Such are the Demands of our Propaganda and our Truth

This article examines the production of historical knowledge by Russians who were displaced from the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Its focus is the followers of Soviet General Andrei Vlasov, who created a ‘Russian Liberation Army’ that served the Nazis during the war, many members of which were captured and punished as traitors by the Soviets after the war. The survivors of the so-called ‘Vlasov Movement’ found refuge in the Cold War West, where they often became active in American-funded institutions for combatting the communist regime. The piece shows how a community of exiles was able to generate and convey its own narrative on the war – one rooted in collective memory of displacement and wartime collaboration – in the United States and West Germany, and to influence popular and scholarly historical discourses on the Second World War in these countries

Aesthetics · Art · Cold war · Economic history · Movement (music · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law