 1961, become the largest in the world and one of the major employers in the state.6 Although a few Cuban arrivals served the purposes of U.S. covert operations, the majority had little military value. Eisenhower’s Cuban Refugee Emergency Center struggled to cope with the volume of refugees. More than 26,000 Cubans reached the United States in the first six months of 1959, and a further 110,000 in the following two years.7 Many were from the upper and middle classes, who had the most to lose from Castro’s redistributive policies. Cuban inward migration was a headache for the government in more ways than one: military assets could be hard to control and destructive of social order; civilian migrants needed significant government assistance. In this sense, the first political impact of Cuban exiles in the United States was a product of their presence alone, which created considerable forward pressure for the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy’s geopolitical calculations and domestic political fears of appearing to be “soft” on Communism were the primary factors in ensuring the operation went ahead.8 But the problem of disposing with a trained anti-communist paramilitary force was also significant. By spring 1961, the Ydígoras government wanted the Cuban exiles out of Guatemala. The CIA warned that if the invasion was called off exiles would be “angry, disillusioned and aggressive with the inevitable result that they will provide honey for the press bees and the US will have to face the resulting indignities and embarrassments.”9 They also feared that abandoning the anti-Castro forces would damage relations with a future Cuban government. It was “hard to imagine any acceptable

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post-Castro leadership,” the agency argued, “that will not include some of the exiles dealt with during the past year.”10 The cumulative effects of failure at the Bay of Pigs, the ineffectiveness of subsequent covert operations designed to unseat Castro, and the trauma of the missile crisis substantially weakened Washington’s resolve to depose Castro by covert means. Its willingness to tolerate a host of antiCastro Cuban anti-communists camped out in Florida thus began to edge into a more open-ended commitment to permanent settlement. That this was an unplanned development in the first instance can be adduced from the degree to which it undermined the primary goal of deposing Castro. Louis A. Pérez, Jr. has noted how support for migration weakened the sanctions regime. As the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State argued in April 1960, “the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”11 But those most discontented, and therefore most likely to oppose Castro, were precisely the people who were being permitted to “vote with their feet” by coming to Florida. Government efforts to assist the adjustment of Cubans to life in Florida (and to resettle them elsewhere in the United States) expanded throughout the decade as an alternative to further invasion plans. Members of Brigade 2506 were encouraged to join the armed forces, while the government’s Cuban Refugee Program spent over $700 million on assistance between 1961 and 1973.12 An estimated 80 percent of all Cuban migrants were given some sort of governmental aid in these years.13 In 1965, President Johnson made an expansive commitment to resettling Cubans when his response to Castro’s announcement that exiles could pick up their relatives led to a bilateral agreement that allowed a further 300,000 disaffected Cubans into the United States.14 And in 1966, Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which remains in force to this day and allows Cubans in temporary status to apply for permanent residence without proof of persecution. These programs made it harder for Cuban anti-communists to maintain their distinctive identity. Whilst most migrants seek to gain political influence in order to win social and economic inclusion, Cuban anticommunists thus found themselves fighting to maintain political separation, resist the temptations of prosperity, and continue the war against Castro. This increasingly conflicted with U.S. policy. Within weeks of the fraught negotiations that ended the missile crisis, an Operation Mongoose squadron bombed a Cuban factory without CIA approval. In 1963, the leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Council—the exile political

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leadership left over from the Bay of Pigs—resigned in protest after government crackdowns on unlicensed raids, publicly criticizing Kennedy for breaking his “promise” to form another invasion force. Washington swiftly removed funding and, some months later, the council fell apart.15 Cuban anti-communists began, unhappily, to recognize that their de facto status in the eyes of the government had transformed from an army-inexile to a community of refugees. In contrast to the years immediately following the revolution, differences in political priorities were beginning to emerge by the mid-1960s that a shared anti-communist rhetoric was unable to obscure. Cuban anticommunists remained committed to militant action against Castro, while the primary goal of the government became integrating émigrés through assistance programs and special adjustment of status legislation. To the Johnson administration, prosperous Cuban exiles were more valuable as propaganda than they would ever be as a military resource.16 Cuban anti-communists did not acquiesce to this reformulation lightly. Indeed, the change in government policy may even have hardened attitudes. Cuban anti-communist Enrique Encinosa, who was involved in anti-Castro operations throughout the 1970s and 1980s, considered much of the Cuban anti-communist violence to be “a direct by-product” of Washington’s decision to withdraw support for exile militancy.17 Many turned to internal sources of support to maintain their militant activities. In 1963, alarmed by the disunity and ineffectiveness of the exile community, Bacardi rum millionaire José Bosch organized a referendum to approve the nomination of a five-member Representación Cubana del Exilio (RECE). Among them was the young and energetic Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the student group Juventud Cubana, who would eventually become the most influential Cuban exile in the United States.18 Initially, RECE campaigned throughout Latin America to isolate Castro’s regime. When this failed to produce the desired Cuban insurrection, they began to fund and coordinate commando raids on the island.19 Other militant groups also conducted raids on Cuban shipping and diplomatic installations as well as terrorizing those within the exile community who questioned their tactics or expressed a wish for coexistence with Havana.20 Cuban political solidarity, however enforced, led to a remarkable prosperity: “drawing strength from their political beliefs, they set out to reach their practical ambitions in the United States with all the fervor of a holy war.”21 Despite federal government encouragement to settle outside the state, the 1970s saw a reconcentration in Miami.22 Cubans established

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influence in local politics, opted to buy from Cuban businesses, traded preferentially with fellow Cubans, hired and promoted Cubans over others, and lived in Cuban districts of Miami. All this was accompanied by forceful political intimidation. As Ramón Cernuda, a Cuban exile and art dealer, argued: “The predominant idea in Cuban exile politics is that you need absolute conformity in order to confront the totalitarian government in Cuba.”23 Since many low-paid migrant workers displaced the factory jobs of existing minorities, the growth of the Cuban community was accompanied by ethnic tensions, especially with African Americans.24 Yet Cuban exiles perceived little hostility or racism from the dominant “Anglo” community.25 The Lean Years of Exile-Government Relations, 1972–80 Many Cuban anti-communists saw their problems through the lens of party politics, assuming that the Republicans would be more supportive than the Democratic administrations of the 1960s.26 The 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency seemed to demonstrate that the hard-line anti-communist wing of the Republican Party was in the ascendant. The victory of the quintessential Cold Warrior, Richard Nixon, in 1968, only reconfirmed this. He offered the hope of a revitalised anti-communism in foreign policy and a strategic change that might bring the government back into alignment with Cuban anti-communists. In practice, no such thing occurred. In fact, relations between Cuban anti-communists and the institutions of the state were significantly worse in the 1970s than they had been in the 1960s. Successive administrations continued to promote Cuban development in Miami but there was little support for the broader agenda. In the 1970s, the idea of a unified and homogenous Communist threat from Havana to Hanoi was called into question, and Washington began to opt for constructive engagement over containment. In this context, the radical tendency of anti-Castro activism was unwelcome. Nixon shared Kennedy’s and Johnson’s personal antagonism toward Castro, but as he focused on driving a wedge between the Soviets and the Chinese, Cuban anti-communism threatened to destabilize a carefully managed concert of great powers. The conception of small powers as global irritants, sources of political instability when great power rivalries needed to be controlled had been clearly demonstrated by the missile crisis. Given his disposition toward

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superpower chauvinism, it was hardly surprising that Nixon neglected Cuban anti-communists. Nixon took only the most modest step toward improving relations with Havana: a bilateral antihijacking agreement in 1973. However, neglect was transformed into open hostility in the first year of the Ford administration, when Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary for InterAmerican Affairs, William D. Rogers, encouraged by reformists in Congress and a supportive public, began to pursue normalization.27 Cuban anti-communists were by now a substantial obstacle to the expansion of the détente agenda. If this were not enough, other political developments in the 1970s seemed to further challenge the Cuban exiles’ brand of militant anticommunism. The fallout following Watergate led to the exposure of CIA-sponsored efforts to assassinate Castro in the early 1960s. Following the Church Committee’s revelations, assassinations of heads of state in peacetime were outlawed. Further ad hoc violence by militant anti-Castro groups such as the infamous bombing of a Cuban airplane in 1976, linked to exiles Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles and in which more than seventy civilians were killed, only reinforced the shift in public attitudes against Cuban anti-communism. A new vigor was injected into Congress, which sought to discipline the executive branch. And the kind of gung ho activities that the CIA and Cuban exiles had worked on together in the 1960s were exactly what Congress was looking to eliminate. At the same time, members of Congress began to question the assumption that all exiles would be adamantly opposed to improving relations with Havana. Exiles were increasingly involved in electoral politics, and naturalizing at a high rate.28 New social dynamics might challenge the authority of the anti-communist leadership. New organizations had emerged in opposition to the anti-Castro groups of the first decade, drawing support particularly from younger Cubans interested in renewing ties to their homeland. Beyond the radical fringe represented by groups like Areito, which organized the first large-scale trip to Cuba in 1977, a 1975 Miami Herald poll found that 49.5 percent were at least willing to visit the island.29 Compared to previous hearings, at which Cuban exiles had competed over the vehemence of their anti-Castro rhetoric, Cubans with a number of different perspectives were invited to testify to Congress in 1975 on a proposal to lift the trade embargo. Jorge Mas Canosa and exile activist Ramón Bonachea presented the militant perspective, warning that a resumption of trade would be “the final crushing blow to the already cool

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relations between the Cubans in exile and the US government.”30 But Michael Germinal Rivas of Cuban Christians for Justice and Freedom favored improved relations and claimed that the large majority of Cuban exiles “are somewhat ambivalent about it.” Rather optimistically, Rivas estimated that only 15 percent of Cuban exiles opposed any change.31 The Ford administration ultimately drew back from normalization after Castro sent troops to Angola.32 But President Carter was committed to transforming hemispheric relations. His efforts were hampered by Cuban internationalism, but even after Castro dispatched troops to Ethiopia in early 1978, the State Department continued secret negotiations, reaching an understanding for the release and admission to the United States of 3,000 Cuban political prisoners. Subsequently, Castro invited exiles (most of whom were unaware of the bilateral agreement) to Havana to participate in a “dialogue,” which produced accords on political prisoners, emigration, and family visits.33 Cuban anti-communists responded with violence. Bernardo Benes, a Cuban émigré businessman who had helped create the Committee of 75 to lead the normalization negotiations, was condemned as a traitor and received death threats. Two members of the committee were assassinated and bombs were found in the homes of other dialogueros.34 Cuban and Soviet diplomatic missions were targeted for terrorist attacks by Omega 7, an exile paramilitary organization. In the end, the political climate in 1979 caused efforts to founder.35 Combined with the shattering effect of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis, normalization was dead in the water even before the chaotic Mariel boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans, including thousands of ex-convicts, to the United States in 1980.36 Newfound Cooperation, 1980–89 The Carter years marked the nadir of Cuban anti-communist influence in the United States. Substantial sections of the public had come to see Cuban anti-communists as distastefully authoritarian, even supporters of terrorism, rather than victims. The proponents of dialogue believed that the participation of other Cubans in mainstream politics showed that the old hard-line leadership was anachronistic. In fact, though, the turn toward electoral politics and lobbying in the 1980s would reinvigorate ethnic Cuban anti-communism in alignment with the New Right and certain congressional Democrats who looked to Cuban anti-communists

