The Cold War of Refugees. The forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens from Western Europe

The article aims to explore the long-ignored topic by Italian historiography, of the forced return, after the Second World War, of Soviet military and Rus-sian-Soviet civilian refugees from the West to the Soviet Union, taking into account the published foreign literature and the recently declassified Russian documentation of the Garf, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (for-merly the Nkvd Archive) as well as Italian diplomatic documentation. In We-stern Europe, in the mid-1940s, there were approximately five million Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, civilians deported by the Nazis as forced workers for the Reich, but also those who had left the Ussr of their own free will befo-re the conflict, political refugees or anti-communists. At the Yalta Conferen-ce (February 1945), among other things, the Allies decided to comply with Stalin’s demand to return all prisoners and political refugees to the Soviet Union, regardless of the reasons that had brought them out of Russia, igno-ring their own wishes. On the part of the Kremlin, the forced repatriation of Soviet civilians and military personnel, who had taken refuge in Italy, was used as a quid pro quo to return to Rome the prisoners of war and dozens of civilians arbitrarily detained in the Soviet Union after the end of the conflict.

Keywords: Cold War; Refugees; Soviet Union; Repatriation.

Maria Teresa Giusti, La Guerra fredda dei rifugiati. Il rimpatrio forzato dei cittadini sovietici dall’Europa occidentale in "VENTUNESIMO SECOLO" 57/2025, pp 9-31, DOI: 10.3280/XXI2025-057002