The American state, the fascists and the Soviet Union’s ex-revolutionaries
In
Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia, published by Oxford University Press last year, Benjamin Tromly, a professor of history at University of Puget Sound, explores the relationship between America’s post-war spy agencies and anti-communist Russian and Soviet émigrés dedicated to regime change in the USSR.
His work contains extensive evidence of the machinations of the fascists with which the US government was working and the willingness of former socialists to work alongside the far-right to promote the anti-Soviet cause. Yet the book’s considerable strength is also at times a weakness. Tromly traces in detail the twists and turns in the reactionary, backstabbing, at times buffoonish, politically tragic, and frequently ineffective efforts of émigrés jockeying for money and political influence. But the author does not make sense of all the evidence. In the final analysis, what fused all of the figures and organizations that populate Tromly’s book was their bitter opposition to working class revolution—both that which occurred in Russia in 1917 and those on the post-war horizon.