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for campaign contributions and votes. The anti-Castro coalition that had failed to be realized in 1964 and 1968 now finally came into its own. The Reagan administration, whose advisors rejected what they considered to be the failed politics of détente, was ideologically and strategically closer to Cuban anti-communists than any administration had been since the 1960s. It believed Carter’s key mistake was to reduce anti-communism to a secondary issue in foreign policy. Moreover, it committed itself to destabilizing covert and low-intensity warfare in pro-Soviet third world nations. The focus of the Reagan Doctrine lay in Central America rather than the Caribbean but Cuban anti-communists easily recognized the resonance with their agenda. Short of invading Cuba, no policy could be closer to Cuban anti-communists’ hearts than an expansive commitment to an anti-communist insurgency (the contras) fighting a socialist revolutionary government (the Nicaraguan Sandinistas). The exile community began raising funds, donating blood and sending doctors to tend to the contra wounded.37 Moreover, the Reagan administration gave critical encouragement and assistance to Cuban anti-communists in making the transition from militant politics to political lobbying. Indeed, for a crucial few years in the early 1980s, the confluence of administration and Cuban anti-communist priorities allowed the latter to reconsolidate their control over the Miami Cuban community and gain an unprecedented influence over foreign policy in Congress and the executive branch. In 1981, encouraged by Reagan officials, a small group of Cuban anti-communists came together to form the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). Though versions differ, it appears that it was Richard Allen, Reagan’s first National Security Advisor, who suggested that exiles create an organization along the lines of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).38 AIPAC lawyer Barney Barnett recommended the establishment of legally separate research, lobbying, and funding entities (the Free Cuba PAC), which made it possible for CANF to receive government funding despite its associated lobbying activity.39 Haney and Vanderbush argue persuasively that ideological affinity and the need to persuade a skeptical public and a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives of the gravity of the Communist threat to the Western Hemisphere led to a strategic partnership between the émigrés and the administration.40 CANF supported military aid to El Salvador, the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the Caribbean Basin Initiative. CANF strongly backed assistance to the contras. CANF also supported the administration’s

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decision to reimpose travel-related currency restrictions on Cuba in 1982, which had been lifted under Carter. In exchange, CANF was given privileged access to the policymaking process and the opportunity to participate in government programs. One immediate priority was the creation of a surrogate home service for Cuba modeled after Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Christened Radio Martí after the Cuban independence leader José Martí, the station was designed not to provoke an uprising nor incite emigration but to “enable Cubans to hold their own government to some degree accountable.”41 While CANF leaders appeared several times at congressional hearings, Manuel Gomez, president of the Cuban American Committee for the Normalization of Relations, appeared only once. Despite his argument that the station would not be “objective and verifiable,” given the involvement of “strongly partisan” Cuban Americans who had been “associated in the past with exaggeration and misinformation,” Mas Canosa was appointed to chair the President’s Advisory Board in 1984, a position he held until his death in 1997.42 Ernesto Betancourt, a member of the CANF speakers’ bureau, became the first director.43 Radio Martí went on air on May 20, 1985. In the late 1980s, CANF set up its own refugee program as part of the Reagan administration’s Private Sector Initiative, funding Cubans in third countries who wished to enter the United States as refugees. CANF selected and coached the Cubans for their interviews with immigration officials and then helped them settle in the United States.44 Meanwhile, CANF associates, such as Otto Reich and José Sorzano, were appointed to government positions, while Armando Valladares, a former Cuban political prisoner who spoke no English and resided in Spain, was granted citizenship so he could spearhead a campaign at the United Nations Human Rights Commission to have Cuba condemned for human rights violations. CANF sought to create the impression that it spoke for the Cuban exile community, accusing rival groups such as the Cuban American Committee (formerly “for the Normalization of Relations”) of acting as an internal lobby for Castro.45 Although, in its structure, CANF was by no means democratic, ideologically it was broadly representative of émigré sentiments. A 1984 poll found that 78 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami supported an increase in defense spending, 64 percent supported military aid to the contras, and 53 percent opposed normalization with Cuba.46 Reagan received 80 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade County Hispanic precincts in 1980 and 88 percent in 1984.47

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Working on the basis that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” CANF took the lead in pushing for the extension of the Reagan Doctrine to the Cuban-backed Marxist government in Angola. Mas Canosa formed an alliance with Jonas Savimbi of UNITA (the South African-backed rebel movement) and persuaded friends in Congress to get the Clark Amendment repealed.48 After receiving assurances of backing from Reagan on a triumphal trip to Washington in 1986, an appreciative Savimbi sent Mas Canosa a replica of an AK-47.49 In 1988, Mas Canosa signed a mutual assistance pact with Savimbi, and in May 1991 he attended celebrations of what was supposed to be a final Angolan peace in Lisbon. Nevertheless, the effective working partnership between Reagan hardliners and Cuban anti-communists did not mean that the Cubans abandoned their distinctive politics. Indeed, their newfound influence meant that they were able to drive the political agenda more effectively than before. For instance, by the latter half of the 1980s, CANF was complicating policymaking in southern Africa. While both CANF and the administration sought a Cuban troop withdrawal, CANF was determined that Castro should not gain any benefit from deal making. In his account of the complex talks between the superpowers, South Africa, Angola, and Cuba, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Chester Crocker remarked, “We could not promise to terminate some sanction in return for a South African or Cuban action we wanted because other actors within the American system would have blocked us.”50 Similarly, CANF used allies in Congress to promote legislation in 1987 which threatened to ruin efforts to return thousands of Mariel ex-convicts to Cuba, a very high priority for the administration. It appears from these episodes that even during Reagan’s presidency, Cuban anti-communists were constraining executive branch policymaking. The circumstances surrounding Television Martí, a planned anti-Castro channel, further demonstrate CANF’s distinctive influence.51 The first TV Martí funding was attached to a 1987 authorization bill by CANF champion Senator Lawton Chiles, a Democrat from Florida.52 Though it was immediately apparent that broadcasting a TV signal to Cuba would be both legally dubious and technically difficult, CANF’s commitment was unshakable.53 Given the slight improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations in 1988, which forced Vice President Bush to reassure CANF leaders that there would be no “accommodations” with Havana if he became president, Gomez may have been correct to see TV Martí as a “monkey wrench wrapped in the American flag,” designed to maintain tensions in the wake of the successful Angola negotiations.54 In July, Bush endorsed the station

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and, shortly afterwards, the Senate approved $7.5 million in start-up costs.55 Unlike Radio Martí debates, there were neither prior hearings nor authorizing legislation. George Crockett (Democrat from Michigan) convened a last-minute hearing in protest.56 But the hearing only revealed the partiality of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, whose members had received some $120,000 from the Free Cuba PAC in 1988, toward Mas Canosa.57 By encouraging the formation of CANF and giving Cuban anti-communists privileged access to the policymaking process, Reagan officials had reduced Washington’s subsequent room for maneuver and increased the salience of Cuba in electoral and domestic politics. Furthermore, the concentration of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County of swing-state Florida gave them a solid local political base and influence in presidential and congressional elections. Bush’s 1988 endorsement of TV Martí was thus motivated by a desire to consolidate his standing with Cuban Americans rather than any foreign policy consideration. Post-Cold War Cuban Anti-Communism, 1989–96 The fall of the Berlin wall and the rapid dismantling of Soviet subsidies to Cuba only strengthened the hands of Cuban anti-communists. Hearings in the summer of 1989 revealed some congressional interest in improving relations with Cuba and provided a platform for pro-normalization organizations.58 But public opposition to diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba increased substantially between March 1988 and October-November 1990.59 Deprived of its cold war raison d’être, successive presidents showed little enthusiasm for the embargo. But in the end, both Bush and Clinton preferred to defer to domestic politics rather than expend political capital on normalization.60 Bush initially resisted attempts by CANF’s congressional allies to seize any more control over policymaking. In 1990 and 1991, he vetoed the Mack amendment prohibiting trade between Cuba and U.S subsidiaries abroad. Nevertheless, the amendment became a key provision of the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA), which sought to bridge the gap between those in Congress who advocated traditional coercive tactics and those who believed in constructive engagement but shared the common goal of regime change. Although the Bush administration disliked much of the CDA, it had a remarkably smooth passage through Congress, primarily due to presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s support. Approached by Mas Canosa in Tampa, a temporarily cash-strapped Clinton saw an

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opportunity to tap into Miami money and win Cuban American votes. After telling a crowd of wealthy exiles on April 23, 1992, that the Bush administration “has missed a big opportunity to put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” the candidate raised $275,000 in South Florida.61 In response, Bush endorsed the bill on May 5, 1992. The CDA passed both houses of Congress by large margins and was signed into law in October at a Miami ceremony. Initially, Clinton appeared to be balancing, sometimes incoherently, domestic political concerns with a disposition toward constructive engagement. Although Mas Canosa told his supporters that they “need not fear” a Clinton administration, the advent of the first Democrat president since Jimmy Carter gave hope to many who wished for normalization. The appointment of embargo skeptics such as Morton Halperin, who had led the American Civil Liberties Union campaign to lift travel restrictions to Cuba, looked promising. Yet an early episode in which the administration deferred to CANF over a key State Department appointment suggested little appetite for deviating from existing policy.62 Sporadic comments from the White House endorsed the embargo, Radio and Television Martí, and the CDA. As laid out in the CDA, the administration declared its readiness to reduce sanctions “in carefully calibrated ways in response to positive developments in Cuba,” but officials admitted that, in practice, they had no “first step in mind.”63 Meanwhile, in Congress, support for the embargo was bolstered by the election in 1992 of anti-communist Cuban American representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart (Republican from Florida) and Bob Menendez (Democrat from New Jersey), joining Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Republican from Florida). Despite the emergence of the moderate antiembargo Cuban Committee for Democracy, and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo’s Cambio Cubano, the administration favoured CANF during the migration crisis of AugustSeptember 1994.64 Immediately after announcing that Cuban migrants intercepted at sea would be sent to detention camps at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a decision expected to be unpopular in Miami, Clinton interrupted his own birthday party to speak to Mas Canosa, who had flown up with Florida Governor Lawton Chiles and a select group of South Florida notables.65 In September, administration officials made no attempt to consult with Cuban American moderates over ongoing migration talks with Havana.66 The following year, however, the administration engaged in ultrasecret negotiations with Havana, resulting in an agreement allowing Guantánamo detainees to be let into the United States but future migrants intercepted at sea to be returned to Cuba. As would be the case

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in the Elián González saga of 1999–2000, averting a mass migration of Cuban refugees which could be plausibly attributed to administration action took precedence over satisfying Cuban anti-communists. Anger at this abrupt policy change contributed to the passage of the Republican-backed Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (“LIBERTAD”) Act, generally known as the Helms-Burton Act. Perhaps the most important aspect of Helms-Burton was the long list of requirements that must be met by any “transitional” or “democratically-elected” Cuban government before the U.S. president can lift sanctions. The embargo, which had formerly been based on executive orders, was now codified. However, the most radical element was Title III, which gave U.S. citizens or companies a right to sue foreign companies who invested in expropriated property in Cuba. This applied not only to the original U.S.-certified claimants but also those who had been Cuban citizens at the time of the expropriation.67 The involvement of Bacardi in Title III is an open secret.68 As it was not a U.S. company, Bacardi was entitled to nothing under existing law, but Helms-Burton allowed the company’s U.S. subsidiary to sue French competitor Pernod Ricard, which had announced a joint venture with the Cuban government in December 1993. Lawyers representing other U.S. and Cuban American property claimants were also consulted.69 Given the strong links between CANF and several sponsors, it was surely overstating the case to suggest, as Kiger does, that the organization “had little influence on the content of Helms-Burton.”70 Still, the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, the particular interest of Senator Jesse Helms (Rep-NC) in property rights, and the extraordinary events surrounding the shootdown by the Cuban Air Force of two planes piloted by the exile organization Brothers to the Rescue in a presidential election year were even more important. As with the Bush administration and the CDA, Clinton officials at first opposed the bill. Republican presidential contenders Phil Gramm and Bob Dole then applied pressure to Clinton and the administration acquiesced. However, Clinton’s repeated six-monthly suspension of the right to sue foreign investors shows that, although induced to sign the legislation, he was not willing to implement the bill. The passage of Helms-Burton and the death of Jorge Mas Canosa in 1996 deprived Cuban anti-communists of both a unifying cause and a preeminent leader. But the Clinton administration continued to act cautiously and anti-communists retained powerful allies in Congress. In 2000, they exacted a price for passage of the Ashcroft amendment, lifting restrictions on the sale of food and medicine to countries under unilateral

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sanctions. Not only were there specific conditions on sales to Cuba but also restrictions on tourist travel were codified in the same legislation. The basic embargo policy would enter its fifth decade securely in place, protected both by law and a still influential Cuban anti-communist lobby. Conclusion Joan Didion once wrote, “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.”71 But far from a sunny retirement community for Cuban expatriates, life in Miami gave a second wind to those who learned how to use the American state to further their otherwise frustrated agendas. Cuban anti-communists found that Florida was not a hopeless exile and that support from the U.S. government could mean the difference between survival and dissipation. When the government sought advantage from the Cuban community, it offered exile groups invaluable assistance, first helping Cuban exiles to survive and thrive in Miami and later supporting anti-communists’ dominance over the Cuban American community and their ability to raise concerns through the political system. But Cuban anti-communists, even when taking advantage of opportunities afforded them by the state, have refused to operate solely as a vessel for the agenda of any particular “Anglo” interest group. They failed to fall silent when Washington politicians might have wished. And when Washington politicians began to fear the potentially destabilizing impact of Cuban anti-communist militancy, they acted to undermine their preeminent position within the exile community. A sophisticated dialogue thus developed between the militant anti-Castro brand of ethnic anti-communism and the shifting agendas of Washington’s Cold Warriors. Cuban ethnic anti-communism neither began nor ended at the traditional axes of the cold war—1947 and 1989. Its tone and tenor remained consistently aggressive and crusading even when moderate policies reigned in the corridors of power. Its fortunes varied according to its relationship with Washington. But perhaps more than anything, the Cuban exile experience shows how, over time, anti-communist politics in the United States has become decentred and how the ability of politicians to present monolithic approaches to fighting Communism has been challenged even by those most vehemently committed to the battle.

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Notes 1. Haynes Johnson, The Bay of Pigs: The Invasion of Cuba by Brigade 2506 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 350–51. 2. They were almost certainly incorrect to do so. See Stephen G. Rabe, “After the Missiles of October: John F. Kennedy and Cuba, November 1962 to November 1963,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2000): 723–25. 3. In recent years, there has been a considerable volume of literature published on this community, but interpretations of the origins and nature of their influence have differed widely. See María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Damian J. Fernandez, “From Little Havana to Washington, D.C.: Cuban-Americans and US Foreign Policy,” in Ethnic Groups and US Foreign Policy, ed. Mohammed E. Ahrari (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987); Maria de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in US Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National Foundation,” International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1999): 341–61; Miguel González-Pando, The Cuban Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998); Alex Stepick, Max Castro, Guillermo Grenier, and Marvin Dunn, This Land is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). James Schlesinger is perhaps the most trenchant critic of the ethnic Cuban influence on Washington. See James Schlesinger, “Fragmentation and Hubris: A Shaky Basis for American Leadership,” National Interest 49 (1997): 3–9; also, Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 4. Betsy Guzman, “The Hispanic Population,” Census 2000 Summary File 1, U.S. Census Bureau, at http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01–3.pdf, http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-34.pdf; Nolan Malone, Kaari F. Baluja, Joseph M. Constanzo, and Cynthia J. Davis, “The Foreign-Born Population: 2000,” Census 2000 Brief, U.S. Census Bureau, at http://www.census.gov/ prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-34.pdf 5. Annex A, “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime, 16 March 1960,” in Bay of Pigs Declassified, ed. Peter Kornbluh (New York: New Press, 1998), 103. On the decision to overthrow Castro, see Geoffrey Warner, “Eisenhower and Castro: US-Cuban Relations 1958–60,” International Affairs 75, no. 4 (1999): 803–17. 6. Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick, “Power and Identity: Miami Cubans,” in Latinos: Remaking America, ed. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 76–77.

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7. Alejandro Portes and Rafael Mozo, “The Political Adaptation Process of Cubans and Other Ethnic Minorities in the United States: A Preliminary Analysis,” International Migration Review 19, no. 1 (1985): 37. 8. Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, “Anatomy of a Failure: The Decision to Land at the Bay of Pigs,” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 3 (1984): 484–85; Piero Gleijeses, “Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House and the Bay of Pigs,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 1 (1995): 26, 41–42; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis 1958–1964 (London: John Murray, 1997), 65, 82. 9. Annex B, “Cuba, 17 February 1961,” in Bay of Pigs Declassified, 114–15. 10. Ibid. See also Richard Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 163. 11. Cited by Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Source of US Policy Toward Castro,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34 (2002): 242. 12. Álvaro Vargas Llosa, El Exilio Indomable: Historia de la Disidencia Cubana en el Destierro (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1998), 44–46; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Foreign Operation and Related Agencies, Foreign Assistance and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1972, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., March 24 and April 1, 1971, 419. 13. Daryl Harris, “Generating Racial and Ethnic Conflict in Miami: Impact of American Foreign Policy and Domestic Racism,” in Blacks, Latinos and Asians in Urban America: Status and Prospects for Politics and Activism, ed. James Jennings (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 81. 14. See Portes and Mozo, “The Political Adaptation Process of Cubans,” 37. 15. García, Havana USA, 131. 16. See Undersecretary of State George Ball’s testimony on the Cuban Adjustment Act, U.S. Congress, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee No. 1, Adjustment of Status for Cuban Refugees, 89th Cong., 2d sess., August 1, 10, and 11, 1966, 12–13. For more on the Cuban Adjustment Act, see Jessica Gibbs, “The Cuban Adjustment Act and Immigration from Cuba,” in America’s Americans: Population Issues in US Society and Politics, ed. Philip Davies and Iwan Morgan (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007). 17. Cited in González-Pando, The Cuban-Americans, 143. 18. Álvaro Vargas Llosa, semi-official historian of the Cuban American National Foundation, writes that 74,000 “heads of household” participated in a vote to approve the five names put forward by the nominating committee. While he confesses that the 90 percent approval was “more like a banana republic than an advanced democracy,” he claims that “nobody doubted that the process was serious and the result a logical one” (Vargas Llosa, El Exilio Indomable, 54). 19. Ibid., 55–61; Gaeton Fonzi, “Who Is Jorge Mas Canosa,” Esquire, January 1993, 86–89, 119–22. 20. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Terroristic Activity: Terrorism in the Miami Area, 94th Cong., 2d sess., part 8, May 1976.

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21. González-Pando, The Cuban-Americans, 129. 22. During the 1970s, the proportion of Cuban-born people living in Miami grew from 40 to 52 percent of the total in the United States. See Portes and Mozo, “The Political Adaptation Process of Cubans,” 38. 23. Cited in González-Pando, The Cuban Americans, 142. 24. Harris, “Generating Ethnic and Racial Conflict in Miami,” 81. 25. Alejandro Portes, “The Rise of Ethnicity: Determinants of Ethnic Perceptions among Cuban Exiles in Miami,” American Sociological Review 49, no. 3 (1984): 383–97. 26. Portes and Mozo, “The Political Adaptation Process of Cubans,” 53. See also Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio, “Latinos and the 1992 Elections: A National Perspective,” in Ethnic Ironies: Latino Politics in the 1992 Elections (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 31. 27. Polls taken between 1973 and 1975 suggest that support for normalization was between 45 percent and 55 percent. See William G. Mayer, “The Polls—Trends. American Attitudes toward Cuba,” Public Opinion Quarterly 65 (2001): 601. 28. Portes and Mozo, “The Political Adaptation Process of Cubans,” 41; Dario Moreno, “The Cuban Model: Political Empowerment in Miami,” in Pursuing Power: Latinos and the Political System, ed. F. Chris Garcia (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 208. 29. García, Havana USA, 138. 30. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittees on International Trade and Commerce, and on International Organizations, United States Trade Embargo of Cuba, 94th Cong., 1st sess., May 8, 13, 15, and 22, June 11 and 26, July 9, and September 23, 1975, 4–15, 16–23, 25. 31. Ibid., 215–21. 32. See Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 290–91. 33. Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of US-Cuban Relations since 1957 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 160–63; Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 8, 96. 34. Robert M. Levine, Secret Missions to Cuba, 135. See also “Dangerous Dialogue: Attacks on Freedom of Expression in Miami’s Cuban Exile Community,” Human Rights Watch 4, no. 7 (1992). 35. Gloria Duffy, “Crisis Mangling and the Cuban Brigade,” International Security 8, no. 1 (1983): 67–87. 36. See Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 266. 37. Fernandez, “From Little Havana to Washington D.C.,” 123; David Rieff, “A Reporter at Large: The Second Havana,” New Yorker, May 18, 1987, 82–83. 38. See Haney and Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in U.S. Foreign Policy,” 341–61. 39. Between 1983 and 1988, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) provided some $390,000 for CANF to publicize Cuban human rights abuses. The associated Free Cuba PAC donated a corresponding amount to political campaigns, including to congressmen who had championed the NED. See Vargas

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42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

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Llosa, El Exilio Indomable, 121–22, 146–47; and Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 117, 348. Haney and Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in U.S. Foreign Policy,” 349–50. For comments from supporters who hoped that Radio Martí would produce a change of government, see U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Radio Broadcasting to Cuba (Radio Martí), 97th Cong., 2d sess., March 3, 4, and 24, 1982, 22; “A ‘Radio Free Cuba’? Si!” Miami Herald, September 25, 1981; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Radio Broadcasting to Cuba, 97th Cong., 2d sess., July 1, 27, and 28, and August 17 and 19, 1982, 385–88, 530–37. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Radio Broadcasting to Cuba (Radio Martí), 97th Cong., 2d sess., March 3, 4, and 24, 1982, 87–89; U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection, and Finance, Radio Broadcasting to Cuba, 97th Cong., 2d sess., May 10, 1982, 192–93; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Radio Broadcasting to Cuba, 97th Cong., 2d sess., July 1, 27, and 28, and August 17 and 19, 1982, 410–11, 419–38, 439–52, 407–10. Gomez’s concerns were echoed even among some who supported the station. For instance, Edward Gonzalez, “An Alternative Perspective on Radio Martí,” Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos 14, no. 2 (1984): 51. Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 118. Ibid., 122; Vargas Llosa, El Exilio Indomable, 279–80. Fernandez, “From Little Havana to Washington D.C.,” 127. See also the statement from Dr. Dagmaris Cabezas, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittees on Human Rights and International Organizations, on Western Hemisphere Affairs, and on International Economic Policy and Trade, Cuba and the United States: Thirty Years of Hostility and Beyond, 101st Cong., 1st sess., August 1 and 2 and September 20, 21, and 27, 1989, 284. Fernandez, “From Little Havana to Washington, D.C.,” 123. Dario Moreno and Christopher Warren, “The Conservative Enclave Revisited: Cuban Americans in Florida,” in Ethnic Ironies: Latino Politics in the 1992 Elections, ed. Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 173. In force between 1976 and 1985, the Clark amendment first prohibited and then severely restricted aid to combatants in the Angolan civil war. Patrick E. Tyler and David B. Ottaway, “The Selling of Jonas Savimbi: Success and a $600,000 Tab PR Firm Paved Guerrilla’s Way,” Washington Post, February 8, 1986; Llosa, El Exilio Indomable, 139–41. Chester Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighbourhood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 398. Alvin A. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account (New York: Arcade, 1995), 236–37; Elizabeth A. Palmer, “Exiles Talk of PACs and Power, Not Another Bay of Pigs,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, June 23, 1990, 1929, 1932–33.

