The Captive Nations Lobby
Part One: Nazi Collaborators
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) is well known, but its origins are not. This notorious right-wing organization is the successor to the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC), a relatively obscure outfit that created the VOC in the 1990s and faded into its shadow by the 2000s. In other words, the hidden history of the “Victims of Communism” starts no later than 1959-60 with the creation of “Captive Nations Week” and the NCNC.
This installment of VOC INFO will look at the role of former Nazi collaborators in the broader “Captive Nations Movement” — in particular, the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. “It is with deep sorrow that we mourn the millions of victims of Communism and colonial Russian imperialism,” the “American Friends,” praying for “strength to successfully resist and vanquish Communist Russian imperialism,” addressed “Fellow Americans” in 1959.
Radi Slavoff (1926-2019) was a founding member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and served on its board of trustees through 2010. Several years before the VOC’s creation, Slavoff resigned as the national co-chairman of the GOP’s “Bulgarians for Bush” after journalist Russ Bellant exposed him as the representative in Washington, D.C. of the far-right Bulgarian National Front (BNF), which was established by veterans of a pro-Nazi organization that brandished swastikas and held torchlit marches in 1930s Bulgaria.
The BNF was part of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), “the largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators” according to Inside the League, Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s exposé of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The ABN, insisting that World War III was “inevitable,” represented the “Iron Curtain nations” in the WACL, the Fascist International of the Cold War. WACL historian Keith Allen Dennis contends that the ABN “was as much a hindrance as help in building the League,” but credited it as the “centerpiece” of the “Captive Nations Lobby.”
“Is It Time for an Updated ‘Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations?’” wondered Paul Goble, now a member of the VOC Academic Council, in the title of a blog post that he wrote for the conservative Jamestown Foundation in 2016. The ABN was established in 1946, however traced its origins to a 1943 “Conference of Enslaved Nations of Eastern Europe and Asia” in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The OUN-B, or “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, organized this conclave after launching a fanatical mass murder campaign against Poles and Jews earlier that year with its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
In his biography of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe wrote, “The conference must have been a disaster for the OUN-B, as they destroyed the minutes and afterwards killed several of its delegates.” The ABN was always a Banderite project. According to Rossoliński-Liebe, by the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941,
the OUN-B wanted not only to found a state for the “Ukrainian race” but also to struggle for other “nations of Eastern Europe and Asia enslaved by Moscow, for a new order on the ruins of the Moscow Empire, the USSR.” For this reason, the “Ukrainian National Revolution” was planned to take place not only in the “living space” of the “Ukrainian race.” The OUN-B also wanted to inspire a number of other “nations enslaved by Moscow” and involve them in the “liberation struggle” against the Soviet Union. This was to take place under the slogan: “Freedom for the Nations and the Individual.”
This became the slogan of the ABN, which the OUN-B established in 1946. Early partners included the former Nazi puppet government of Belarus, and remnants of likeminded fascist movements that were defeated in Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia. By 1950, the ABN inherited some former “national committees” from Nazi Germany’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
Bandera’s deputy and successor Yaroslav Stetsko chaired the ABN Central Committee from its inception until his death forty years later. Like Bandera, the ferociously antisemitic Stetsko became an inspiration for neo-Nazis in Ukraine, in particular the 1990s “Social-National Party,” but contrary to internet lore, Stetsko did not co-chair the National Captive Nations Committee.
As told by Stepan Halamay, a leader of the OUN-B network in the United States, “a group of patriots, mostly former leaders of liberation movements of Central and East-European descent” established the AF-ABN in the early 1950s “to prepare Americans to fight Communism and Russian imperialism and to promote the ideas of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.” After the Korean War failed to become World War III, Stetsko wrote this about the armistice:
It was not the time for half-measures. It was, much more, the time for Russia to experience its Pearl Harbor… The time demands that western commanders of the stature of General Patton place themselves protectingly before the revolutionaries with a few lightning panzer-divisions. The moment presses for military support of our nations’ underground fight, by a simultaneous advance on the central point, the Kremlin… Moscow’s despotic rule would be eliminated more quickly than one has ever dared to hope. No armistice and no compromise with the Kremlin can bring peace on earth and free the world from fear, but only a resolute, offensive advance. It is still not too late.
