A new book tells the story of the displacement and ultimate resettlement of Russian citizens who were outside the borders of the Soviet Union when World War II ended.

‘Lost Souls’, by Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, examines a seminal period in the history of global migration, which had an impact on later international refugee conventions.

When World War II ended, about ten million people were displaced. A million of them were people which the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were but who were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria.

These ‘displaced persons’ were Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939.

But many, fearing reprisals, imprisonment or worse, refused to go back to the Soviet Union despite its demands.

This triggered one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War.

American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organisations taking care of displaced persons quickly waned after the war.

It was only after the people were recharacterised, not as ‘victims of war and Nazism’ but as ‘victims of Communism’ in 1947 that their fate was settled.

The United States agreed to pay for the mass resettlement of the displaced Russians in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe.

The Soviet Union protested the ‘theft’ of its citizens, but the episode amounted to a geopolitical coup for the US.

The decision by hundreds of thousands of displaced persons to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union.

In Lost Souls, Professor Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive manoeuvrings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.

The book is a fascinating tale of great-power politics. America had become a global superpower buoyed to take a global leadership role by its key part in the allied victory.

Russia is characterised in the book as being full of zealous and dogmatic Stalinists, angry at the damage they had sustained in the war.

The furious commissars demanded the return of all the displaced citizens. At the same time, the allies’ relationship with Stalin was fraying.

The Western powers refused to give in to demands for the return of the displaced, who found themselves in the middle of tectonic geopolitical changes.

Also, the rise of American hegemony needed an enemy to kick it along, and the Soviets were front and centre.

The book evokes obvious comparisons to current approaches to human displacement, especially on the part of the US.

The global responses to recent refugee crisis seem mean and tawdry compared to what happened after WWII.

‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick, New South Books $59.99