‘Captive Nations’: The Forgotten Origins of the ‘Victims of Communism’
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) is infamous, at least online among leftists, for scaremongering about the growing popularity of socialism among young people, championing the debunked claim that communism killed over 100,000,000 people, employing fanatical pseudo-experts like Adrian Zenz, and deciding to count those who died from the global pandemic as additional “victims of communism.” And yet, little is known about the origins of this notorious organization.
The VOC is said to have been founded in 1993–94. This is a half-truth, also known as a great lie. “Victims of Communism,” at that point, was a new name for the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC), established in 1960 to oversee the annual Cold Warrior observance known as Captive Nations Week, the popularity of which plummeted after the Soviet Union collapsed. The NCNC, associated with numerous far-right groups in the United States and abroad, reinvented itself as a bipartisan organization.
In the summer of 1993, Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, decided to tone down the controversial 1959 congressional resolution that established Captive Nations Week. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk privately described the resolution as “one of the wildest kinds of cold war kind of thing you ever seen in your life.” Pell deleted its list of “captive nations,” some of which (“Idel-Ural” and “Cossackia”) were “invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry,” according to George Kennan, the architect of Washington’s anti-Soviet “containment strategy.” Senator Pell also removed its references to “Communist Russian imperialism,” and the specification that Captive Nations Week should occur on the third week of July.
The Cold War was over, but not for all. The NCNC vigorously denounced Senator Pell’s amendment: “this rewriting of history is like having sought better U.S.-German relations by expunging any mention of the Holocaust and Nazi German imperialism.” The organization requested Congressional hearings on “our inadequate policies in East Europe and Siberia,” apparently in order to promote the goal of breaking up the Russian Federation.
“A ‘deja vu,’ re 1918–22, for the peoples of North Caucasia, Cossakia [sic], Idel-Ural and the Far Eastern Republic…?” asked the NCNC secretary, the ultraconservative author Lee Edwards, who decried a conspiracy “to wipe out the record of imperial Moscow’s expansionism.” Later that year, US president Bill Clinton sought to remove “numerous Cold War restrictions and critical references to the former Soviet Union” from the statute books before meeting with Russian president Boris Yeltsin in early 1994.
In order to get the legislation through Congress on time, according to Utah’s Daily Herald, Clinton was forced to accept an amendment by segregationist Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) authorizing the far-right NCNC “to construct, maintain, and operate” an “international memorial” to the “victims of communism” in Washington. Helms’ amendment “encouraged” the NCNC “to create an independent entity” for this purpose. And so the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established, perhaps as an independent organization on paper, but not in reality.
The main author of the Captive Nations Week resolution (Public Law 86–90) signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower in July 1959 was Lev Dobriansky, the longtime president of the nationalist Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. Some declared it the Ukrainian American community’s biggest political feat. In a letter to Eisenhower, the far-right American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (AF-ABN) called Public Law 86–90 “one of the greatest documents of modern history.”
Dobriansky, who cofounded the VOC with Lee Edwards and Zbigniew Brzezinski after chairing the NCNC for decades, was an important ally of the cultish OUN(B), the most authoritarian faction of the clandestine Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which massacred thousands of Jews and Poles during World War II, led by the notorious Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. They met in the early 1950s, and Dobriansky helped Bandera receive his first visa to the United States a few months after the first Captive Nations Week, but he didn’t make it, because the KGB assassinated Bandera in Munich.
The OUN(B) essentially functioned as the vanguard party of the extremist Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which Scott and Jon Lee Anderson described in their exposé of the far-right World Anti-Communist League as “the largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.” Some components of the ABN, including its earliest representatives of “Idel-Ural” and “Cossackia,” had migrated from Nazi Germany’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
Bandera’s deputy and successor, Yaroslav Stetsko, a vicious antisemite, led the ABN for life, and without Lev Dobriansky, wouldn’t have made his first trip to the United States in 1958, had his Banderite proxies take over the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America in 1980, and received valuable photo ops with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the White House.
