Thus Ovchinnikov ‘joined the émigré anti-communist political scene with enthusiasm’ in 1955, as historian Benjamin Tromly writes in his careful study of US entanglements with Russian anti-Bolsheviks in the early Cold War. These were years of CIA sponsorship of Russian exiles, promising to help ‘liberate’ Russia from the Soviets. But like many others, Ovchinnikov soon grew disillusioned. An anti-Soviet Russian patriot as well as an anti-Semite, he found the exiles working for the Americans a bunch of ‘Russo-phobes, Jews [and] Soviet spies’. He also became convinced that the years of what he perceived as Jewish rule over Russia were over: in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev had defeated the opposition against him in the Communist Party’s leadership. To Ovchinnikov, a ‘Russian national government’ had now taken over from the Jews, presumably because one of the four main players in the ousted opposition group – Lazar Kaganovich – was known to be Jewish. Thus Ovchinnikov returned to East Berlin in 1958. He was promptly arrested and sentenced to death for treason, eventually commuted to ten years in the Gulag.

Ovchinnikov’s fateful decision took shape in the context of a post-Stalinist campaign to entice émigrés to return to the homeland. All would be forgiven, they were told, if they would surrender themselves. The campaign was moderately successful: between 1954 and 1959, some 10,000 exiles repatriated. We know little about their collective fate, although it does appear that some were allowed to live a quiet life upon their return, under the watchful eyes of the security services.

Ovchinnikov was part of the third wave of Russian emigrants, a mini-wave of postwar defectors. The first group of post-revolutionary émigrés was the largest: probably around two million people (not all of them ethnic Russians). The second wave left during World War II, as prisoners of war (POWs), slave labourers for the Germans, or collaborators with them. Most were returned under forced repatriation agreements reached at Yalta, but some 32,000 Russians (and many other non-Russians) avoided this fate. According to secret Soviet statistics, some 5,700 of them went to Australia.

Despite attempts by leading émigrés and their sponsors in the US government, these groups never coalesced into a unified Russian diaspora, as Tromly shows in detail. Too big were the divisions between them. The White émigrés of the first wave had been formed ideologically and personally during the pre-war political crisis, World War I, revolution, and civil war. They were divided internally between a few liberals and larger numbers of non-Bolshevik socialists, monarchists, and fascists, all struggling to recalibrate their politics to fit the new realities of the emerging Cold War. As is the custom among Russian intellectuals, they formed groups and ‘movements’, parties and journals, only to split and split again, call one another names, and wallow in mutual recriminations and resentments. During World War II, they could become ‘defensists’ who supported Stalin’s regime as the current incarnation of Russian statehood; ‘defeatists’, who hoped that a Soviet surrender would reignite the civil war they had lost; or outright fascists who delusively believed they could build a Russian state in alliance with the Nazis.

This fractious world of émigré politics then confronted the second wave, people who had largely grown up under the Soviets. They included a hard core of active anti-Stalinists who had crossed the frontline to fight with the Nazis against the Bolsheviks; a much larger group of refugees who had collaborated to escape near-certain death in German POW camps; and others washed up outside the Soviet Union who did not dare to return because they assumed it spelled incarceration or worse.

Tromly’s book tells the story of émigré politics in great detail. It will remain an essential guide to the murky world of covert operations, anti-Soviet plots, and propaganda in the early Cold War. The third wave of postwar defectors saw eye to eye neither with the second wavers, who they often thought were traitors to the motherland who should have fought as long as the war raged, nor with the first wavers, whose politics seemed archaic. They returned at a time when life was getting better in the West in more dramatic ways than in the Soviet orbit and when émigré political entrepreneurs and the CIA had established opportunities for employment in the murky world of espionage, psychological warfare, and propaganda. Tromly doubts their political motivations, although he might put the bar rather high in his discussion of opportunism versus ideological conviction.

The book provides a sobering tale for advocates of area studies (of which I am one). Much US engagement with the Russian émigré communities was driven by ‘liberationism’ – ‘an intellectual and political position that advocated US support for the freeing of Russians from communist rule’, as Tromly explains. A central figure in this current of foreign-policy thought was George F. Kennan, author of ‘containment’, head of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State in 1947–50, and later US ambassador to the Soviet Union (1952). Kennan was deeply steeped in the language, culture, and history of Russia, and so were many other State Department Russian hands. They held ‘a conservative and Russophilic reading of Russian history, from which they derived the notion that exiles were not just vital parts of the Russian nation but also harbingers of the country’s non-communist future’.

This vision they had acquired from their language, literature, and history teachers – often Russian émigrés – during three-year stints at European universities, which were to equip them with deep knowledge of the enemy. They returned blinkered not only to the realities of contemporary Soviet life but also to the disconnections between émigrés and the country they claimed to represent. Meanwhile, the funds funnelled into anti-Soviet projects empowered the bolder among the émigrés to lie to their handlers about the supposed resistance cells they were building in the Soviet Union, all the while ‘drink[ing] champagne’ and buying ‘camel’s hair coats and new briefcases’. As one of them summarised the relationship with his American sponsors: ‘God gives, we drink.’