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52. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation, 232; Elizabeth A. Palmer, “TV Martí Wins Its First Test in House . . . But Broadcasters Fear Castro’s Fury,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, June 23, 1990, 1930–31. 53. To get around International Telecommunications Union regulations, the channel would have to be broadcast at night, meaning few would watch. To minimize costs, the signal would be beamed from an air balloon tethered 10,000 feet above the Florida Keys, making it easy to block. See Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation, 229–35; Laura Parker, “TV Marti: Igniting War of Airwaves; As Three-Month Test Nears, Cuba Threatens Retaliatory Jamming,” Washington Post, March 27, 1990, A3. 54. Kenneth Skoug, The United States and Cuba Under Reagan and Schultz: A Foreign Service Officer Reports (London: Praeger, 1996), 187–89; Manuel Gomez, “Pull the Plug on TV Martí,” New York Times, June 9, 1989, I 31. 55. Skoug, The United States and Cuba Under Reagan and Schultz, 202; Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation, 235. 56. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittees on International Operations and on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Foreign Policy Implications of Television Martí, 100th Cong., 2nd sess., September 22, 1988, 1. 57. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation, 236. 58. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittees on Human Rights and International Organizations, on Western Hemisphere Affairs, and on International Economic Policy and Trade, Cuba and the United States: Thirty Years of Hostility and Beyond, 101st Cong., 1st sess., August 1 and 2 and September 20, 21, and 27, 1989. 59. William G. Mayer, “The Polls-Trends: American Attitudes Towards Cuba,” Public Opinion Quarterly 65 (2001): 600. 60. William M. LeoGrande, “From Havana to Miami: US Cuba Policy as a TwoLevel Game,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 40, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 67–86. 61. Gillian Gunn, Cuba in Transition: Options for US Policy, 21. See also Morley and McGillion, Unfinished Business, 47–48. 62. See Peter H. Stone, “Cuban Clout,” National Journal 25, no. 8 (1993): 449–53; George Gedda, “The Cuba Lobby,” Foreign Service Journal, June 1993, 24–29. 63. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittees on Economic Policy, Trade and Environment, on Western Hemisphere Affairs, and on International Operations, U.S. Policy and the Future of Cuba: the Cuban Democracy Act and U.S. Travel to Cuba, 103rd Cong., 1st sess., November 18, 1993, 17; Richard Nuccio, cited by Morris Morley and Chris McGillion, Unfinished Business: The United States and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70. 64. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittees on Select Revenue Measures and on Trade, H.R. 2229 Free Trade with Cuba Act, 103rd Cong., 2nd sess., March 17, 1994, 225–31. For more on these organizations, see Maxine Molyneux, “The Politics of the Cuban Diaspora in the United States,” in The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda, ed. Victor

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65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

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Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley (Boston: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 1999). Lisandro Pérez, “The End of Exile? A New Era in U.S. Immigration Policy Toward Cuba,” in Free Markets, Open Societies, Closed Borders? Trends in International Migration and Immigration Policy in the Americas, ed. Max J. Castro (Coral Gables: North-South Center Press, 1999), 204. Morley and McGillion, Unfinished Business, 78. Joaquín Roy, Cuba, the United States, and the Helms-Burton Doctrine: International Reactions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 53–54. Vargas Llosa, El Exilio Indomable, 303; Joaquin Roy, Cuba, the United States, and the Helms-Burton Doctrine, 52–56; Patrick J. Kiger, Squeeze Play: The United States, Cuba, and the Helms-Burton Act (Washington, DC: Center for Public Integrity, 1997), 48–49. Kiger, Squeeze Play, 47–49. Ibid., 47. For links to CANF, see, for example, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Cuba and United States Policy, 104th Cong., 1st sess., February 23, 1995, 4. Joan Didion, Miami (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 11.

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Conclusion Ieva Zake

By analyzing ethnic anti-communism, this volume provides insight into the uniqueness of the experience of political refugees or émigrés. The following is a preliminary summary of its most persistent trends. By no means, this is a full list of generalizable features of political exiles as a special type of immigrant community; however, it offers some valuable points for future comparisons and explorations. Hopes, Disappointment, and Persistence Most political refugees arrived in the United States with heightened hopes for this country’s role in helping liberate their homeland. They asserted loyalty to their host country and saw it as their best ally. However, they soon faced a disappointing realization that the American public and government had limited concern for their Communist-dominated countries. As the United States pursued compromises necessary for its own internal and foreign politics, the refugees felt increasingly isolated and misunderstood. Yet they did not give up. America was still their best, if not the only, friend, therefore they took advantage of its pluralistic political institutions and made themselves into notable political players. In the end, most of them had little to show for their enthusiastic activism. Thus, one of the most important problems characterizing the émigré experience was the ultimate gap between their expectations and practical results when dealing with the U.S. government. Although a lot of blame for this could be put on the ignorance of the American political establishment, it is also clear that the émigrés treated the United States with such high expectations that could never be met.

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Playing the Political Game Another complex area in the refugee experience was related to the role that Americans expected and enabled them to play. During the cold war, American institutions saw the émigrés as valuable providers of the “inside track” into the Communist regimes. Americans were interested in the émigrés because they were so starkly different from other immigrants. They were the former intellectual, military, and political elites of their countries who immediately organized into associations and showed a distinct capability of exerting political pressure. While the American side was impressed by them, it was also concerned about the émigrés’ controversial past and the sheer multitude of opinions among them. The American government was often afraid of “these people” and sought to connect to the more moderate and trustworthy groups among them. In other words, American attitude was ambiguous. Realizing this, the émigrés sought to find their own place within the American political spectrum. Although some organizations insisted that their activities did not carry partisan meaning, others openly targeted specific American parties. Usually, the émigrés could build alliances with political forces or individuals that were already anti-communist. This indicated that ethnic anti-communism did not gain its legitimacy on its own but through associations with established forms of American anti-communism. Combining the Past with the Present Was the émigré political activism determined by their exile experience or was it something brought from the homeland? The answer is mixed. Clearly, the refugees used political activism as an instrument for preserving their ethnic identity. In this process, their past and their memories played a major role, more so than for other immigrant groups. Yet, the refugees were sensitive to political opportunities in the United States and American perceptions of Communism and anti-communism. Consequently, émigré anti-communism was both a product of exile experience and a deliberate attempt to preserve the political battles from the lost homeland. This explains why ethnic anti-communists often continued cross-ethnic conflicts from the old country, which prevented them from building valuable coalitions. In other words, quite frequently, their nationalism was stronger than their anti-communism.

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Difficult Relations with the Homeland Another distinctive characteristic of the émigré experience was the complex relationship with their homelands. The émigrés desperately tried to remain connected to the oppressed nations, but often (and quite justifiably) felt exploited by the regimes in their home countries. The Communist governments, particularly those controlled by the Soviet Union during the cold war, consciously tried to influence the émigrés who were outspoken critics of Communism. The Communist regimes also wanted to use the émigrés as propaganda instruments. They organized repatriation campaigns and tried to recruit the émigrés for espionage. In most cases, these measures failed, demonstrating that the émigrés were careful to keep their distance. But this also meant that although they wanted to connect with their people under the Communist rule, they had to insist on their independence. Consequently, relations with their homelands often were and still are emotional and very painful. Dramatic Internal Conflicts Not only political, but also social, cultural, and even religious life of the émigré communities was characterized by passionate internal conflicts. Although these disagreements were strong and sometimes involved violence, they were also necessary for the preservation of these groups’ ethnic identity. These conflicts could not be avoided because the émigrés felt that it was the survival of their nations that was at stake here. Unfortunately, these internal conflicts sometimes tended to create an intolerant ideological climate within the émigré communities. The émigrés often acted as if the only possibility for fighting totalitarianism was to become completely uniformed in their beliefs and attitudes. While fighting for freedom and individual liberty in their homelands, the exiles were in danger of instituting thought-control in their own politics. This was particularly obvious in the situations of cross-generational conflicts. While the younger generations were interested in building connections with their repressed homelands and sought affirmation for their ethnic identity among copatriots, the older exiles mercilessly criticized and even isolated them. A Unique Pattern of Assimilation To conclude, the assimilation of political refugees proceeds differently from other immigrant groups. It is greatly affected by the persistence and success of their political activism, the extent of political repression in their

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homeland, their relationships with the political regimes that expelled them and the dynamic of internal conflicts. Political refugees tend to remain much more powerfully tied to their homeland in their politics, even if they assimilate socially or culturally. As noted, the émigrés preserve their ethnic identity through political ideas and activism, in this case, anti-communist struggle. And if their homelands remain under oppressive political regimes, it can be predicted that émigrés are much more likely to reject their adopted American and reassert their separate ethnic identity than any other immigrant group.

Contributors Benjamin F. Alexander is a full-time lecturer at Towson University in Maryland. His dissertation, which he is working on making into a book, is on twentieth-century Armenian American immigrant experiences. He is also researching twentieth-century American racial and cultural politics for a second book project. Judith Fai-Podlipnik is an associate professor of modern European history at Southeastern Louisiana University. She has published several articles and book chapters on Hungarian immigration during the postwar years and the various political personalities associated with the émigré movements. She is a recipient of numerous grants from the Holocaust Educational Foundation and the United States Holocaust Museum. Jessica Gibbs lectures in American history at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales. She has published on the Cuban Adjustment Act and U.S. immigration from Cuba, and is currently working on a book about the U.S. policy towards Cuba after the end of the cold war. Alex Goodall is a lecturer in modern history at the University of York, United Kingdom. He works on the history of the twentieth-century counterrevolutionary movements in the Americas. He is currently working on a book about aspects of anti-communism in the United States before the cold war. Myron B. Kuropas is an adjunct professor of history at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations, 1884–1954 (1991) and Ukrainian American Citadel: The First Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association (1996). He is also the author of two photographic histories To Preserve a Heritage: The Ukrainian Immigration in the United States (1984) and Ukrainians of Chicagoland (2006). In 2004, he was awarded the prestigious Shevchenko Freedom Award for his contributions to Ukrainian American life.

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C. N. Le is a visiting assistant professor in the Sociology Department and Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Asian American Assimilation: Ethnicity, Immigration, and Socioeconomic Attainment (2007). His current research focuses on analyzing structural and institutional measures of assimilation and social integration among Asian Americans. Anna Mazurkiewicz is a historian at the University of Gdansk in Poland. She is the author of American Diplomacy and the Polish Elections of 1947 and 1989 (2007). She is also a recipient of Poland’s National Center for Culture award for her dissertation. Her research on East European exiles was made possible by the support of the Kosciuszko Foundation. Vasil Paraskevov is an assistant professor of modern Bulgarian history at Konstantin Preslavsky University, Shumen, Bulgaria. His PhD dissertation was entitled The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union: Nikola Petkov, 1945–1947. Currently, he carries out postdoctoral research devoted to the British-Bulgarian relations during the cold war. Donald Pienkos is a professor of political science and coordinator of International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published extensively on Polish politics and foreign policy and on the organizations of the Polish ethnic community, including PNA: A Centennial History of the Polish National Alliance (1984), Yesterday, Today, Tommorow: The Story of the Polish National Alliance (2008), For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863–1991 (1991), plus monographs on the fraternal and patriotic activities of the Polish Falcons of America (1987) and the Polish Women’s Alliance of America (2003). John Radzilowski is an assistant professor of history and geography at the University of Alaska Southeast. He is the author or coauthor of numerous reports, articles, and reviews and thirteen books including The Eagle and the Cross: A History of Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (2003) and Community of Strangers: Change, Turnover, and Turbulence and the Transformation of a Midwestern Country Town (1999). He is currently editing the Encyclopedia of American Immigration (2nd edition) and a collected volume of translated articles on the activities of the communist security services in Poland since 1944. In 2007, Dr. Radzilowski received the Oskar Halecki Prize from the Polish American Historical Association for his book Poles in Minnesota (2005).

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Prokop Tomek is a historian at the Military History Institute in Prague, Czech Republic. He is an author of Object Alpha. Czechoslovak Security Forces against Radio Free Europe (2006). He specializes in relations between the repressive apparatus of the Communist regime and the citizens of Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989. Chia Youyee Vang is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Hmong in Minnesota (2008). Her research focuses on American involvement in Southeast Asia in the post-World War II era and refugees in the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. Ieva Zake is an assistant professor of sociology at Rowan University. She is an author of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism and Twentieth-Century Anti-Democratic Ideals: The Case of Latvia, 1840s-1980s (2008) as well as numerous academic articles and book chapters on nationalism, intellectuals, post-Communist transition and Latvian émigrés in the United States.

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Index Abhay, Khamphay, 220 ACEN Inc., 177 ACEN News, 177–78 Acheson, Dean, 169 Action for Repatriation, 123 Afghanistan, 131, 240 Agrarian Union, in Bulgaria, 155, 164n19 Aharonian, Avedis, 70 Albania, 171, 174, 178, 182 All-American Conference to Combat Communism, 136 Allen, Richard, 241 Allied Control Commission, 87–88 allied powers, 29 Amerasian Homecoming Act, 192 American, 1–6, 8–12, 11–14, 15–16, 25–37, 47–56, 57–63, 67–73, 76–77, 79, 81–83, 90–103, 113–14, 119–22, 124, 127–31, 133–34, 136–46, 152, 155–57, 159–60, 162, 167–71, 173–79, 189–90, 192–99, 202–7, 211–28, 234–39, 241–47, 255–56, 258. See also United States American Committee for the Liberation of Czechoslovakia, 113 American Committee for the Liberation of the People’s of Russia, 76 American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 12, 185n73 American Hungarian Federation (AHF), 96–98, 103, 106n40 American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees (AFCR), 114, 124

American Latvian Association, 133, 136, 138, 147n9 American Latvian Youth Association, 138 American Legation in Budapest, 100 American Relief for Poland, 27–28 Americans for Congressional Action to Free the Baltic States, 141 Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU), 58 American Slav Congress, 28, 38n9 amnesties for the refugees, in Bulgaria, 159 anarchists, 7, 44 Angola, 240, 243, 251n48 anti-Americanism, 130–31, 161 Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations (ABN), 57, 61, 64 anti-Castro, 233, 235–39, 241, 243, 247 anti-colonialism, 131 anti-communism, 153, 155–57, 162, 190, 194–95, 199, 202, 205–7, 211, 216, 233, 234, 239–41, 244, 247, 255 American, 1, 5, 17n1, 33, 131, 145, 199, 256 ethnic, 1–5, 7, 9–10, 12–16, 17n4 anti-communist, 151–53, 155–57, 160–63, 177, 189, 193–96, 199, 202, 205–8, 213, 216, 219, 221, 224–25, 228 minorities, 113, 124, 214 Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 51–52 antiemigre, 123, 159 antiexile, 123–24

264

Index

anti-Jewish, 95 anti-Nazi, 9, 136 anti-Semites, 78, 95 anti-Semitic, 90, 95, 104n8, 106n30, 135 anti-Semitism, 52, 78, 136 anti-Soviet, 32–30, 51, 64n26, 76, 80–82, 146, 157 anti-Sovietism, 52, 76 Areito, 239 Armenia, 8, 67–86 Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), 69, 76 Armenian, 67–86 American Apostolic church, 69, 71–72, 80 Americans, 67–86 Democratic Liberal, also Ramgavar Party, 67, 69, 71 immigrants, 67–68, 82–83 National Council of America, 74, 79 Progressive Party, also Progressive League, 79 Protestant or Evangelical church, 69, 79 Republic, 69–70 Revolutionary Federation, also Tashnag Party (ARF), also Dashnags, 67–83 Soviet Republic, 70 Soviet Socialist Republic, 67 speaking, 68 Armenians, 67–86 Arrow Cross, 90, 98 Ashcroft amendment, 246 Asia, 132, 140, 167, 178, 200, 204 Southeast, 6, 10, 13, 212, 217–18, 224, 228 Asian Americans, 193–94, 202, 206–7, 218 Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), 176 Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), 1, 34, 139, 141–42, 167,

170–79, 181n24, 182nn30, 38, 183nn42, 48, 49 budget of, 178 house of, 174 plenary sessions of, 171 publications of, 178 structure of, 171 assimilation, 62, 128, 168, 193, 207–8, 257 Atlantic Charter, 10, 27, 30, 35, 38n4 ATF. See Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Austria, 26, 88, 92, 113, 122, 123n1 Azk, 69 Bacardi, 237, 246. See also José Bosch Baikar, 71, 77–78 Balogh, István, 97 Baltic, 9, 14, 19n20, 60, 127–30, 132–34, 136–37, 139, 141–46, 167 American Freedom League, 142 Appeal to the United Nations (BATUN), 132, 141–42 Freedom Day, 145, 177 Holocaust, 134 states, also nations, also countries, 9, 19n20, 127, 129–30, 132–36, 139, 141–42, 144–45 Balts, 10 Ban Vinai refugee camp, 213 Bandera, Stephen, 56 Barev, Tsenko, 158 Barnes, Maynard, 156 Base Trax, 233 Batum, truce of, 69 Bay of Pigs invasion, 15, 233, 235–36 debacle, 234 Benes, Bernardo, 240 Beneš, Edvard, 111–13, 117, 126n12 Betancourt, Ernesto, 242 Big Three, 27, 29 Bilateral Trade Agreement between Vietnam and the U.S., 204 Blanks, Ernests, 132, 135

Index

Bloc 8406, 200–201 BNF Borba, 154 BNF Svoboda, 154 Boat People, 191 Bolshevik(s), 8, 43–44, 46–47, 50, 57–58, 61–63, 74, 82, 104n9, 142–43 Bonachea, Ramón, 239 Bosch, José, 237. See also Bacardi Brigade 2506, 233, 236 Britain, 27, 30, 55, 111, 114, 121–22, 139 Brothers to the Rescue, 246 Buckley, James, 58 Buell, Pop, 215 Bulgaria, 120, 151–52, 154, 156–62, 182n38 as the Sixteenth Soviet Republic, 158 Union of Democratic Forces, 161 Bulgarian, 151–63, 164n19, 166n55 American(s), 156, 159, 168–69 authorities, 161 Communist Party (BCP), 151, 153–54, 157–60, 162 émigré(s), 151–63 ethnic anti-communist group, 151 immigration to the United States, 152–53, 156 monarchy, also monarchism, 154–55 National Committee for a Free and Independent Bulgaria (BNC), 153–55 National Front (BNF), 153–55 state policy toward émigrés, 161 State Security (DS), 158–62 subordination to the Soviet Union, 151 Temporary Bulgarian Representation (TBR), 154 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), 221–22 Bush, George H. W., 35, 41n27, 65–66n68, 243–46 Bush, George W., 203 Byrnes, James, 31

265

California State Board of Education, 135 Cambio Cubano, 245 Cambodia, 10, 213 capitalism, 214 Captive Nations committee, 1, 5, 12, 141, 145, 177 proclamation, 57 resolution, 139, 141 week, 34, 57, 141, 155, 177, 184n67 Carter, Jimmy, 36, 41nn26, 27, 62, 240–42, 245 Castro, Fidel, 15, 233–34, 236–40, 242–45 Castro’s army, 233 Castro’s redistributive policies, 235 Castro’s regime, 6, 14–15 Catholic Church, 3, 17, 18n8, 32, 35, 46, 109, 130 leaders, 9, 18n8 white ethnics, 10 working-class, 9 Central Europe, 34 Central European, 32–33, 111, 141, 145, 179 Central European Federation, 111, 125nn3, 4, 182n35 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 15, 70, 101, 121, 124, 131, 140, 156, 159, 169–71, 178, 213, 215, 217, 222–23, 225, 229n19, 233, 235–36, 239 Cernuda, Ramón, 238 Černý, Karel, 121 Cham Montagnard, 191 Chamberlain, Wendy, 223 Charter of Paris, 217 Chicago, 9, 29, 33–36, 37–38n1, 46, 48, 50–51, 71, 111, 121 Chiles, Lawton, 243, 245 China, 1, 3, 10, 200, 204–5, 234 Maoist, 3 southern, 211 Chinese, 3, 10, 14, 177, 191–92, 207, 238

266

Index

Churchill, Winston, 27–29, 32, 39n11 Clark Amendment, 243, 251n48 Clinton, Bill, 197, 244–46 cold war, 1–2, 12–14, 22n42, 34–35, 117, 151, 156–57, 176, 178, 212–14, 217–18, 228, 234 American Armenian, 67–86 multiple fronts, 127–50 Cold Warriors, 234, 238, 247 collaboration, 55, 126n13, 135, 155, 169, 174 collaborators, 15, 22n41, 44–56, 60–61, 78, 96, 135–36, 213 Committee for Democracy, 245 Committee for Free Latvia, 140 Committee for Human Rights in Vietnam, 201 Committee for Hungary’s Liberation, 101–2 Committee of 75, 240 Committee to Stop World Communism, 32 Communism, 1–5, 8–12, 14, 16, 32–33, 36–37, 57, 62, 71, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 89–91, 99, 101, 103, 110, 112–13, 124–25, 127, 129, 131–36, 138, 140, 143–46, 154, 156–57, 161–62, 168, 174, 177, 179, 197, 205–6, 208, 212–14, 216, 235, 238, 247, 256–57 Communist, 1–8, 10–16, 27, 28, 31–34, 44, 46–47, 49–54, 56–57, 61, 68, 71, 75, 78–79, 81, 82, 87–91, 94, 98, 101–2, 109–10, 112–21, 123–25, 127, 129–33, 136–41, 151–62, 168, 173–74, 176, 189–93, 195–204, 206–7, 211–13, 216, 218–20, 223–24, 228, 234–35, 237–41, 245, 247, 255–58 censorship, 118, 156, 200 government, 4, 10, 14–15, 27, 28, 31–32, 37, 57, 62, 71, 76, 79, 81–82, 89–91, 99, 101, 140,

144–45, 156–57, 161–62, 168, 179, 197, 205–6, 208, 212–13, 235, 238, 247, 256 ideology/ideologies, 1, 4, 8, 112, 127, 151–52, 154, 162, 214, 216 infiltration, 12 internationalism, 8 Party of the United States (CPUSA), 1, 7, 14 regime, 6, 14, 32–33, 62, 71, 90–91, 101, 140, 156, 162, 168, 189, 195–99, 202–3, 212, 216, 218, 234–35, 237 repression, 1–3, 11–12, 33, 62, 157, 161 security apparatus, 11, 14, 123, 159 system, 8, 94, 99, 117, 132–33, 153–54, 156, 158, 160, 189, 206, 216, 239, 247 terror, 1, 3, 5, 11–12, 44, 91, 109, 130, 154 utopia, 4, 8 Communist coup of 1944 in Bulgaria, 155 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 6, 27 Conference of Americans of Central and Eastern European Descent (CACEED), 142, 175 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 15 Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, 50 Conquest, Robert, 44, 58 conservative(s), 7–9, 93, 95, 221, 242 containment, 132, 62, 70, 213, 228, 238 contras, 241–42 Coste, Brutus, 172, 175, 177 Council of Europe, 172, 175 Council of Reciprocity between Czechs and Slovaks, 118 Counterintelligence Corps, 15 Crockett, George, 244 Crusade for Freedom, 119 Cuba, 6, 10, 13, 15–16, 131, 177, 233–34, 237–44, 243–46, 245–47

Index

Cuban, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16, 233–38, 237–47 Adjustment Act, 236–37 Air Force, 246 Christians for Justice and Freedom, 240 Committee for Democracy, 245 Democracy Act (CDA), 244–46 government, 14, 234, 237–38, 240–43, 246–47 migrants, 245 migration, 245–46 Refugee Emergency Center, 235 Refugee Program, 236, 242 Revolutionary Council, 237 Cuban American Committee for the Normalization of Relations, 242 Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), 234, 237, 241–46 Cuban American(s), 11, 13–14, 234, 237–38, 241–42, 244–47 Cubans, 5, 10, 233–40, 242–43 in the U.S., also Florida, also Miami, 5, 10, 234, 237–38, 242–43 Czech, 47, 173 Czechoslovak, 109–23, 125, 126n12 Communist Party, 109–10, 113 communists, 109, 111–12, 114–17, 121, 123 government in exile, 118, 121 independence, 110–12 National Council of America, 114, 119 Republic, 110, 113, 116, 121 Czechoslovakia, 9, 44–45, 160, 171–72, 174 Communist, 109, 111–12, 114–17, 121, 123 Communist coup in, 115–17 Council of Free (CFC), 117–18, 121–22, 124 Legion, 121 State security (StB), 113, 123–24 Dao, Yang, 211, 223 Darbinian, Reuben, 70, 78–81