Someone on Wikipedia apparently started the myth that Stetsko co-chaired the National Captive Nations Committee with Dobriansky. In fact, with Dobriansky’s go-ahead, the ABN practically became the de facto leader of the so-called “captive nations movement” in the United States. AF-ABN and OUN(B) members typically spearheaded Captive Nations Week events with their allies, such as members of the extremely paranoid John Birch Society. It is rather fitting that the below archival video of Captive Nations Week is randomly spliced with footage from the OUN(B)-affiliated Ukrainian American Youth Association camp in Ellenville, New York with its larger than life busts of OUN leaders including Stepan Bandera.
Edward M. O’Connor, a former Displaced Persons Commissioner who lifted restrictions on some Nazi collaborators entering the United States and years later helped draft the Captive Nations Week law, died in 1985 as the AF-ABN’s honorary president. By that time, the Ukrainian Nazi death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk, facing extradition to Israel, had hired O’Connor’s son as his lawyer, and Ronald Reagan appointed Lev Dobriansky as the US Ambassador to the Bahamas after he presided over an OUN(B) “coup” in the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.
Dobriansky formed the National Captive Nations Committee in 1960. Austin App, “the first major American Holocaust denier,” who wrote a book called The Six Million Swindle, was the first name I found on an undated roster in the NCNC papers at Syracuse University that was typed up when the committee was “still in formation.”
The list also named Kalin Liocheff, secretary general of the neofascist Bulgarian National Front, and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, who personally accused President Eisenhower, the first to proclaim Captive Nations Week, of being a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy.” From at least 1969 until his death in 1984, Austin App chaired the Captive Nations Committee in Philadelphia.
The Bulgarian National Front (BNF) was established after World War II by far-right émigrés and former members of the Union of Bulgarian National Legions, a pro-Nazi organization that brandished swastikas and organized torchlit marches in 1930s Sofia. Ivan Dochev, one of its leaders who met with Adolf Hitler, founded the BNF, and led the AF-ABN in the 1960s. He is heavily featured in the above archival footage, and is sitting on the right in the still image that previews the Youtube video, which begins with a BNF event. During World War II, Dochev served as the mayor of a Nazi-occupied town in Bulgaria where the Jewish population was exterminated. After the war, Bulgarian authorities sentenced him to death three times in absentia.
Radi Slavoff, the BNF’s representative in Washington during the 1980s, played an important role in the Republican Party’s electoral “ethnic strategy” in those days, arranged a White House visit for Ivan Dochev in 1984, and organized an event in the US capital honoring Austin App the year before he died. Slavoff, a founding member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, served on the VOC board of directors through 2010. By then, the VOC appears to have absorbed the National Captive Nations Committee.
At the turn of the 21st century, the VOC and NCNC had similar boards of directors. Lev Dobriansky chaired them both. When he died in 2008, his anticommunist comrade Lee Edwards hailed him “a hero of the Cold War” and “Mr. Captive Nations.” Edwards served as the VOC president and NCNC public relations director. He has long been a key figure at the Heritage Foundation, which has had the ear of every Republican administration since Reagan.
In the early 2000s, Michael Sawkiw performed secretarial duties for the NCNC and VOC, in addition to being president of the “Banderite”-dominated Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). Earlier in life, as a member of the OUN(B) affiliated Ukrainian American Youth Association, Sawkiw paid tribute to the deceased OUN(B) and ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko in a letter he wrote to the Ukrainian Weekly newspaper in Jersey City.
Ten years later, in 1996, the UCCA tapped Sawkiw as the director of its Washington office, the Ukrainian National Information Service, based in the headquarters of the influential, right-wing Heritage Foundation, which eventually took the place of the NCNC as the VOC’s principal backer. Dobriansky invited Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner to join the NCNC in the 1990s, who until recently chaired the VOC board of trustees.
