In recent years, Cold War studies have increasingly focused on the movement of people and ideas across the Iron Curtain, bridging the bipolar world order. Lars Fredrik Stöcker’s book is a most welcome contribution to this trend. It paints a vivid picture of Baltic rim migrations during the Cold War and shows how networks were established between Polish and Estonian emigrant communities in Sweden and their home countries. Covering more than half a century, Stöcker spurs deeper reflection about the specificity of the region in the context of the global Cold War and the impact of clandestine networks established in need for information and freedom.
Stöcker’s story begins with the outbreak of the Second World War and leads up to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. He considers how wartime events and 20th-century ideologies influenced the Baltic Sea region, which subsequently became the place of German-Soviet bargain, of German-Soviet rivalry, and a theatre of the Cold War. Together with the author, we observe the emergence of émigré networks and their development throughout the decades of the Cold War. The landmarks of this history are defined by thaws, which offered opportunities for the circulation of people, books, and ideas, and by the heyday of the anti-communist opposition following the establishment of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Similar issues have already been addressed in the Polish-language literature by Paweł Jaworski for the wartime period, and by Arnold Kłonczyński for the postwar period.1 However, Stöcker’s approach of combining Swedish archival documents and literature with selected Polish and Estonian sources is unique. Publishing his findings in English, he provides an outstanding opportunity to integrate regional knowledge with comprehensive scholarship.
The first major question touched on by the book is the scale of migration to the West during and immediately after the war. For the Baltic states, we estimate that approximately one-third of the local population left their home countries. In the case of Poland, the most precise estimate by Janusz Wróbel suggests that approximately 600,000 refugees decided to stay in the West2, around two to three percent of Poland’s pre-war population.
These wartime migrations established the background for further issues related to networking strategies of longtime émigrés like Norbert Żaba, who played an important role in all phases of émigré action towards Poland since World War II.3 After the war, countless émigré organizations emerged – which makes their nomenclature quite tricky, as can be seen when Stöcker mentions the Council of Polish Political Parties (Rada Polskich Stronnictw Politycznych) (e.g. pp. 50, 82) as being established in 1949 in opposition to the London-based Polish government-in-exile. In fact, this formation had been established earlier, whereas in 1949 the Political Council (Rada Polityczna), and a year later the Polish National Democratic Committee (Polski Narodowy Komitet Demokratyczy) appeared. Both organizations were opposed to the government-in-exile and participated in the activities of the American-sponsored Free Europe Committee.
The “American factor” was of utmost importance, particularly in the first postwar decade, and the reconstruction of clandestine networks of communication deserves reference to Cold War specifics such as intelligence operations. For example, clandestine American networks in the region supported escapes to the West as part of a broader policy of rescuing elites.4 Stöcker is aware of the importance of this sphere but limited his research in the archives of the former Communist secret services to operations dedicated to the collection of information (pp. 81–85). This is a reasonable decision, although it should be noted that other research devoted to intelligence-related issues has been growing systematically in recent years.5
One of the assets of Stöcker’s account is his contextualization of émigré activities within Swedish internal and foreign policies. When describing the atrophy of émigré politics in the years of détente, Stöcker brings us to the heart of Swedish discussions around neutrality. While Swedish decision-makers of the détente generation were generally sympathetic to freedom aspirations in the Global South, they perceived anti-communist activities as “interfering in Soviet internal affairs” (p. 124), and the fate of Central Europeans faded away from the main agenda of Swedish politics. Only with the advent of the CSCE conference in Helsinki in 1975 and the rise of the human rights discourse did Polish émigrés like Jakub Święcicki and Maria Borowska gain access to Swedish social democratic decision-makers and the Swedish media.
After the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and following the oppression of dissident circles in the Soviet Union, Sweden once again became the first stop for new waves of émigrés. However, the profile of this emigration was different from the former waves – most of the newcomers were dissidents, Polish Jews, or former officials of the Communist administration or security apparatus. Though only a part of this group engaged in regular politics, it was enough to open a space for new initiatives, like the Aneks journal founded in Uppsala by Eugeniusz Smolar.