267

Daugavas Vanagi, 15, 136–37 Daugavas Vanagu Mēnešraksts, 130–33, 135 Deak, Istvan, 146, 170–71 Demjanjuk, Ivan, 15, 61 democracy, 17, 26, 55, 61, 79, 89, 97, 152, 161, 176, 195, 197, 199–94, 206, 214, 216–17, 220, 223, 237, 241, 244–45 Democrat/Democratic, 5, 9–10, 13, 29–37, 45–47, 55, 67, 69, 71, 78–79, 88–89, 92, 99, 142–43, 146, 154, 161, 169–70, 172–73, 175, 189–90, 199–93, 206, 213–14, 218, 220, 224–25, 238, 242–46 Democratic Party, 29, 35–37, 88, 143, 201, 224 Derounian, Avedis, also John Roy Carlson, 74, 78, 80 détente, 156, 239, 241 Dewey, Thomas E., 29, 33–34, 97 dialogueros, 240 diaspora, 7, 15, 69, 75, 82–83, 211 Diaz-Balart, Lincoln, 245 Dies, Martin, 51–54 Dimitrov, G. M., 153–54, 156, 158, 168, 172, 175 Displaced Persons, also DPs, 11–13, 31, 33, 36, 55–56, 60, 74, 78, 92, 97, 128 Act, 55–56, 60, 92, 128 camps, 11, 31, 56, 75, 128 Commissioner of, 78 dissidents, 13, 58, 133–34, 157, 200–201, 203, 206 Do, Ahn, 206 Dobriansky, Lev, 57–58, 141, 177 Dochev, Ivan, 152, 154–55, 157, 162 Dole, Robert, 58, 145, 246 Dulles, John Foster, 140, 145, 169, 176, 178 Dundurs, Ēriks, 130, 143–44 Ďurčanský, Ferdinand, 112 Dziennik Zwiazkowy, 3

268

Index

East-central Europe, 6, 9, 15, 170 East-central European, 7 Eastern Europe, 10, 14, 45, 55, 62, 88, 100, 103, 115, 120, 127, 145–46, 155–56, 162, 168–70, 172, 174–76 Eastern European, 7, 9, 12, 32–33, 36, 119, 135, 139–40, 142–45, 167–69, 172, 174–79 Echmiadzin, 71, 80–81 Eckhardt, Tibor, 94–96, 99, 101, 103 Economic Research Unit, 122 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 10, 34–36, 56–57, 81, 119, 139, 145, 168–69, 176–77, 235 Elián González saga, 246 emigration, 87, 98, 114, 123, 153, 160, 191, 240, 242 emigrants, 153, 161 émigré(s), 2–3, 10–11, 13–16, 26, 28, 57, 61, 82, 87, 90–96, 98, 103–4, 109–10, 112–13, 117–18, 120, 123–25, 127–30, 134, 136–46, 151–63, 168, 170–72, 174, 176, 178–79, 191, 208, 237, 240–42, 255–58 Encinosa, Enrique, 237 Enlightenment, 4 espionage, 1, 4, 14–15, 52–53, 55, 100, 122, 158–59, 257 actions, 4, 100 ethnic, 1, 4, 14–15, 257 Estonia, 8–9, 135, 145, 169, 171–72, 174 Ethiopia, 240 ethnic, 1–8, 7–16, 26, 33, 36, 43, 58, 60–63, 68–70, 72–73, 110–11, 127, 129–35, 140, 143–46, 151, 153, 157, 161–62, 167–68, 174, 176–77, 179, 189, 191–95, 200, 202, 204, 206–7, 211–17, 220, 223, 228, 234, 236, 238, 240–42, 247, 255–58 animosity, 68, 216

Chinese, 3, 10, 14, 177, 191–92, 207, 238 communities, 1–3, 7–8, 11–16, 33, 69, 168, 174, 176, 193–95, 213, 217, 220, 223, 257 culture(s), 2–3, 6, 10, 33, 70, 73, 132–33, 167, 174, 179, 207, 213–14, 216 ghetto, 5 groups, 1–3, 7–8, 12–16, 168, 213–15, 217, 257 identity, 16, 62, 70, 73, 129, 133, 207, 236, 256–58 leaders, 2–3, 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 26, 33, 61, 70, 72–73, 129, 140, 151, 162, 168, 177, 202, 214, 216–17, 220, 223, 242 minorities, 73, 129, 132, 161, 191, 211–12, 214–15, 217, 220, 236, 238 radicalism, 7–8 Russians, 1, 8, 14, 43, 110, 131–33, 140, 157 solidarity, 8, 13–14, 177, 189, 195, 206–7 ethnicity, 2–3, 5, 8, 10, 36, 72, 74, 83, 174, 206, 214, 216–18, 238 ethnics, 3, 5, 9–11, 58, 62, 217, 225 Eurasia, 168 Europe, 1, 9, 21n39, 26, 29, 31, 33, 46, 54, 56, 87–88, 90, 92–93, 95, 99, 112, 114–17, 134–35, 167, 170–74, 178–79 European, 22n41, 47, 70, 96, 112, 119, 125n3, 128, 133, 158, 167, 170, 175 Conference on Security and Cooperation, 134 Great Powers, 157 Movement, 172 exhibition “Soviet Empire 1917–1958”, 178 exiles, 2, 10–11, 15, 111–14, 117, 119–20, 122–24, 134–36, 140, 142, 144, 152–54, 159, 161–62,

Index

168–70, 173–76, 179, 197, 213, 216, 227–28, 234–41, 245, 247, 255, 257 Ezergailis, Andrievs, 15, 136 fascism, 29, 52, 99 fascist(s), 28, 49, 52, 55, 56, 61, 74–75, 87–88, 90, 93, 98–99, 174 Father Ly, the trial of, 201 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 15, 51–54, 124, 131, 196 Federation of Communist Parties, 46 Federation of Socialist Parties, 46 Federation of Ukrainians in the U.S., 46 Feinstein, Diane, 202 fellow travelers, 9, 62 Finland, 9 Finnish, 7–8 Americans, 19n7 immigrants, 7 First Indochina War, 211–12 Fish, Hamilton Jr., 51 Ford, Gerald, 36–37, 58–59, 62–63, 145, 155, 239–40 France, 26, 55, 76, 99, 111, 121–22, 159, 212, 217, 221–22 Free Cuba PAC, 241, 244 Free Lao, 212 Free Lao Front, 212 French colonial regime, 212 French Indochina, 211 Gadomski, F., 170, 172–73, 176, 178–79 Genocide, 59–61, 68–70, 75, 82–83, 95, 135 Turkish against Armenians, 68–70, 75, 82–83 German, 7, 9, 15, 44, 51–52, 60, 92, 110–11, 115, 119–20, 135–36, 170 Americans, 9, 15, 51–52, 60, 92, 119–20, 136, 170 immigrants, 7, 9, 92, 110 invasion, 9, 15, 111

269

Germany, 15, 26, 30–31, 45, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 55, 111, 113–14, 116, 121–22, 128, 167, 178 Federal Republic of, 116 Nazi, 15, 52–53, 55, 111, 121 West, 15, 113–14, 116, 121 Goldwater, Barry, 143, 238 Gomez, Manuel, 242–43 GOP, 58, 61. See also Republican GOP Nationalities Reporter, 143 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 34 Gorianite movement, 159 Gottwald, Klement, 113 Gramm, Phil, 246 Granovsky, Alexander, 54 Grava, Uldis, 138, 141 Greece, 32, 76, 159 Grew, Joseph C., 70, 138, 169, 215, 237 Groueff, Stephane, 152, 162 GRU, also Soviet military intelligence, 62 gulag, 56, 63, 100 Hairenik Weekly, 67, 73–79, 81, 82 Hall, Gus, 14 Hanoi, 238 Hanusiak, Michael, 61 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, 192 Havana, 233–34, 237–45 Haymarket Riot, 7 Hāzners, Vilis, 129, 132, 140 Helms, Jesse, 101, 246 Helms-Burton Act, 246 Helsinki Accords, 13, 134 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 9, 27–28, 49–50, 52, 74, 77, 111 Hmong, 13, 191, 211–28 homeland politics, 15 insurgency, 221–22 refugee resettlement, 217 resistance or freedom fighters, 219, 221, 223 Veteran Naturalization Act, 13

270

Index

Holocaust, 11, 15–16, 111, 134–36, 141 Baltic, 134 Jewish, 11, 21n40, 111, 135–36, 141 Holodomor, also the Great Famine, 44, 48, 51 Holy See at Cilicia, 80 Holy See at Echmiadzin, 71, 80–81 homeland, 2–12, 15–16, 46, 67, 72–73, 75, 77, 83, 87, 89–91, 93–94, 98–103, 110, 129, 158, 161, 189, 195–97, 205, 207, 216, 218, 227–28, 239, 255–58 Hoover, Edgar J., 48, 53, 92, 95, 96, 99 Horthy, Miklós, 88, 90, 93, 95 regime, 88, 90 Houdek, Vladimir, 116 Hour, The, 52–53, 61 House of Representatives. See U.S. House of Representatives House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). See U.S. House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Hrushevsky, Michael, 44 human rights, 58, 97, 100, 114, 132–33, 199–91, 200–201, 203–8, 213, 216–17, 220, 226–27, 240–42, 244 Humanitarian Operation Program, 192 Humphrey, Hubert, 37, 143 Hunchak Party, 69, 74 Hungarian, 3, 34, 63, 87, 89–104, 111, 120, 122, 146, 168, 174 Americans, 95, 97–98 Communist Party, 89 Communists, 3, 87, 89–91, 95, 98, 100l, 102, 111 émigrés, 3, 87, 90–96, 98, 103–4, 120, 146, 168, 174, 176 Jews, 3, 87, 90–92, 95, 111 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 100 Peasants Party, 31 Provisional Government, 29–30, 87–89

Popular Front, 89 Relief Movement, 96 Smallholders’ Party, 88–89, 91, 94–95, 106n30 Socialist Movement, 96, 101 Socialist Party, 96 Hungarian National Council (HNC), 98–101, 103 Hungary, 44, 81, 87–104, 119–20, 156, 168, 170–72, 174–75 identity, 16, 44–46, 62, 70, 73, 76, 94, 128–29, 133, 207, 235–36, 256–58 ideological diversion, 153, 156, 160 ideology/ideologies, 1, 4, 8, 15, 46, 61, 67, 76, 83, 112, 127, 134, 151–52, 154, 162, 211, 214–16, 228 immigrants, 2, 4, 7–11, 13, 25, 45–46, 56–57, 62, 67–68, 70–71, 82–83, 91–93, 96–99, 110, 113–14, 117, 124, 129, 152, 168, 176, 192, 194, 207, 234, 255–58 immigration, 3, 11–12, 15–16, 25, 33, 35, 68, 90–92, 110, 113–14, 152–53, 191–92, 194, 225, 227, 242 laws, 11–12, 114, 227 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 191 Ingr, Sergej, 121–22 intellectuals, 1, 16, 109, 123, 152–53, 157 intelligence, 13–16, 52, 62, 101, 117, 121–24, 138, 153, 158–61, 168–69, 212, 220 Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, 93 International Human Rights Watch, 227 International Refugee Organization, 92 International Workers’ Order (IWO), 47 Iranian hostage crisis, 240

Index

Ireland, 2–3 Irish, 2–3, 36 Irish Americans, 2–3 Iron Curtain, 57, 76, 78, 81, 90, 93, 130, 139–40, 167, 169–70, 172 Jack, Harrison Ulrich, 221, 223 Japan, 26 Jewish, 3, 5, 7, 11, 90–91, 95 Jews, 3, 61, 87, 90–92, 95, 111, 134 John Paul II, Pope, 3 Johnson, Lyndon B., 77, 233, 236, 237 Joint Terrorism Task Force, 221 Juventud Cubana, 237 Kahn, Albert E., 52–53, 61 Katek, Charles, 121–22 Katyn Forest, also Katyn Massacre, 12–13, 28, 34 Kean, Thomas H., 135 Kennan, George F., 32, 169 Kennedy, John F., 34–36, 219, 233–35, 237 Kersten, Charles J., 93, 119 KGB, 1, 52, 60–62 Khai, Phan Van, 202–3 Khmer, 191 Khrushchev, Nikita, 234–35 Kissinger, Henry, 62, 239 Koichev, Kalin, 154 Komunistychnyi Svit, 47 Konovalets, Evhen, 49, 53, 56 Korboński, Stefan, 168, 171–73, 178 Korsts, Voldemārs, 131, 143–44 Korvig, Bennett, 171 Kremlin. See also Moscow, 158, 170 Krzycki, Leon, 28 Kun, Béla, 87–88, 91 labor, 7–9, 12, 16, 20n25, 26, 38–39n9, 44, 47, 55, 90–91, 96, 114–15, 120–21, 134, 175, 192, 200 activists, 12 historians, 12 movement, 9, 12, 16, 35

