‘Poster children for choosing freedom’ An interview with renowned historian Sheila Fitzpatrick about how Cold War politics helped solve postwar Europe’s refugee crisis
Sheila Fitzpatrick is one of the world’s leading experts on the Soviet period, with more than 60 years of experience researching Stalinism and the history of the USSR and Eastern Europe. Most of her work focuses on everyday life under Communism, as well as the nature of power and repressions in the Soviet Union. In her most recent book, “Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War,” Fitzpatrick chronicles how refugees who refused repatriation to the USSR in the aftermath of World War II found new homes outside Europe. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, the renowned historian reconstructs what life was like in Western camps for “displaced persons” (DPs) and traces the fates of those who managed to emigrate. In an interview with Meduza, Fitzpatrick discusses her new book and explains how Cold War politics helped solve postwar Europe’s refugee crisis.
This interview was originally published in Russian on May 22, 2025. The following English version has been edited and abridged for length and clarity.
In the aftermath of World War II, approximately one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were scattered across Europe. Having found themselves outside the USSR’s newly expanded borders, many of these “displaced persons” (DPs) refused to repatriate, often for fear of political repression by the Soviet regime.
Among the displaced were prewar Soviet citizens, those left stateless after the Russian Empire’s collapse in 1917, and people from territories that had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union during the war, including the Baltic states and parts of present-day western Ukraine.
In the years immediately after the war, Western countries acquiesced to the Soviet Union’s demands and worked to forcibly return Soviet citizens as part of what was known as Operation Keelhaul. But as the Cold War gathered pace, the U.S. not only changed its stance on Soviet DPs but also funded mass resettlement efforts.
— Your husband, the late physicist Michael Danos, was a displaced person from Riga. In the book, you describe reading his letters to his mother, where they discussed their plans to emigrate. How typical was his story compared to those of other refugees?
— I think he had an easier time than many, which is not to say it was easy. Being displaced is traumatic for anybody. But it was easier for him because he was young, healthy, spoke good German, and he was quite educated.
He had been going to university in Riga, and that was interrupted. When he registered as a DP with the UNRRA [the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration], he was able to go back to university and finish his engineering degree in Hanover. Then, he went on to do a PhD in Heidelberg. These places were really good in his area of physics, so he was really lucky.
When he finished the PhD at the end of 1951, he was able to be resettled by the IRO [the International Refugee Organization] in the United States. His mother had gone [to the U.S.] the year before him. She also knew German, and they both had contacts in Europe, so their family had quite a lot of cultural capital. That would not have been the case for everybody by any means.
— Can you describe a typical refugee camp in postwar Europe?
— In the very first months after the end of the war, DPs in Europe were living in all kinds of conditions. Sometimes they were even in former [Nazi] concentration camps, behind barbed wire. But that’s absolutely not typical in terms of what emerged as the UNRRA took over [assisting DPs].
Registered DPs lived in pre-built housing with running water and heating, often barracks, schools, or churches, or sometimes private homes that had been requisitioned from the Germans. It was quite a comfortable existence. These camps provided the necessities of life, but also with a bit more than that.
DPs had the opportunity to work, and it didn’t have to be in the camps. It might have meant paid work for one of the refugee organizations (including the UNRRA) or for one of the [Allied] occupation forces. Or it could have meant black market work, although nobody liked to remark on that.
Medical care was provided, especially for single mothers and children, of whom there were many among the displaced. The camps set up schools, though older children could also go to German schools. And then there were lots of activities, [like] sports teams, drama groups, and choirs. Sometimes, [when reading their] memoirs, you can hardly believe what a good time DPs had [in the camps]. And I think the reason for that is that it was often an easier life than the one they immediately encountered after resettlement, which was quite tough.
— How did being seen as “victims of Communism” rather than “victims of Nazism” help postwar refugees?
— I think the DPs got very lucky because of the Cold War. Initially, the official [definition] of a DP was a victim of war and fascism. In other words, somebody who had been displaced because of the war, which was taken to be the fault of Nazi Germany.
However, many of the DPs were people who didn’t want to go back to their countries. And because their countries were mainly Communist or becoming Communist — in other words, the Soviet Union or [countries in] Eastern Europe — their preferred definition of themselves was as “victims of Communism.” [That’s how] they saw and talked about themselves. Having found themselves in Europe, they didn’t want to go back to their native countries because, as they put it, they did not like the political regime.