The liberalization of the border regime during détente also led to increasing numbers of visitors and tourist exchanges, which opened up new possibilities for smuggling forbidden literature. These new circumstances enabled the circulation of thoughts between oppositionists at home and émigrés in the West, which became crucial for the convergence of ideas and the promotion of human rights. Such exchanges skyrocketed after the emergence of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980. Given its status as a workers’ movement and trade union, Solidarity fostered cooperation with Western trade unions, including those in Sweden. This further intensification of exchanges played a crucial role in mobilizing Western public opinion and raising awareness of Polish affairs, which materialized in the Nobel Prize in Literature for Czesław Miłosz in 1980, and the Nobel Peace Prize for Lech Wałęsa in 1983.6
Another important asset of Stöcker‘s book is its consistently comparative approach. Stöcker shows the similarity of the fate and strategies employed by Polish and Estonian émigrés but also differentiates between the different attitudes and strategies of émigré groups. While some cultivated suspicions against the changes brought by détente, others took advantage of intensifying contacts and exchanging ideas. However, Stöcker notes the discrepancy between the growing activities of Polish émigrés since the 1970s and the lack of a comparable growth of networks in the Estonian case (p. 192). All in all, he concludes that Estonian emigration remained more monolithic than Polish emigration and achieved fewer political and social effects, mainly because it was confronted by a highly paralyzed society in Soviet Estonia until the end of the 1980s.
Though Stöcker does not dare to measure “to what degree the cross-Baltic networks influenced or even accelerated the deconstruction of the communist order” (p. 262), it is difficult to imagine the history of those events without referring to the “Swedish connection” (p. 263). Thanks to Stöcker’s book, we see better the large number of political actions made possible in Sweden, despite its declared neutrality. Subsequent research investigating the Cold War period in the Baltic Sea rim will necessarily follow the threads proposed by Lars Frederik Stöcker. He posed a fundamental question about the role of the region in Cold War history, framed the research, and pushed our knowledge forward by introducing new material, reconstructing new facts, and above all by offering a new interpretation of transnational connections and encounters in the region.
Notes:
1 Paweł Jaworski, Marzyciele i oportuniści. Stosunki polsko-szwedzkie w latach 1939–1945, Warszawa 2009; Arnold Kłonczyński, My w Szwecji nie porastamy mchem. Emigranci z Polski w Szwecji w latach 1945–1980, Gdańsk 2012.
2 This information can be found in Anna Mazurkiewicz (ed.), East Central European Migrations During the Cold War. A Handbook, Berlin 2019.
3 Żaba’s story is reflected in Jaworski’s Marzyciele i oportuniści, which is partly based on an inquiry into Żaba’s private archives, today accessible at Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw.
4 New facts about such operations can be found in Anna Mazurkiewicz, Uchodźcy polityczni z Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej w amerykańskiej polityce zimnowojennej (1948–1954), Warszawa 2016, pp. 148–150.
5 For some references to contacts between the Estonian underground and exile, as well as to their infiltration by Soviet security services, see Rafał Wnuk, Leśni bracia. Podziemie antykomunistyczne na Litwie, Łotwie i w Estonii 1944–1956, Warszawa 2018, pp. 512ff. For outstanding input into our understanding of civilian intelligence in Communist Poland until the early 1960s and its activities against Western countries and émigrés, see Witold Bagieński, Wywiad cywilny Polski Ludowej w latach 1945–1961, vol. 1–2, Warszawa 2017.
6 Some new details about this period of Polish-Swedish contacts can be found in Paweł Jaworski, Most przez Bałtyk. Szwecja wobec “Solidarności” 1980–1982, Warszawa 2017; and in the contributions by Magdalena Wnuk and Arnold Kłonczyński in Patryk Pleskot (ed.), Za naszą i waszą “Solidarność”. Inicjatywy solidarnościowe z udziałem Polonii podejmowane na świecie (1980–1989), vol. 1–2, Warszawa 2018.