The ‘Enemy Within’: Left-wing Soviet Displaced Persons in Australia

Abstract

In the wake of the Second World War, Soviet displaced persons (DPs) from Europe and Russians displaced from China were resettled across Western nations. Their migration coincided with the escalating geopolitical tensions of the early Cold War, which in an Australian context turned migrants of Soviet origin into potential ‘enemy aliens.’ Soviet DPs have generally been considered virulently anti-communist, as indeed many were. Others developed their anti-communist narratives as they negotiated displacement, emphasising beliefs which were expedient and keeping quiet about those that were not. But despite the pressures of the early Cold War, a minority of Soviet DPs actively engaged with left-wing politics after arriving in Australia. These DPs’ political activities resisted the Australian government’s expectations of migration assimilation. Their convictions oriented them back toward a Soviet homeland and resulted in dual loyalties which appeared dangerous in Cold War Australia. Thus, left-wing DPs negotiated not only politics, but state suspicion regarding their loyalties and the surveillance of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). This dissertation reconstructs the political and social experiences of individual Soviet DPs throughout the processes of displacement and migration. Through biography and individual experience, it traces the development of politics across continents and the interactions with intelligence which resulted. I argue that despite the Australian state’s expectation that migrants would assimilate and develop loyalty (solely) to their new home, some DPs maintained their dual loyalties and orientation toward an ‘enemy’ homeland, co-existing with attitudes to Australia that ranged from alienation to acceptance.