The Cold War heritage of Russian nationalism

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, left, meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin on 12 June 2007 (President of Russia, CC4.0).

A charismatic entertainment personality wins the US Presidency for the Republicans. Behind him stand a cohort of activists determined to gut the leadership of the intelligence community and replace it with like-minded ideologues. Not Donald Trump in 2024, but Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Reagan’s transition team had a hitlist of 27 senior CIA officers who they labelled as ‘Carter administration proteges who advanced in grade and position during the past four years because of their willingness to support leftist-oriented perceptions and programs.’¹ In the event, incoming CIA director Bill Casey left the agency hierarchy largely in place, but often chose to work around it, notably during the Iran-Contra Affair.

As Ronan Mainprize noted in a recent RUSI Commentary, Trump is ‘not the only president to have a turbulent relationship with the IC.’² Yet while the continuities with past precedents are instructive, the differences are also significant.

Nobody charged Reagan with being a tool of Moscow, in the way many have accused Trump. Perhaps this reflects the radicalisation of the Republican Party in the intervening years. But the change in Moscow may be just as important.

Reagan era Cold Warriors were focused on a clear ideological enemy which no longer exists - Soviet communism. Vladimir Putin’s past as a KGB officer leads many of his critics to read current Russian policy in terms of the Soviet past. Yet other interpretations are possible.

Currents of thoughts that could rival communism inside the Soviet Union were always of interest to the US. From its birth in the late 1940s, the CIA adopted a typically eclectic approach to the search for allies among Soviet exiles.

With the right discredited across Europe by the Second World War, CIA strategists embraced the non-communist left or ‘NCL’ as a key constituency. The Russian version of this was support for the remnants of the Mensheviks, the social democrats who had ruled in Moscow between the February and October revolutions in 1917. In the use. these were gathered around Sol Levitas’ magazine, The New Leader, a key influence on official anti-communism and occasional recipient of CIA funds.³

Despite the Menshevik’s intellectual clout they could not dissuade the CIA from embracing more right-wing groups, including those that had collaborated with the Nazis. One such was Stepan Bandera’s the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), who former leader in Western Ukraine, Mykola Lebed, was brought to New York in 1949.⁴

Although early attempts to use these networks for agent penetration petered out, the CIA’s links with Ukrainian nationalists would continue throughout the Cold War. An internal agency study of the relationship in 1971 concluded ‘No matter what the operational climate at any given time, minority nationalism in the USSR has had and will continue to have operational potential for CIA as long as non-Russian areas are administered from Moscow.’⁵

Since 2014 the history of US support for Ukraine’s Banderist right has received some scrutiny from critics of Western involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Another aspect of the CIA’s approach to Soviet exiles has received less attention in this context - its support for right-wing Russian nationalists.

The most prominent ‘Great Russian’ nationalist group in the CIA orbit was the National Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) whose story had notable parallels with that of the OUN-B. Like the Banderists, the Solidarists threw in their lot with Nazi Germany during the War, and gravitated towards the Western Allies afterwards.⁶ Its relationship with the CIA also had a similar trajectory: early attempts at agent infiltration into the Soviet Union were replaced by a focus on propaganda.⁷

One scholar of the exile movements, Benjamin Tromly, suggests both east and west had reason to exaggerate the strength of the NTS, as the CIA sought to induce paranoia among the Soviets, who in turn sought to promote the evidence of Western links to Nazi collaborators.⁸

One enduring source of NTS influence was its Posev publishing house which printed dissident writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Despite his importance to the human rights movement of the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn was himself a figure of the nationalist right.

This did not seem too important in 1980, when former CIA officer Cord Meyer wrote that ‘one may differ with Solzhenitsyn’s concept of the role the Orthodox Russian Church should play in a post-Marxist Russia, but his soaring talent as a novelist and historian has almost single handedly transformed the views held by many Western intellectuals concerning the origins and development of the Soviet dictatorship.’⁹

However, by the time of Solzheenitsyn’s death in 2008, RFE/RL, the US-backed radio network that had supported many Eastern Bloc exiles reported that he left ‘a complex legacy throughout the former communist bloc.’