Now, [this is where] the Cold War comes in. For these DPs to have somewhere permanent to live, first you need to find places to send them, and then somebody needs to pay [for resettlement]. The decision was [ultimately] to send them outside [of Europe], and the U.S. came up with the money — not just for the resettlement of DPs in the U.S., but they also paid for [the UNRRA], the organization that resettled [people elsewhere].
My argument is that the reason the U.S. was prepared to foot the bill for this large and successful operation is because by 1947, [the Americans had] entered the period of the Cold War, which was (among other things) a propaganda competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. From the U.S. point of view, DPs and defectors were the poster children for “choosing freedom over totalitarian Communism.” In other words, the propaganda advantages were very great for the Americans.
The Soviet Union strongly objected to the notion that their people should be accepted as displaced persons liable for resettlement. They saw the whole thing as a capitalist bid to get cheap labour, and they described it in terms of stealing their citizens. The Soviet Union was very, very upset about not being able to get those people back, and it was one of the contributing factors in the breakup of the wartime alliance.
— The countries receiving refugees prioritized those with manual-labor skills, and so intellectuals often pretended to be workers in order to be admitted. Were they able to succeed professionally?
— Let me give you the example of Australia, which only wanted blue-collar workers. The very first boat of DPs was all Latvians, and they had all signed up identifying themselves as farm laborers, construction workers, or domestic servants, if they were women. But when the boat arrived and the Australian immigration [officials] started to interview people, [they found out] that many of these people were professors of theology, former journalists, children of diplomats — in other words [members of the] intelligentsia who had simply misstated their occupations in order to get on the list.
Australia had a two-year manual labor requirement, and you had to work a job the government gave you. So for two years, [DPs] had to forget about whatever it was they wanted to be. It was tough. Those looking to rejoin the intelligentsia had to think about their children, not themselves. The children [of DPs] could usually get into university in Australia and re-establish themselves there. But the parents usually worked a lower-status job their whole lives.
— Many ethnic groups faced problems with resettlement due to racist immigration policies. How did “whiteness” influence how DPs were treated?
— Soviet DPs who were not classified as “European” or “white” faced problems, [including] Buryats, Bashkirs, and people from the eastern part of the country. Australia had a whites-only immigration policy, and I think they didn’t really realize this was a problem. The [degree of] ignorance about the Soviet Union was very great.
Australia took the second largest [number of DPs] after the United States, but let in very few [refugees from] Turkic and Mongolic [ethnic] groups. They tended to get rejected after a face-to-face interview with Australian immigration officials, who would [deem them] unsuitable for some other reason. We know this from interviews with these immigration officials [that were conducted] later on.
In the case of the United States, this question came up with regard to the Kalmyks. At first, individual Kalmyks argued that they ought to be allowed in because they had two Russian grandfathers, or something like that, and Russian counts as European. But then American lawyers developed another argument, which [claimed] that there’s a predisposition towards democracy in Kalmyk history and culture, which made them essentially European. It was an incredible argument but a [U.S.] court accepted it. So, “whiteness” or being able to label yourself as on the side of democracy and against totalitarianism was important.
— After World War II, influential human rights organizations in the United States fought anti-Semitism and helped Jewish refugees settle. Did similar organizations operate in other countries?
— The Jewish story is a separate and complicated one. The countries of resettlement were allowed to name their preferences with regard to nationality and many of them had Jews at the bottom [of their lists]. However, because of behind-the-scenes actions taken by international refugee organizations to frustrate these attempts to keep out Jews, the successful resettlement of Jews — and I’m talking about outside of Palestine/Israel here — was more or less what you would expect proportionately to their representation among DPs.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and HIAS [the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] established a powerful presence in Europe. Their office was very efficient: it was well staffed, the people had the language [skills], and they established good communication with the International Refugee Organization, which worked with them on successfully solving particular problems related to resettling Jews.
This was before human rights groups became an important feature of the landscape, but there were a variety of interest groups involved in migration questions. I think that in all the countries of resettlement, Jewish community groups were actively lobbying and negotiating with governments about Jewish resettlement. In the United States, the same was true of other nationalities. Latvian, Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian organizations lobbied for preferential access for their people in the DP immigration program.
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— In your book, you note that Baltic refugees received special favor, while Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Slavic peoples weren’t as warmly received. What accounts for this preference?
— I can’t recall any country that didn’t state a preference for Baltic people, and the rhetoric surrounding it was that they were educated, clean, well-organized, disciplined, not going to cause trouble, would be easily assimilable, and so on. It’s hard not to read the subtext there as a racial hierarchy not unlike the Nazi one, [which considered] Baltic people not Aryan like Germans but one step below. A country like Australia, for example, explicitly emphasized the fact that people from the Baltics were likely to be blue-eyed and blonde-haired, and that sounds very “Aryan.” And Baltic people also realized that this was a good card for them [to play] and did their best to present themselves accordingly.
With regard to the Slavic people, each country had a different hierarchy, but they tended to come after the Baltic peoples and above the Jews. In Australia, for example, the Poles were somewhere near the bottom of the list for some reason, while Slovenes were rather high up. With regard to Russians, there was a complication because they were Soviet [citizens] and it was already the Cold War. Many people who were in fact Russians from the Soviet Union said they were something else.
Nobody used the term “Soviet” in their list of preferred people for entry. I honestly don’t think that the preferences given within the Slavic peoples had a great deal of significance. But I think we can generally say that they did have a somewhat more difficult passage than Baltic people.
— You also mentioned that postwar refugees often had multiple identities. How did host countries respond to this complexity? Did they understand why, for example, residents of western Ukraine didn’t identify as Soviet citizens?
— That is a very complicated subject, in part because we’re dealing here with claims that often can’t be checked. In terms of claiming multiple identities, there was a tremendous amount of shifting between Russian and Ukrainian identities — and within Ukrainian identity. No matter what part of Ukraine you actually came from, it was advantageous to indicate that you were from west Ukraine, because that solidified your anti-Soviet credentials, which meant you weren’t going to be sent back there.
There were also very many Russian-Ukrainian families and married couples, and often the family itself didn’t initially think of these identities as mutually exclusive. In other words, they thought [of themselves as both] Russian and Ukrainian. [But] over the long haul, I think everybody tended to choose. In the work I’ve done on particular families, [I found that] for the first 10 years or so, they’d say they were Ukrainian while perhaps privately regarding themselves as both Russian and Ukrainian, and over time, one of those identities tended to become dominant.
— How well were postwar refugees able to adapt to life in their new countries? Which destinations proved most welcoming, and where did they face the most difficulties?
— That’s a difficult question to answer. Anecdotally, they felt most at home in countries where there was already an established diaspora, as long as it was not hostile to them. One example is the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. However, there was a bit of a problem because much of the existing Ukrainian diaspora was somewhat socialist and not very sympathetic to what they perceived as anti-Soviet DPs.
In general, I think things were easier for a lot of nationalities if they went to the United States or Canada. In Australia, you didn’t have that supportive [diaspora] community, and on top of that, you had the two years’ manual labor at the beginning. Also, if you came with a wife and child, you were separated during that period. The man was sent off to work and the wife and child [had to live] in a migrant camp in regional Australia, which was generally less comfortable than the camps in Europe.
— At the end of your book, you argue that the postwar displaced persons crisis is a rare example of a refugee crisis that was actually resolved. Are there really no other successful examples in history?
— I tried to come up with [another] one when I was writing the book and I couldn’t. I really think it was a most unusual combination of circumstances [after World War II] that enabled this success. You’ve got to have a country that can afford to pay for [refugee] resettlement and has a political reason to do so. In this case, it was that these people had chosen liberty over Communism, and on top of that they were [mostly] white.
In general, it would be very hard to duplicate the circumstances surrounding the successful resettlement of [postwar] DPs. The case of Ukrainian refugees following Russia’s 2022 invasion is a partial exception. But here again, you have people who are identified with democracy and against some kind of authoritarianism, and who are seen as white, middle-class Europeans. Ukrainians were certainly received with much more warmth than is normally the case with refugees in a number of countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. Of course, they were also [treated differently] for political reasons, because of opposition to the Russian invasion and sympathy with the Ukrainian cause.
[Today,] refugees from Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine are seen and heard on television screens, and this provokes some distress on the part of the viewers. Of course, there are lots of human rights and refugee organizations trying to help, [but] it all achieves very little. This is a very depressing situation, because there is no country or other entity that has the means and the [political] will to resolve the situation. I don’t want to think this, but I feel as though we will continue to see terrible scenes of refugees and the destruction of the places they come from on our televisions and on social media, and we’ll continue to feel very upset about it, but nothing will [be done].
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