Michael B. Ryan died in 2018 as the vice chairman of the Victims of Communism, thirty years after becoming the NCNC’s legal counsel. In the latter capacity, in 1992, Ryan wrote an angry letter to the editor of the Ukrainian Weekly in response to a recent column which had “asserted that… Dr. Dobriansky was ‘firmly in the grip of OUN(B)’ and implied that Dr. Dobriansky was controlled by that organization. What nonsense!” Apparently Ryan didn’t realize that Myron Kuropas, the columnist, was a fellow traveler of the rival OUN(M), as were many others associated with that newspaper. “Also, what complaint does Dr. Kuropas have against OUN(B)?” he asked.
The OUN(B) wasn’t the only authoritarian political cult in the newly created VOC’s orbit. When Lee Edwards cofounded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, he was the senior editor of The World and I, a magazine associated with the Unification Church led by self-declared messiah Rev. Sung Myung Moon.
During the 1970s scandal in Washington known as Koreagate, the US-based Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation was exposed as a Moonie front group. Its executive director Donald L. Miller had the same role in the NCNC since 1963. He registered as a foreign agent of the South Korean government in 1968, and after a period of absence in the 1970s, resumed his NCNC duties through the 1990s. He served on the VOC board of directors, likely from the start, until 2002.
Before realizing that the NCNC formed the VOC, I was suspicious about the latter’s ties to the defunct World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which united Nazi collaborators in Europe, authoritarian leaders in Asia, and death squads in Central America, just to name a few. The ABN and OUN(B), the Unification Church, Lev Dobriansky, Lee Edwards, Donald Miller, and others associated with the VOC were deeply involved in the WACL.
Former Congressman Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y., 1979–99), an early VOC board member, joined the WACL at some point, apparently while in office. 1980s WACL president John Singlaub, an often overlooked figure in the Iran-Contra affair, advised the VOC. As a retired major general in the US army and founding member of the CIA who helped run the arguably genocidal Phoenix Program in Vietnam, Singlaub used the WACL to provide illegal US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua. At an ABN conference in London, a year before the Iran-Contra affair was exposed, Singlaub made a Freudian slip, and said he worked “through them,” talking about the ABN, before correcting himself, “with them.”
In 1990, the WACL reinvented itself as the Taiwan-based World League for Freedom and Democracy, which co-sponsored at least one VOC event in 2015 alongside the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office. The authoritarian Kuomintang ruled Taiwan as a one-party state for decades, and always played a commanding role in the WACL, which explains the support it received from the pro-Taiwan “China Lobby” in Washington. One could argue that the VOC has in recent years largely spearheaded a new “[anti-]China Lobby,” in part by rehabilitating the “captive nations” rhetoric.
One of the principal US backers of the World Anti-Communist League was the American Security Council, a conservative Cold Warrior think tank embedded in the military industrial complex that was especially influential with Ronald Reagan in office. Singlaub, Edwards, and Dobriansky were members of this extremely hawkish organization established in the 1950s. As told by Keith Allen Dennis, a historian of the WACL, the American Security Council (ASC) “eventually established a ‘psycho-political warfare’ training campus for the U.S. called the ‘Freedom Studies Center’ in 1966. It was this estate in Boston, Virginia that earned the ASC the title of ‘Cold War Campus.’”
The private libraries of the American Security Council Foundation and former CIA director William Casey now belong to the Institute of World Politics (IWP), an intensely right-wing private graduate school that “teaches all the instruments of statecraft” in Washington, DC. The IWP was established in 1990 with its campus near Dupont Circle as a feeder school for the US government and the CIA in particular. According to its website, “IWP faculty and leadership have a longstanding relationship with VOC.”
