Displaced Comrades - by Ebony Nilsson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, and uncovers how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, proof of capitalist countries' superiority. But for a few, this was not the case. Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East for West, but remained left-wing or pro-Soviet.

Drawing on interviews, government records and surveillance dossiers from multiple continents this book explores how these refugees' ideas took root in new ways. As these radical ideas drew suspicion from western intelligence these everyday lives were put under surveillance, shadowed by the persistent threat of espionage. With unprecented access to intelligence records, Nilsson focuses on how a number of these left-wing refugees adjusted to life in Australia, opening up a previously invisible segment of postwar migration history, and offering a new exploration of life as a Soviet 'enemy alien' in the West.

Review Quotes

"This work represents a solid, stylish academic undertaking, with intricate analysis across a spectrum of elusive and challenging sources ... A timely contribution done with much care on a topic that seems to reinvent itself, just like its characters did." --The Russian Review

About the Author

Ebony Nilsson is a research fellow in the Centre for Refugee, Migration and Humanitarian Studies at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2020.