While the world widely admired his courage in exposing the atrocities of the Soviet prison camps, many, too, frowned on the ardent nationalism he espoused in his later years. His warm ties with former Russian President Putin, a retired KGB officer, drove a wedge with many of his fellow Soviet-era dissidents. He wrote a long article saying that Russia has to be a separate state, that it has to kick out the other 14 republics. He wrote that the republics were Russia's 'underbelly,' meaning that Russia was feeding them and would prosper if they were discarded.¹⁰

Despite his own Ukrainian heritage on his mother’s side, he ‘called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.’¹¹

Would Solzhenitsyn have supported the invasion of Ukraine? The Spectator’s Robin Ashenden reached a generously ambivalent conclusion on this question in 2014:

Would Solzhenitsyn have supported this war, Mariupol, Izium, Bucha and all? In his heart, he once said, there was ‘no place for a Russo-Ukrainian conflict’, and ‘never…no matter how some hotheads may push us’ would he or his sons fight in one. Yet many who have imbibed his words – including the Russian president – clearly feel very differently.¹²

Other have nevertheless seen Solzhenitsyn’s 1990 book Rebuilding Russia as the blueprint for Putin’s ideas about Ukraine.¹³ The Russian President’s own account of his thinking shows his debt to anti-Soviet Russian nationalism.

In his 2021 essay, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians', Putin wrote of the Russian Civil War period: ‘Nationalists sought to create their own independent states, while leaders of the White movement advocated indivisible Russia. Many of the republics established by the Bolsheviks' supporters did not see themselves outside Russia either. Nevertheless, Bolshevik Party leaders sometimes basically drove them out of Soviet Russia for various reasons.’¹⁴

Putin here drew to a significant degree on the White tradition that was sustained by exiles in the West after the end of the Civil War. One shouldn’t exaggerate the significance of such ideological factors apart from the other structural forces pushing Ukraine and Russia apart. Nevertheless, the Cold War heritage of Russian nationalism should give pause to those who see Russia as the centre of an axis of resistance to the West. To the extent that it exists, that axis might reflect the break-up between the liberal and conservative elements of the West’s anti-Soviet coalition as much as a revival of the anti-imperialist left.

This history also has implications for another ‘resistance’, the liberal resistance to Donald Trump. It may well be the that there is a counterintelligence angle to Trump’s affinity for Russia, but it is as well to remember that the intelligence connection once ran the other way. Much has changed since then, but the mutual affinity of right-wing nationalists in the US and Russia has remained consistent. Intelligence is downstream of politics.

1. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Conservatives Had CIA 'Hit List', Washington Post, 15 March 1987.

2. Ronan Mainprize, Donald Trump’s New Spymasters, RUSI, 25 November 2024.

3. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Harvard University Press, 2008, pp.229-230.

4. Cristian Salazar,Randy Herschaft, Revealed: How the CIA protected Nazi murderers, Independent, 12 December 2020.

5. Cited in Kevin C. Ruffner, ‘Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA's Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists’, in Fifty Years of the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, 1998, p.42, n.49.

6. Benjamin Tromly, Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia, Oxford University Press, 2019, p.42-44.

7. Benjamin Tromly, Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia, Oxford University Press, 2019, p.170.

8. Benjamin Tromly, Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia, Oxford University Press, 2019, p.191.

9. Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, Harper & Row, 1980, pp.393-4.

10. Claire Bigg, Solzhenitsyn Leaves Troubled Legacy Across Former Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 6 August 2008.

11. Claire Bigg, Solzhenitsyn Leaves Troubled Legacy Across Former Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 6 August 2008.

12. Robin Ashenden, Would Solzhenitsyn have supported Putin’s War, Spectator, 27 November 2022.

13. Casey Michel, How Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Became Putin’s Spiritual Guru, Foreign Policy, 7 April 2024.

14. Article by Vladimir Putin ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“, President of Russia, 12 July 2021.