Abstract
The activities of East European exiles in the United States during the Cold War, for many years a neglected topic, has recently and rightfully become the object of historical and political research. Estimates of the numbers of refugees and exiles continue to vary widely. The exiles included workers as well as the cultural, scientific, intellectual and political elites of Eastern Europe. Many were determined to contribute towards the difficult task of liberating their homelands from communist rule. To do so, they needed to gain the support of governments willing to back their cause, and most importantly to establish a unifying umbrella organization that would give them greater legitimacy and become a worthy partner for Western nations.
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Notes
J. Robert Wegs and Robert Ladrech, Europe since 1945: A Concise History (Boston: St Martins, 1996), pp. 38–53.
See Martin Conway and José Gotovitch (eds), Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain 1940–45 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001).
See also Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 2001).
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John Radzilowski, “Ethnic Anti-Communism in the United States”, in Ieva Zake (ed.), Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–17.
Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 11–32.
On RFE see Robert Holt, Radio Free Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958);
A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010);
Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 210–13.
On the issue of the control of broadcast content, particularly in relation to Hungary in 1956, see also Anne-Chantal Lepeuple, “Radio Europe libre et le soulèvement hongrois de 1956”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 47 (2000), pp. 177–95.
Richard H. Cummings, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), pp. 6–7.
See Waldo H. Heinrichs Jr, American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1986);
Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 203–7.
See John Gillingham, Coal, Steel and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 241–77.
See also Martin J. Medhurst, “Eisenhower and the Crusade for Freedom: The Rhetorical Origins of a Cold War Campaign”, Presidential Studies Quarterly 27 (Fall 1997), pp. 646–61.
Sara Diamond, The Road to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 41–4.
See Anna Mazurkiewicz, “The Schism within the Polish Delegation to the Assembly of Captive European Nations 1954–1972”, in A. Walaszek and J. Pezda (eds), Polish Diaspora in America and the Wider World, papers from the meeting of the Polish American Historical Association, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Kraków, June 2010, pp. 73–108.
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Ieva Zake, American Latvians: Politics of a Refugee Community (New Jersey: Transaction, 2010), pp. 77–9.
Peter Gatrell, Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees 1956–1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 32–4.
Darren G. Lilleker, Against the Cold War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 109–37.
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© 2014 Martin Nekola
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Nekola, M. (2014). The Assembly of Captive European Nations: A Transnational Organization and Tool of Anti-Communist Propaganda. In: van Dongen, L., Roulin, S., Scott-Smith, G. (eds) Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388803_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388803_7
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