This naturally made the job of crafting a unified anti-Bolshevik movement all the more difficult. And that was not all. Even within the Russian émigré community there were profound political divisions. On the left were the Mensheviks, a small but influential group of social democrats who had fled Russia following 1917 and, after years of wandering the west, had fetched up in New York, where they congregated around the
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the restoration of the Russian monarchy, or Czarists, were a dwindling minority in the émigré population, but there were many others who embraced one form or another of conservative nationalism. The Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz (NTS), or National Union of Labor Solidarists, a well-organized and ideologically aggressive faction of “Great Russians” who flirted with neo-fascism, was increasingly popular. The Vlasovites, veterans of the military units of captured Russian soldiers formed by the Nazis during World War II under the command of the charismatic general Andrei Vlasov, were rather vaguer on questions of doctrine, but were fervently nationalistic and anti-Bolshevik.54 Together, these various groups constituted a political powder keg, with their would-be American patrons unwittingly poised to light the fuse.
Attempts to impose some order on this mélange were already underway by the time that AMCOMLIB appeared on the scene. In January 1951, an OPC officer, former journalist Spencer Williams, rented an inn on the outskirts of the Bavarian town of Füssen to accommodate a meeting of Russian exile leaders. As representatives of the main émigré organizations assembled in an atmosphere of brooding enmity, Williams tactfully retired to the pleasant town of Garmisch, forty miles away.55 The meeting did not go well. Discussions got so badly bogged down over the “unification” issue—how much independence the Russians should concede to the national minorities in the struggle against Bolshevism—that it barely got around to the question of liberation.56 The NTS delegates present, suspecting that the Americans were in cahoots with the Mensheviks, particularly Boris Nicolaevsky, staged a walkout, causing Williams to cancel the inn reservation after just a week. For their part, the Mensheviks, who were already dismayed by the U.S. authorities’ readiness to employ émigrés with fascist pasts, returned to New York feeling that they had been used as American agents. (“I wonder why Americans, every time they undertake something along the Russian line, never fail to call on people who are hopelessly compromised,” Nicolaevsky once remonstrated with an OPC
contact.) In a
David Dallin berated AMCOMLIB for trying “to give orders” and “interfering in the smallest details.”57 Considering that the work of the American Committee was supposed to be secret, it is hardly surprising that Dallin’s outburst earned him the organization’s undying hostility.58
Next it was the turn of AMCOMLIB’s European director, journalist
É M I G R É S
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and publicist Isaac Don Levine, to try persuading the exiles to pull together. His efforts appeared, on the surface at least, more successful. In August 1951, after “considerable back-and-forth negotiations, and some emotion,” the main Russian organizations (which, following some further factional splits, now numbered five) met at Stuttgart and, prodded by Levine, managed to agree to a common policy on the nationalities question.59 (The London
“lifting Kerensky from the dustbin of history.”) A follow-up meeting attended by representatives of six non-Russian émigré groups (the Ukrainians stayed away) took place in a Wiesbaden hotel in November, leading to the formation of a “Coordinating Center of the Anti-Bolshevik Struggle.”
The following summer, Levine even succeeded in persuading the exiles to set up a commission to sponsor the launch of a new radio station.60