The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare: Cold War Organizations Sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe/Free Europe Committee ed. by Katalin Kádár Lynn (review)

Within Cold War studies, emigrants from the Soviet bloc remain an unwritten chapter. This journal has published merely two articles on the topic, one of which is revealing in its title, “Exploiting the Exiles.” Emigrants have been treated as objects in the hands of mightier players regardless of the emigrants’ own agenda. Irrefutably, the exiles are always dependent on the authorities in their new country of residence, but their endurance in the given limits provides an interesting angle to international politics.

In the cultural Cold War, Radio Free Europe (RFE) has gained a mythical reputation, yet little scholarly literature exists on the broadcasts or the organization arranging them. The organization behind the radio station was the Free Europe Committee (FEC). Even the name causes confusion, because it was founded as the Committee for Free Europe in May 1949, but a few weeks later the prefix “National” was added. The name “Free Europe Committee” was adopted in 1954. The organization pretended to be a private enterprise of freedom-loving Americans but was covertly funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. When this was revealed to the public in 1971, the public funding ended. RFE, however, was reorganized and continues to broadcast even today.

Although RFE was the Free Europe Committee’s major venture, the anthology The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare: Cold War Organizations sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe/Free Europe Committee, edited by Katalin Kádár Lynn and published by Helena History Press, focuses on the other activities of the organization. Only the Anti-Communist Minorities in the US: Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, edited by Ieva Zaķe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), takes a similar approach. Just as many authors complain about the lack of research in national historiography, emigrant history usually falls in the dell.

The FEC was organized with a separate committee for each nationality, and the book is similarly constructed. The conditions for Polish, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian groups were similar, so the chapters on these groups naturally resemble one another. They serve as valuable collections of basic information about the national committees and other activities (e.g., providing assistance to refugees), but finding parallels and comparisons is left to the reader. Only the three Baltic committees are introduced together. On the one hand, the Baltic states were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union and thus they were exceptions; on the other hand, the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian committees were as independent as the others. Thus there is little justification to study them together. Conversely, more such transnational research on emigrant politics is needed.

Despite some overlaps, the chapters on the national committees vary insofar as the personalities and situations of those committees differed. Political fractures that had existed prior to exile did not magically disappear after emigration. The Czechoslovak and Romanian committees in particular were constantly being torn apart by internal disagreements, and the Polish representation was eventually divided into two committees.

The Hungarian and Bulgarian committees managed to avoid such schisms but in their cases the questions rises, where did the inevitable clashes, which are characteristic of diaspora politics, take place? For example, Estonian emigrant politicians considered their national committee to be merely a link to the U.S. government rather than representing the Estonian diaspora. Therefore its activities were not contested, but the major Estonian political organs needed 25 years to start even modest cooperation. Undeniably, some political activities of emigrants are outside the scope of the book, and placing the national committees within the context of other diaspora organizations remains a task for future research.

The book also contains essays on the international cooperation with the New York–based Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN) and the Free Europe...