The AF-ABN’s first rally in the spring of 1952 featured a pair of Congressmen and General Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak, the far-right Hungarian chairman of the ABN Military Commission. The New York Times noted that the ABN claimed to represent 250,000,000 people. A leader of the Hungarian National Council in New York subsequently provided this “Background of General Farkas” in a letter to the Times: “in 1944 he was responsible for sentencing to death the anti-Nazi heroes and oppressing the Hungarian anti-totalitarian underground movement.”
Earlier that (election) year, Congressman O.K. Armstrong (R-MO), who addressed the AF-ABN rally in Manhattan, organized a “Conference on Psychological Warfare” in Washington, which historian Sarah-Jane Corke described as “one of the first meetings between Republicans and the psychological warriors.”
Readers of the “prelude” to this series already know that in 1952, the Republican Party endorsed the “liberation” of the “captive nations,” which Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson called a “cynical and transparent attempt, drenched in crocodile tears, to play upon the anxieties of foreign nationality groups in this country.”
Future VOC founder Lev Dobriansky, as the president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, participated in Armstrong’s event, but withdrew because Russian nationalists supposedly “took over and virtually ran the conference.” Other speakers included the chairman of the CIA’s Free Europe Committee (FEC), which wanted nothing to do with Ukrainian nationalists and the ABN. According to historian Anna Mazurkiewicz, this is how an assistant director of the FEC’s Exile Relations Division once described Yaroslav Stetsko’s group:
The ABN is led by Slovak separatists, Hungarian Arrow-Crossists, Croatian Ustashi elements, extreme Ukrainian nationalists, and the like, many of whom are veterans of SS units assimilated into the German armed forces toward the end of World War II. The Bulgarian National Front is led by the remnants of the Tsankov government, a puppet regime established by the Nazis in Vienna after the Bulgarian surrender in 1944. We customarily do not acknowledge correspondence from these groups, since they tend to make use of any acknowledgement as an FEC endorsement of their aims.
Bulgarian National Front leader Ivan Dochev received three death sentences in absentia after the war. According to a 1953 memo by the CIA’s Southeast European Division, “Sources do not agree entirely on DOCHEV’s background but there is sufficient evidence in the files to indicate that he was definitely pro-German and that he worked for German IS [Intelligence Services].”
Ivan Dochev chaired the AF-ABN for years. By the 1960s, the “American Friends” (including BNF and OUN-B activists) typically spearheaded the celebration of “Captive Nations Week,” especially in New York and Philadelphia. They grew increasingly fed up with Washington’s reluctance to suicidally ignite World War III for them. The “Organization of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” (OUN-B) called on President John F. Kennedy “to screen and investigate the experts and advisers on East European Affairs in the State Department.”
“Then, of course, come the standard and timeworn labels,” bemoaned a Ukrainian American AF-ABN member at the 1979 Captive Nations Week rally in Central Park, Manhattan. “The Captive Nations supporters are right-wing extremists, benighted anti-communists, rabid nationalists pursuing selfish goals… So it seems that our commemoration here today is, one of those bitter, though instructive ironies of our times.” Two decades after the first Captive Nations Week, every president since Eisenhower had let them down.
Then in 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his successful presidential campaign at a Labor Day “ethnic festival” at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. According to Jersey City’s Ukrainian Weekly newspaper, “The majority of the more than 20 ethnic groups taking part in the festival were affiliated with the Captive Nations Committee of New York.” Ivan Dochev died in 2005, but on paper he remains an honorary president of the Captive Nations Committee of New York, which the AF-ABN established in the 1950s.
With a friend of the “captive nations” finally in the White House, the 25th annual Captive Nations Week was dedicated to the fake 40th anniversary of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko got an invitation to Washington where he shook hands with President Reagan and Vice President Bush. According to Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party by Russ Bellant, the BNF-affiliated VOC trustee, Radi Slavoff, arranged Ivan Dochev’s 1984 visit to the White House as executive director of the Republican Heritage Groups Council, the GOP’s “special ethnic outreach unit.”
