Dr. Martin Nekola: For The Freedom of Captive European Nations: Eastern European Exiles in Postwar America

The talk will focus on the formation and development of organizations of political exiles from the countries of East Central and Southeastern Europe in the U.S.A. in the early Cold War.  This topic has yet to be examined comparatively and within a broader international context.  Based on long-time research in U.S. archives, Dr. Nekola will provide a basic factual overview, then examine the comparative operation of the anti-communist exile movements.  In addition, he will discuss the political organizations and representatives of a number of individual national exile groups, including Czechs, Poles, and Baltic peoples, within the context of the changes in international politics during the first decade of the Cold War (1946—1956).

MARTIN NEKOLA, Ph.D. is a political scientist and historian, born in Prague. He studied at Charles University in Prague and was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University. His research focuses on the Czechoslovak Exile community after 1948 and on Czech communities in the USA. He is the author of three hundred articles and has published ten books in the past ten years. He is a member of The Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences.