Dissertationsprojekt: Imagining Ukraine in Times of Cold War: Ukrainian Exiles and the CIA in the Secret Anti-Soviet Alliance

My project examines the alliances, strategies, and political evolution of the transatlantic Ukrainian exile network centered around the so-called “Prolog” group during the Cold War. The only Ukrainian exile group to secure financial support from the American government, Prolog’s cooperation with the CIA lasted from the early postwar years until the fall of the Soviet Union. This durability provides a useful perspective on the Cold War as a whole, American policy toward Eastern European and, more prominently, Ukrainian exiles, and their ability to wage anti-Soviet psychological warfare and pursue political aspirations. With its operational headquarters in New York, a publishing office in Munich, and a press agency in London, this group carried out a wide range of anti-Soviet measures in support of an independent Ukraine, building transnational alliances with other exiles, most notably with Polish émigré magazine Kultura and later with the Solidarność movement in socialist Poland. I argue that Prolog’s effectiveness can be attributed first and foremost to its political evolution from a far-right to a central-liberal group over this period. It enabled Prolog to shift its focus from ideological party-line to statehood thinking and thereby distinguish itself from other, more ideologically strict or isolated exile nationalist groups. Furthermore, the American government's financial support empowered Prolog’s pluralism and engagement with people, ideas, and texts from across the political spectrum, enabling it to publish a wider variety of authors—liberals, leftists, and rightists—including socialists marginalized in other diaspora organizations.

My project on a transatlantic network of Ukrainian exiles based in Germany and the USA, their alliances with American intelligence services, and cooperation with other Eastern European exiles will provide new perspectives on Cold War history from non-state, transnational, and peripheral perspectives, American–Ukrainian relations, and American policies toward Eastern Europe. Furthermore, studying the legacies of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, and in particular in Ukraine, offers a new perspective on the different trajectories that post-socialist and post-Soviet countries took after 1989/91.