Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War - Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick, prominent Australian historian and widely regarded as one of the leading scholars of Soviet and modern Russian history, delivers a lecture titled "Lost Souls" at the 2025 Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia. The presentation took place on July 1, 2025, in Yerevan, as part of the symposium organized by the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. The symposium ran from June 25 to July 13, 2025, across three regional capitals: Batumi, Yerevan, and Tbilisi.

Key Points from the Lecture:

Fitzpatrick examines one of the most successful refugee resettlement programs in history, involving half a million Soviet displaced persons (DPs) in post-WWII Germany who refused repatriation to the USSR. She reveals how these refugees demonstrated remarkable agency within restrictive circumstances, constantly strategizing and repositioning themselves despite appearing as "pawns of fate." The DPs could choose their identities on registration cards, decide when not to accept resettlement offers to undesirable countries, and even reinvent their professional backgrounds—as famously occurred when a shipload of supposed manual laborers transformed into professors and opera singers during their voyage to Australia.
The historian traces the geopolitical transformation of the DP problem from a humanitarian crisis to a Cold War asset. Initially defined as "victims of war and fascism" under UNRRA, the displaced persons were successfully rebranded as "victims of communism" when the American-funded International Refugee Organization (IRO) took over in 1947. This narrative shift proved crucial for securing US Congressional funding, as the DPs became "poster children for the choice of freedom and democracy over totalitarianism" during the early Cold War period.
Fitzpatrick's analysis reveals the racial and national hierarchies that determined resettlement success, with recipient countries showing clear preferences for Baltic peoples over Slavs, and implementing various exclusionary practices against non-Europeans. She concludes by contrasting this successful resolution with the contemporaneous Palestinian refugee crisis—two problems of similar scale, but only one solved due to the DPs' ability to present themselves as white, European, and anti-communist. The lecture demonstrates how changing the narrative around refugees can determine their fate, though Fitzpatrick notes this "recipe" for solving refugee crises isn't universally applicable.