Displaced Comrades

This book explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, uncovering how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, serving as proof of capitalist countries' superiority. However, for a few, this was not the case.

Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East for West but remained left-wing or pro-Soviet. Drawing on interviews, government records, and surveillance dossiers from multiple continents, this book examines how these refugees' ideas took root in new ways. As these radical ideas drew suspicion from Western intelligence, their everyday lives were put under surveillance, shadowed by the persistent threat of espionage.

With unprecedented access to intelligence records, Nilsson focuses on how a number of these left-wing refugees adjusted to life in Australia, opening up a previously invisible segment of postwar migration history. The book offers a new exploration of life as a Soviet 'enemy alien' in the West.