Austin App, said to be “the first major American Holocaust denier,” became a vice-president of the AF-ABN by 1973, and chaired the Captive Nations Committee in Philadelphia from at least 1969 until his death in 1984. Four years later, Christopher Simpson, author of Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, argued that App wasn’t just a bad apple. “Similar attitudes are a pervasive part of the Captive Nations movement throughout the U.S., and have been for many years.” Austin App was a founding member of the National Captive Nations Committee, which established the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
In 1984, Christopher Simpson observed Captive Nations Week in Manhattan, and witnessed a speech by Nikolai Nazarenko, “the self-styled leader of the World Federation of Cossack National Liberation Movement … and the Cossack American Republican National Federation.” Nazarenko was unashamed of being a Nazi collaborator. As told by Simpson, “Nazarenko’s speech at the 1984 Captive Nations ceremonial dinner in New York left little to the imagination about his own point of view or that of his audience.”
“There is a certain ethnic group that today makes its home in Israel,” Nazarenko told the gathering. “This ethnic group works with the Communists all the time. They were the Fifth Column in Germany and in all the Captive Nations … They would spy, sabotage and do any act in the interest of Moscow,” he claimed … “They had to be isolated … arrested and imprisoned … This particular ethnic group was responsible for aiding [the] Soviet NKVD,” he continued. “…You hear a lot about the Jewish Holocaust,” he exclaimed, his yellowed mustache quivering, “but what about the 140 million Christians, Muslims and Buddhists killed by Communism? That is the real Holocaust, and you never hear about it!” The Captive Nations Committee’s crowd responded with excited applause in the most enthusiastic welcome for any speaker of that evening.
Thirty five years later, I observed Captive Nations Week in Manhattan, and learned that the Captive Nations Committee of New York is a one man operation these days. I received a flyer that emphasized the importance of East Prussia: “The Cornerstone of all Captive Nations MUST BE FREED NOW.” With a small crowd assembled in Central Park, an old-time fellow traveler of the “Captive Nations Movement” seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been coming to this demonstration since 1964, and my parents before that,” a man named Jeff Smith said into a megaphone, hunched over in a suit and tie, as he started jabbing at the air. About 30 seconds later, he launched into a tirade against the “people throughout the history of communism who have aided and abetted it, people like the New York Times, people like the Council on Foreign Relations, and all these NGOs on the Upper East Side, people that do business with Russia, people who do business with China,” and all the other “schmucks.”
The man congratulated his audience, “YOU are the uncorrupted! That’s the difference between you and them. They want comfortability. They want respectability,” he said, mocking the passersby in the park. Afterwards, Mr. Smith told me that there is an “invisible government” ruled by “all the same families,” many of them from the Upper East Side, and they control the international banking system, and facilitated the rise of Communism. During the conversation, he name-dropped only two people from his past: Nikolai Nazarenko and Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society. The latter was another founding member of the National Captive Nations Committee, which was chaired for life by ABN ally Lev Dobriansky.
In 1959, Prince Niko Nakashidze, a Georgian Nazi collaborator and Secretary General of the ABN, wrote a letter to Senator Paul Douglas (D-IL), who sponsored the Captive Nations Week legislation. “As long as the United States of America exist they have never aimed to conquer foreign countries. They have allowed neighboring small states to exist and develop unmolested and have respected the freedom of other peoples and individuals.”
The following year, Nakashidze wrote “The Truth About ABN,” a pamphlet in which he admitted, “many of us fought on the German side against Russian imperialism and Bolshevism,” but defended this choice, which he also made, because it “was in our national interests.” As for the Holocaust, “The Jews themselves know only too well that our people have never been and are not anti-Semitic… [and for those that] do not cease to spread propaganda lies about us, we shall not keep silent any longer, but shall likewise attack them ruthlessly, even at the risk of being called ‘anti-Semites.’”
The invention of Captive Nations Week was “extremely gratifying to us,” according to Prince Nakashidze, because it was “wholly identical with the fundamental idea which we of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, as the united spokesmen of the entire subjugated world in the East, first propagated and have always championed.”
Roughly five years before the National Captive Nations Committee established the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Christopher Simpson observed that “these [Captive Nations] groups continue to enjoy favorable media coverage, endorsements from leading political figures, and a substantial role in right-wing political coalitions year after year. The reasons for this phenomena are complex, but they stem in large measure from these organizations’ ability to use militant anti-Communism as a ‘respectable’ cover for hate politics.”