271

Labor Service Company Czechoslovakian, 121 Lair, Bill, 222 Lam, Andrew, 199, 201, 205–6 Lamberts, Andris A., 141 Lane, Arthur Bliss, 5, 10, 32, 36, 167–69 Lange, Oskar, 14, 28 Lao, 191, 211–13, 216–18, 220–21, 223–25, 227 Communist Party, 212, 218 Human Rights Council, 216–17 Issara (Free Lao), 212 monarchy, 218 Patriotic Front, 212 People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR), 213, 214, 225, 227 People’s Movement for Democracy, 220 People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP), 213, 218 United Lao Council for Peace, Freedom and Reconstruction (ULCPFR), 220 United Lao National Liberation Front (ULNLF), also Neo Hom, 218 Veterans of America, 225, 231n52 Lao-Hmong American Coalition, 225 Laos, 10, 13, 211–25, 224–28 Latvia, 8–9, 15, 127, 134–38, 140, 145–46, 169, 171–72, 175 Latvian, 15, 127–46, 172, 174 Communists, 129–31, 133–34, 140 émigré(s), 127–30, 134, 136–46, 172, 174 refugees, 15, 127, 138, 140, 145–46, 169, 172 SSR, 137–38 Latvian Republican Federation, 144 Latvians, 127–29, 132–40, 142–44, 146 Leich, John F. Lenin, Vladimir, 169–70, 172–73 Lenin, Vladimir, 44

272

Index

Lettrich, Joseph, 115, 117, 172 liberation doctrine, 170 Liberation Front, 57, 59, 218 Lithuania, 8–9, 127, 135, 145, 169, 171–72, 175 Little Saigon, 194–99, 203 Litvinov, Maxim, 48, 51 Lo clan, 212 Lo, Faydang, 212 Lo, Sia, 226 London, 14, 27–28, 30–32, 79, 111, 117, 121, 156, 159, 161–62, 168, 170, 173, 175, 233, 235, 237, 243, 247 Los Angeles Times, 196–97 Lublin committee, 27, 30 Lugósi, Béla, 93 Ly clan, 212 Lyfoung, Touby, 212 Macedonia, 152 Mack amendment, 244 Magyars. See also Hungary, 88–93, 95–101, 103 Magyar Awakening, 95 Mariel boatlift, 240 market economy, 161 Markov, Georgi, 156, 161 Marshall, George, 31, 52, 63, 116 Marxism, 79, 132 Marxist, 214, 243 Mas Canosa, Jorge, 237, 239, 242–46 Masaryk, Tomas Garrigue, 110–11, 117, 124 Māsēns, Vilis, 137, 172 Matuszewski, Ignacy, 28, 31 Mazewski, Aloysius, 35–36 McCarthy, Joseph, 130, 142 McCarthyism. See McCarthy, Joseph Melnyk, Andrew, 56 Mendendez, Bob, 245 Miami, Dade County, 16, 233–39, 241–42, 244–45, 247 Miami Herald, 239, 242 Miami Orange Bowl, 233

Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw, 29, 32–33, 168 Mindszenty, Josef Cardinal, 11, 100 Minh, Ho Chi, 197–99, 203 Mirror-Spectator, 67, 73–77, 79–82 Molot, 47 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 142 Moravec, Frantisek, 121–22 Moravian(s), 110–11 Moscow, 1, 5, 29, 31–32, 34, 43–44, 57, 60, 63, 88–90, 93, 101, 111, 116, 121, 146, 158, 168–69 Moua, Mee, 226–27 Munich, 57, 120 Muscovites, 88–89, 95, 100, 104 Nagy, Ferenc, 89, 94, 99, 103 Nagy, Imre, 101–2 National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), 94–95, 99, 118, 169–70, 176 divisions of, 170 National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (KNAPP), 26–28, 33, 38n5 National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee, 226 nationalism, 3, 8, 43, 49–50, 63, 70, 74, 76–77, 136, 162, 212, 256 émigré, 3, 136, 162, 256 nationalist, 44, 47, 49–50, 56–57, 61, 88, 112, 132, 135, 138, 140, 146, 151–52, 171, 228 Nationalities Division of the Republican National Committee, 143 national liberation, 77, 129, 133, 138, 152, 155, 218 National Republican Nationalities Groups’ Council, 144 National Social Party, in Czechoslovakia, 109, 115, 119 nation’s rights, 133, 136 NATO, 16 Nazi, 9, 15, 52–56, 60–61, 74, 78, 93, 100, 111, 121, 125, 127, 134–36, 141, 167, 171, 174

Index

Germany, 15, 52–53, 55, 111, 121 war criminals, 60–61, 135 Nazism, 4–5, 52, 61, 79, 129, 134–36 Nazi-Soviet, 9, 15, 27 alliance, 9 pact, 9 Neo Hom, 218–19, 225 Neo Lao Hak Sat, also Lao Patriotic Front (NLHS), 212 Neo Lao Issara (Free Lao Front), 212 Nersoyan, Tiran, 79 New Course, in Hungary, 102 New Deal, 9–10, 35 New Right, 61, 240 New York, also New York City, 1, 5, 7, 12, 14–16, 26–29, 32–37, 44–45, 48, 50–51, 53, 55–58, 61, 63, 68, 70, 72, 74–75, 77–78, 80–81, 90, 92, 95–97, 99–103, 113, 117, 120, 128, 130, 136, 143, 146, 152, 155, 167–68, 170, 169–74, 176, 178–79, 196, 206–7, 220, 227, 235, 240, 243 New York Times, 35, 55, 65–66n68, 78, 167, 227 Nguoi Viet 2 News, 194 Nguoi Viet Daily News, 202, 206 Nguyen, Minh Triet, 200, 203–4 Nicaraguan Sandinistas, 241 Nixon, Richard M., 34–35, 37, 58, 141, 155, 238–39 NKVD (Soviet Secret Service), 9, 48, 52, 62 Non-Quota Act, 92 North Viet Nam, 190 Nubar, Boghos, 69–70 Office of Special Investigations (OSI), 60, 135, 141 Office of Strategic Services, 121 Omega, 7, 240 Operation Mongoose squadron, 236 Operation New Life, 191 Orange County Register, 206 Orange County Weekly, 196

273

ORDEN, 47 Orderly Departure Program (ODP), 192 Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU), 49–54, 56–57 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), 45, 49–50, 53, 56–57, 61 Ottoman, 68–70, 152 Empire, 68–69, 152 government, 70 OUN(B), 56–57, 61 OUN(M), 56 Pao, Vang, 212, 216, 218–23, 225–26 Papánek, Jan, 114, 116 Pārups, Ēriks, 136 Pathet Lao, also Lao Communist Party, 212, 216 Patriot Act, 227 patriotism, 2–4, 9, 76–77, 158, 174 peaceful coexistence, 160, 176, 178 Pearl Harbor, 26, 28 People’s Democratic Party, 201 People’s Party, in Czechoslovakia, 109, 114–15 Pérez, Louis A., Jr., 236, 246 Peroutka, Ferdinand, 115, 118, 124 Petlura, Simon, 44 Peyer, Károly, 89, 94, 96, 101 Pham, Tap Van, 196, 201 Píka, Heliodor, 121 PM, 52 Poland, 4–5, 8–9, 13–14, 26–37, 44–45, 81, 102, 120, 167–68, 170–73, 175, 178 Poles, 3, 5, 11, 25, 29, 47, 61, 102, 173 policy of non-recognition, 130 Polish, 2–3, 5–6, 8–16, 25–37, 44–45, 111, 143, 145, 170–71, 173 Americans, 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 13–14, 25–37, 145 American Congress (PAC), 14, 25–37, 241, 244 Communist regime, 11, 33 Council of Unity, 173

274

Index

Polish (continued) exile government, 27–28, 31–32 National Alliance, 26, 27, 31, 33 Peasants Party (PSL), 31–33 Provisional Council of National Unity, 173 political prisoners, 102, 133, 240 Polonia, 6, 14, 25–28, 32–34, 36 Pope John Paul II. See John Paul II Powers, Richard Gid, 1, 17n5 Poznan riots, 176 Prague, 115, 116, 118, 121, 124, 160 Prchala, Lev, 111, 115 Protectorate of Czech and Moravian Lands, 111 Prussia, 26 Pucinski, Roman, 34 Pulaski, Casimir, 29 radical(s), 4, 7–8, 29, 102, 111–12, 142, 157, 238–39, 246 radicalism, 7–8 Radio Free Europe (RFE), 2, 33, 93, 119–20, 124, 144–45, 156, 161–62, 170–71, 178, 242 Radio Liberty, 2, 145, 120, 178, 242 Radio Martí, 242, 244 Rákosi, Matyás, 89–90, 100, 102 Raykin, Spas, 159 Reagan, Ronald, 13, 35, 37, 61–62, 131, 140, 144, 145, 155, 177, 221, 241–44 Real ID Act, 227–28 RECE, 237 Red Army, also Soviet army, 8, 27, 43, 70, 88–89, 92, 127, 152 reeducation camps, 192–93, 206, 216 Reformed Hunchak Party, 69 Refugee Act of 1980, 192 refugees, 2–3, 6–7, 10–11, 13–15, 55–56, 68, 75, 91–93, 97, 99–100, 102–4, 110–11, 113–15, 117–18, 123, 127–28, 130, 137–40, 143–46, 152, 159–60, 168–69, 172, 174, 190–95,

207–8, 213, 217, 225–28, 235, 237, 242, 246, 255–58 Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, 45 Republican, also GOP, 5, 9, 10, 13, 29, 32–36, 51, 58, 61, 97, 119, 142–44, 201–3, 224, 238, 245–46 Heritage Groups Council, 58 National Committee, 58, 61, 143 Party, 5, 9–10, 29, 32, 35–36, 61, 119, 142–44, 224, 238 resettlement, 128, 191–92, 194, 213, 217, 222, 225, 227 resistance, 44–45, 76–78, 90, 111, 121–22, 125, 128, 135, 159, 161, 167–68, 171, 208, 212–13, 219, 221, 223 Revolution, 8, 10, 46, 82, 88, 102, 118, 120, 142, 146, 156, 213, 216, 235, 237, 240 Bolshevik, 8, 46, 82, 142 Russian, 8, 46, 88, 102 Revyuk, Emil, 51, 54 Rivas, Michael Germinal, 240 Robitnyk, 47 Rogers, William D., 239 Romania, 44–45, 120, 171, 175 Romanians, 10, 173 Roosevelt, Franklin D., (FDR), 9, 13, 27–30, 32–35, 48, 55 administration, 9, 13, 32, 55 Roosevelt-Litvinov Accord, 48 Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana, 245 Royal Lao Army (RLA), 212 Royal Lao Government (RLG), 212 Rozmarek, Charles, 26, 28–29, 31–35 Russia, 26, 28, 30, 32, 58, 76, 88, 110–11, 121, 133, 168, 171 Russian(s), 1, 8, 14, 32, 37, 43–44, 46, 57, 76, 88, 102, 110, 131–33, 136, 140, 157 nationalist chauvinism, 132 Russification, 44, 129, 132–33, 140 Russo-Czechoslovak Mutual Assistance Pact, 110 Rusyn, also Ruthenian, 45 identity, 45

