Sheila Fitzpatrick, <i>Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War</i>

Sheila Fitzpatrick's latest book is a meticulously researched and skillfully written account of the nuances surrounding Soviet displaced persons (DPs) at the end of the Second World War. It focuses predominantly on the DPs whom the Soviet Union claimed as its own. This included not only Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Georgian, Jewish, Tatar, and Kalmyk individuals but also Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, West Ukrainians, and West Belorussians, who had become forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union after 1939 (p. 3). Fitzpatrick explains that the title of the book refers both to the DPs who had become uprooted and displaced from their origins as a result of the war and to the Russian word dusha, which referred to souls as “units of property” at a time when wealth in Russia was still measured in a landowner's number of serfs (p. 5). The great nineteenth-century writer Nikolay Gogol famously used the word this way in the title of his novel Dead Souls.Fitzpatrick stresses that the Soviet “DP question” of the early postwar period was an anomaly in twentieth-century history insofar as it actually became “a success story” (p. x). This paradoxically became possible because major state actors began to embrace a Cold War paradigm that conceptualized the postwar order in terms of bipolar ideological antagonism and competition, as opposed to international cooperation (p. 252). The book's particular strength is that, unlike many historical accounts of the origins of the Cold War, it attributes agency “both collective and individual” to people who were often assumed to have had none (p. 253). The book is only partly a narrative of how governments interacted with each other and newly formed intergovernmental organizations. Being lost, Fitzpatrick contends, was actually a “temporary state” in the post-1945 turmoil. The rival powers began to offer competing “exit paths” over which the DPs themselves had a certain degree of influence (p. 6).The Soviet Union was an active proponent of repatriation, whereas most of its former wartime allies, including the United States, Australia, Israel, and Canada, gradually began to offer resettlement instead. This distinction also mirrored the mandates of the international institutions established to address the DP question in the aftermath of the war. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), established by the wartime Allies in 1943, became one of the first international refugee organizations whose explicit mission was to repatriate DPs. Its successor, the International Refugee Organization of 1947, primarily directed its efforts toward the resettlement of refugees. This was because many Soviet DPs, especially Jews but also “others from Eastern Europe,” did not want to be forced back to their countries of origin (p. 23).Fitzpatrick carefully but explicitly lays out the tensions over resettlement and repatriation that arose from competing interests among DPs, governments, and international bodies. In doing so, she also sheds light on the inherent tensions within many DPs’ understanding of nationality “as a key marker of DP identity” (p. 31). Soviet officials argued that Soviet citizens, including those from territories incorporated into the Soviet Union after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, ought to be repatriated (p. 39). The issue was that the majority of DPs from the Baltic States and parts of Ukraine did not regard themselves as such, and most allied governments objected to forced repatriation (pp. 39, 44). Many cited the threat of punishment through imprisonment or execution; in fact, Fitzpatrick shows that beginning in 1941, the Soviet authorities began systematically inspecting returnees from Germany to identify “traitors, spies, and deserters” (p. 44).She also explains that, over time, it became clear that substantial numbers of DPs were not going to be repatriated. Instead of accepting repatriation, they sought employment (p. 108). The vast majority of Soviet DPs ultimately resettled in the United States, followed by Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Fitzpatrick also extensively documents the resettlement of Soviet DPs to Israel and Latin America, and she explains the decisions of those who chose to remain in Germany or Austria, having lived in one of manifold DP camps there after the war. Throughout the 1940s, the Soviet Union continued to object to the resettlement of Soviet DPs abroad (p. 240). Ultimately, Lost Souls demonstrates that the repatriation of large numbers of Soviet DPs during the early Cold War arose from the growing perception among many Western governments that they were victims not of war per se but of Communism, and their refusal to repatriate implied that they needed to be “rescued from the horrors of communism” (p. 252). The paradox here is that the refusal to repatriate actually constituted a demonstration of agency from below.For more context, it would have been fascinating for the early chapters of the book to explore some of the comparative aspects of displacement after the First and Second World Wars in greater detail to add emphasis to the unique ways in which the resolution of the Soviet DP question of the 1940s and 1950s constituted a success. That being said, Fitzpatrick's detailed analysis of the DP question during the early postwar period is a forceful reminder that this was a time in which identities and interests were in flux at both state and non-state levels. The book constitutes a valuable addition to a growing body of literature on the social history of DPs and the social history of the early Cold War. Her findings derive from extensive archival research based on Russian-, English, French-, and German-language sources as well as public and private repositories. Last, it includes papers of close relatives, who had experienced firsthand what it meant to live as DPs after the end of the Second World War. The narrative strands based on these sources are particularly vivid and truly bring the book to life.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.