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

A vivid history of how Cold War politics helped solve one of the twentieth century’s biggest refugee crises

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate ...