Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West by EbonyNilsson. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2024. 272 pp. 103. 50. ISBN 978‐1‐350‐37839‐1

Over the last decade, interest in the topic of Russia in exile has grown exponentially, garnering significant academic attention. Reflecting on a bygone world and endeavoring to locate its foci, both young and seasoned historians navigate two global dichotomies within exile: the Left-Right political alignment and the First-Second migration waves. Ebony Nilsson's work begins with the premise that left-aligned Soviet refugees did not conform to the conventional model of "Russians abroad," thus remaining largely invisible to scholars and within the milieu itself (p. 2). This sounds true; indeed, even the right-wingers, despite their prominence in exile, have not received adequate academic attention, remaining a work in progress, just as Russia in exile in general. Ironically though, in the image fit for popular consumption, Russian emigration at large nevertheless revered the achievements of the Left, such as embracing and celebrating the Bolshevik victory in 1945. With even the "visible exiles" presenting a hard case to crack, the immediate challenge is how to trace the even more unknown "invisibles," and the source limitations that stem from it, which the author commendably acknowledges (p. 14). At the heart of the book lay biographical samples of seven exiles and their hangout, the Russian Social Club, and then the attempts of those seven to retell their story. The author drives a narrative operating in a maze of patchy, contradictory documentation. The characters are in a flux: a lot of erratic moves, shifting allegiances, peppered with much disappointment and flagging hopes in the Australian land of beer and races. Overall, this work represents a solid, stylish academic undertaking, with intricate analysis across a spectrum of elusive and challenging sources. However, some necessary criticisms arise. The Left in emigration experienced two significant moments of recruitment, first during the Spanish Civil War and then after 1945, with the latter event arguably more successful. The book could benefit from an opportunity to compare these pivotal moments. Chapter 1 is somewhat unclear in its overall statement: was the Russian Social Club an extension of the Soviet wing or not? Fostering relationships with Soviet representatives, who conducted recruitment for repatriation, while simultaneously maintaining a lukewarm approach to promoting the Soviet lifestyle, appears contradictory. Granted, the book grapples with a challenging aspect of history where even the global context is difficult to piece together. Consequently, the text throughout relies on a degree of speculation, with frequent use of words like "appears," "seemed," and "likely." A critical way to look at it would be to say that it is impossible to discern exactly how much the educated imagination of the author plays into the frequently and frustratingly insufficient documentary data here. Yet another way to assess this would be to claim that even if the stories are short, motives elusive, and documentation puzzling, they still deserve to be told. The question remains: exactly how representative is the overall sample of lives selected, especially against the overall background of exile? Despite this, the torturous lifestyles of the seven and their tumbleweed fates present a captivating read and demonstrate the author's consummate analytical skills. The main impression left after finishing the book is that the Left Exile can be taken as a study in failure. They were obvious functional pariahs for the right-wing émigré stakeholders (also losers for some), and at best lukewarm residents of their host countries. Worse for them, in many cases, including beyond those in the book and especially those who had repatriated, the exiled tovarishchi lived to regret their admiration for the Soviet way of living and ruling, eventually ending up as deflated comrades. In some sense, the book is an exercise in reconstructing the confused identities of those left-wing migrants, and the attempts at further deconstruction of the same identity with the tool of incessant suspicion by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. The murky intelligence world only adds further paranoid complexity, and it surely was much work to figure out the concealed connections between these reports, the reality, and the personality of the émigré in question, the latter in many ways remaining an enigma. This is a timely contribution done with much care on a topic that seems to reinvent itself, just like its characters did.