In his book, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, Christopher Simpson writes that the CIA effectively became “the largest single political advertiser on the American scene during the early 1950s, rivaled only by such commercial giants as General Motors and Procter & Gamble.” That’s because the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front that enlisted Ronald Reagan as a spokesperson, targeted the US population with $5 million of propaganda from 1950–55 in order to boost support for the Cold War. According to Simpson, the CIA and its Crusade for Freedom “became instrumental in introducing into the American political mainstream many of the right-wing extremist émigré politicians’ plans to ‘liberate’ Eastern Europe.”
The CIA isn’t known to have supported the OUN(B) or ABN during the Cold War, and the National Captive Nations Committee plausibly rivaled the CIA’s Assembly of Captive European Nations. In any case, the CIA was no fan of Lev Dobriansky, who eventually feuded with the OUN faction it supported, denouncing them as “soft on Communism.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the most famous but least involved VOC cofounder, was briefed about the CIA’s Ukrainian operations after Dobriansky began to accurately identify his rivals in the Ukrainian American community as “CIA tools.” Brzezinski addressed the infamous 13th Congress of Americans of Ukrainian Descent in 1980, at which Dobriansky presided over an OUN(B) takeover of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.
With allies in Congress, the military-industrial complex, and the “Fascist International” (WACL), until Ronald Reagan came along, the Ukrainian-led, far-right “captive nations movement” apparently made serious inroads in Washington without much (if any) support from the White House, State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency. In 1985, journalist Joe Conason wrote an article titled “Reagan and the War Crimes Lobby” for the Village Voice about the ascent of the OUN-ABN-WACL nexus.
When Reagan, a former Crusade for Freedom spokesperson, ran for president in 1979–80, he launched his campaign at an “ethnic” Labor Day festival associated with the Captive Nations Committee of New York (CNC-NY). The Bulgarian National Front leader, Ivan Dochev, snubbed by the CIA, became an honorary president of the CNC-NY. Ronald Reagan elevated the importance of Captive Nations Week with an annual ceremony at the White House, which people like ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko managed to attend.
A year later, Christopher Simpson went to a Captive Nations Week event in Manhattan and witnessed a speech by Nikolai Nazarenko, an admitted Nazi collaborator, also “the self-styled leader of the World Federation of Cossack National Liberation Movement… and the Cossack American Republican National Federation.” In Blowback, Simpson wrote:
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.
In response to criticism belittling his important book, Simpson stressed that “these [far-right ‘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.”
Over thirty years later, in 2019, familiar with the sordid history of Captive Nations Week but unaware that the NCNC had formed the VOC, I attended the first annual “Captive Nations Summit” in Washington, organized by the VOC and Heritage Foundation with the apparent support of the Trump administration.
One of the most prominent speakers represented the alleged “captive nation” of Venezuela. Carlos Vecchio, “the man tasked with leading the Trump administration’s coup attempt in Venezuela from the US capital,” delivered introductory remarks after Paula Dobriansky, the neoconservative daughter of the NCNC founder, described Captive Nations Week as “truly vested with an ideology.”
After helping to incite a violent opposition campaign following the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, Carlos Vecchio became a wanted man and fled to the United States. At the inaugural Captive Nations Summit, he gave thanks to the VOC for helping him start a “new life.” According to Vecchio, “the institution that received me was Victims of the Communism, so thank you very much for that support that I got when I got here. I don’t have words to express my gratitude for that moment.”
It was around then that I noticed the event’s program said it was held “in conjunction with the US Department of State Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom,” one of the first initiatives undertaken by the State Department under the leadership of former CIA director Mike Pompeo. Earlier that week, the VOC executive director wrote an article titled, “Communism is making a comeback; so should Captive Nations Week.”
“Never heard of it?” he asked. “You’re not alone. Yet this usually-forgotten, federally mandated occasion… is worth resurrecting in the 21st century.” Odds are that resurrecting the “Captive Nations Coalition,” as the VOC website puts it, has always been a longterm goal of the organization.
UPDATE: check out my new Substack for more about the VOC.