Index

Ryan, Allan, 60–61 Saigon, 190–91, 194–99, 203, 205 satellite countries, 6, 171 Savimbi, Jonas, 243 Sayers, Michael, 52–53 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 202 Scowcroft, Brent, 58, 62–63 Second Fight Movement, 111 Second Indochina War, 211–12 self-determination, 46, 102, 112, 139, 167, 218, 228 Shukhevych, Yuri, 13 Shumeyko, Stephen, 55 Sich, also United Hetman Organization (UHO), 47–53 Sichovi Visti, 47 Sidor, Karol, 112 Sikorski, Wladyslaw, 28 Skoropadsky, Pavlo, 44, 47, 49 Slavic, 10, 12, 28, 110 Slavic Americans, 12,28 Slovak(s), 9, 109–20, 124–25, 173 Action Committee, 112 Democratic Party, 10 exiles, 111–14, 117, 119–20, 124, 173 independence, 110–12, 125, 173 Jews, 111 League, 111–12 Liberation Committee, 112 National Council Abroad, 112 separatism, 112 state, 109–14, 116–17, 124 Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 218 socialists, 7, 50, 79, 91, 103 Sofia, 152–54, 155–61 Sokol, 160 Solakov, Angel, 160 Solidarity, 8, 13–14, 35, 37, 50, 177, 189, 195, 206–7, 237, 246 Sonnenfeldt, Helmut, 62 South Africa, 243 South Viet Nam, 190, 196, 203

275

Soviet, 1–3, 6, 8–15, 26–34, 36–37, 43–44, 47–48, 50–56, 58, 60–63, 62, 67–68, 70–73, 75–83, 87–89, 91–94, 96, 100, 102, 104, 110–12, 116, 120, 122, 127–35, 137–40, 142–43, 145–46, 151–52, 154–60, 162, 167–72, 174, 176, 178–79, 240–41, 243–44, 257 agents, 14–15, 55, 62, 138, 159, 174 army also Red Army, 8, 27, 43, 70, 88–89, 92, 127, 152 authorities, 1, 3, 13–14, 52, 111, 134, 137–38, 151, 156, 159, 168 bloc, 62, 93, 156, 159, 162, 167, 170 colonialism, 132 Communism, 1–3, 8–12, 14, 36–37, 62, 71, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 89, 91, 110, 112, 127, 129, 131–35, 138, 140, 143, 145–46, 154, 156–57, 162, 168, 174, 179, 257 countries, 2, 6, 9–10, 48, 76, 127–30, 132–34, 140, 142, 159–60, 167, 169, 171, 179, 257 documents, 1, 15, 92, 133–34, 157, 159, 171 domination, 3, 6, 8, 32–34, 36–37, 44, 93, 129, 131–32, 143, 157, 172 empire, 43, 62, 68–69, 76, 102, 111, 131, 152, 178 imperialism, 8–9, 12, 54, 57, 63, 68, 73, 81, 83, 89, 132, 140, 160 invasion, 2, 9, 15, 25, 28, 72, 76–77, 111, 131, 233, 235–37, 240–41 military intelligence, 62 propaganda, 9, 11, 33, 51, 77, 100, 129–30, 137–38, 158–60, 169–71, 257 regime, 6, 11, 14–15, 31–34, 62, 70–71, 73, 83, 87–88, 91, 102, 120, 127, 129, 134, 137, 140, 142, 151–52, 154, 156, 161–62, 168, 244

276

Index

Soviet (continued) Russia, 26, 28, 30, 32, 58, 76, 88, 110–11, 133, 168, 171 security services, 6, 14, 153 Union, 1, 3, 6, 8–11, 26–28, 31–32, 34, 43–44, 47–48, 51–53, 55, 58, 60–62, 68, 76, 78, 82, 89, 96, 102, 116, 120, 122, 128, 130, 132–34, 151–52, 154–58, 160, 167–70, 172, 174, 176, 179, 244, 257 Special Guerilla Units (SGUs), 213, 225 Spilners, Ilgvars, 132, 138–39, 143 Stalin, Joseph Stalin, 6, 9, 27–30, 32–33, 44–45, 48, 52–53, 59, 75, 89, 100–102, 129 Stalinist, 32, 61, 102, 153, 160 Stamboliisky, Aleksandr, 154 Statev, Hristo, 154 Stoyanov, Dimitar, 16 Sudeten Germans, 115 Svoboda, 14, 46, 48, 51–53, 61 Swietlik, Francis X., 27 Taft, Robert, 58 Teheran, 9, 26–30, 33, 35–36, 38–39 Conference, 9 summit, 26–30, 33, 35–36, 38nn3, 4, 39n11 Television Martí, also TV Martí, 243–45 Thailand, 191, 211, 213–14, 217, 225–28 Thao, Choua, 215–17, 221 Third Fight Movement, 117 Thoj, Va-Megn, 226 Thousand-day Republic, also the Republic of Armenia, 68, 71–72 Tildy, Zoltan, 89 totalitarian, 2, 4, 57, 127, 132, 160, 238 totalitarianism, 4, 136, 153, 157, 257 Tourian, Levon, 71–72, 74, 80, 81 Tran, Truong Van, 197–99, 204 Treaty of Sèvres, 70 Treaty of Trianon, 95

Trident, 50, 52 Truman, Harry S., 5, 9–10, 31–34, 55–56, 75–76, 91, 97, 119, 128, 159, 177 administration, 9–10, 31–32, 55, 76 Doctrine, 10, 33, 75 Turkey, 32, 70, 72, 75, 78, 80, 82 Turkish rule, 69, 157 Turks, 69–70, 161 Turnovo Constitution, 154, 162 Tzeghagron, 73–74 Ubriaco, Robert Jr., 10, 33 Ukraine, 3, 8, 43–45, 44–53, 57–59, 62, 178 Famine Commission, 58 Ukrainian, 3, 5, 12–14, 44–53, 57–58, 62, 78, 141, 171–72, 177 Alliance of America, 46 American/s, 3, 5, 12–14, 47–56 American Coordinating Council (UACC), 59 Canadian Congress, 14 Communist Party, 44, 46, 52–53 Congress Committee of America (UCCA), 54–59, 61, 78 Federation of Communist Parties (UFCPA), 47 Federation of Socialist Parties (UFSPA), 46 identity, 44–46, 62 Military Organization (UVO), 45 National Association (UNA), 46–52, 54, 57–61 National Information Service (UNIS), 58 National Republic, 43–45 National Republican Federation, 58 nationalists, 44–45, 49–50, 52–53, 62 Organizations of America (UUOA), 50–51, 54 socialists, 50 Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR), 44–45, 53

Index

Toilers Organization (UUTO), 47 UnitedWorkingmen’s Association (UWA), 46 Ukrainian Weekly, 13, 48, 54, 57, 60, 177 Ukrainski Shchodenni Visti, 47 UNITA, 243 United Auto Workers (UAW), 12 United Nations (UN), 12, 27, 31, 51, 55, 74, 92, 100, 114, 116, 130–33, 137, 141–43, 169, 172, 174–75, 177–78, 192, 213, 226, 242 High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 213 Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 31, 55, 92 United States, also U.S., USA, 1–7, 9–10, 12–16, 25–35, 37, 43, 46–48, 50–58, 62, 60, 62, 67–68, 70, 75–76, 80–81, 88–104, 110–16, 118–22, 124–25, 128–33, 135–36, 138–46, 151–53, 155–57, 159–60, 162–63, 168–70, 172, 174–79, 190–99, 201–7, 211–13, 215–18, 220–28, 233–37, 239–47, 255–56 Aid for International Development (USAID), 215 Army, 12, 15, 27, 43, 47, 70, 88–89, 92, 111, 120–21, 136, 152, 212, 215, 224, 233, 237 Congress, 6, 12, 14–15, 25–26, 28–29, 28–32, 34, 37, 46, 50, 54–58, 60, 70, 92, 112, 119, 128–30, 141, 160, 176–77, 190, 236–37, 239–46 Congress’ Baltic Committee, 136 Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), 114 Department of Homeland Security, 227 Department of Justice, 53, 60, 92, 227 documents, 1, 15, 133, 159, 191

277

foreign policy, 1, 4–5, 9–10, 12–13, 16, 27, 29–30, 37, 62, 92, 119, 130, 140, 145, 157, 170, 175, 213, 218, 223–24, 228, 234, 236, 238, 241–42, 244 government, 4, 10, 14–15, 27–32, 34, 37, 47–48, 57, 60, 62, 70, 75–76, 80–81, 88–96, 99–102, 115–16, 118, 120–22, 130, 139–40, 142, 144–45, 155–57, 159, 162, 168–70, 175–76, 190, 236–37, 240–43, 246 government attitude toward Eastern European émigrés, 168 House of Representatives, 32, 34, 204, 236, 241 House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 143 Policy Planning Staff, 168 president, 9, 13, 26, 28, 31–35, 37, 48, 51, 54–58, 62, 89, 92, 95, 97–99, 111, 119, 128, 141, 145, 169, 172, 176–78, 197, 203, 212, 233, 235–36, 240, 242–43, 245–46 Senate, 13, 32, 70, 78, 97, 141, 201, 237, 242, 244 Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, 97 State Department, 15, 51, 62, 90, 96, 155–56, 179, 201, 225–26, 240, 245 White House, 12, 29, 54, 58–59, 62–63, 177, 203, 235, 245 USAID, 215 Vajda, Paul, 178 Valchev, Dimitar, 154 Vámbéry, Rusztem, 96, 98 Varga, Béla, 94–95, 99 Vatican, 109, 112 Venona, 1, 14–15, 52, 55 Versailles, 29, 44, 111 Vertanes, Charles A., 75, 79 Viet Cong, 190, 196

278

Index

Viet Kieu, 196, 205 Viet Nam, 189–90, 192–8 elections of 1956, 190 North, 190 South, 190, 196, 203 Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2007 Vietnam Reform Party, 197 Vietnam War, also Viet Nam War, 131, 142, 189–90, 194–95, 198, 206–7, 222, 225 veterans of, 12, 143, 195, 233 Vietnamese, 3, 6, 189–88, 215–16, 218 aggression, 216, 218 American(s), 3, 189, 193–8 imperialism, 215 nationalists, 190 supported Laotians, 216 Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation, 197 Viet Tân, also National United Front for the Freedom of Vietnam, 197 Voice of America (VOA), 120 Voloshyn, August, 45 Vue, Chay Pa, 212 Waffen-SS, 135 Walesa, Lech, 37 Warsaw Uprising, 29 Washington, D.C., 26, 51, 54, 57–58, 60, 92, 97, 117–18, 139, 178, 193, 225, 234, 242 Wat Tham Krabok, 225–26 Watergate, 239 West, 4, 6, 11, 15, 44, 62, 81, 87, 90–91, 98, 104, 113–17, 119–21, 123, 127, 134, 139–40, 142, 152, 153, 159–61, 168, 170–71, 173, 179, 221, 234

Western, 4, 16, 31, 45, 51, 55, 69, 75, 87, 100, 104, 110, 113, 115–17, 123, 128–29, 131, 134–35, 140, 142, 153, 155–56, 158–61, 168, 170, 174, 214, 226, 241–42, 244–46 White Terror, 91, 95 Wilson, Woodrow, 70, 75, 93,146 World Association of the Baltics, 133 World Congress of Free Ukrainians (WCFU), 57, 59 World Congress of Slovaks, 112 World Federation of Free Latvians, 132–33, 139 World Federation of Hungarian Veterans (MHBK), 101 World Trade Organization, 200, 203–4 World War I, 7–8, 26, 43, 68–70, 72, 88, 91, 93, 95, 110–12, 117, 121, 167 World War II, 3, 9, 14, 16, 25–26, 28, 35, 45, 74, 87–88, 90–93, 98, 100, 103–4, 109, 111–12, 115, 117, 121, 127–29, 135, 141–42, 151–52, 154, 156–57, 163, 167–69, 171, 174 Xenophobia, 5 Yalta, 2, 9, 29–33, 35, 36, 55, 142 Yang, Michael, 211–12, 221, 223, 226–27 Yao, Lo Blia, 212 Yeltsin, Boris, 34 Yugoslavia, 63, 89, 173 Zenkl, Petr, 115, 117–18, 172 Zhivkov, Todor, 158, 161