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In the period following the end of World War II, an unknown number of collaborators with the Nazi regime immigrated to the United States from Europe. This included active perpetrators of the Holocaust, around 200 of which are known or suspected, and fewer of which have been subject to investigation and prosecution for immigration fraud by the US government. Most publications, academic and otherwise, on the topic of immigrant Holocaust perpetrators in the post-war US have focused heavily on perpetrators' lives significantly pre- and post-immigration, and have rarely considered the symbiotic relationship which existed between their Holocaust perpetration and their immigration. This has created inaccuracies and lacunae within social conceptions of immigrant Holocaust perpetrators, both as individuals and as part of a largely uncoordinated collective. This thesis presents a novel framework and significant contribution to the field of perpetrator immigration studies, called herein the 'constructed' immigration process. It posits that this process was unique to perpetrators of significant, otherwise immigration-disqualifying crimes. Each decision made by Holocaust perpetrators within the constructed process was built upon foundations laid by past falsehoods, creating an experience of perpetual precarity. Thus, for Holocaust perpetrators, the US immigration process was never truly 'complete,' as their successful immigration was reliant on sustained concealment of their role in the Holocaust. As such, they were always at risk of being discovered and facing prosecution or having their US citizenship or residency revoked. In order to combat this, perpetrators created new pre-immigration identities devoid of Holocaust perpetration and continuously maintained these identities and their claimed innocence for the rest of their lives. The existence of observable patterns in the experiences of immigrant perpetrators suggest that they made calculated and calculable choices in order to ensure their success. These findings offer new, more expansive understandings of both immigration and Holocaust perpetration as continual experiences rather than time-limited events. The thesis is centred around a database tracking the immigration of 147 men and women either proven to have been Holocaust perpetrators or of whom perpetration is strongly suspected, beginning with their experiences of post-war displacement and following them through their post-resettlement lives in the US. It assesses their interactions with both formal and informal aspects of the immigration process, including displacement, sponsorship arrangements, occupations, and post-resettlement community integration, and establishes the role of individual strategy within these interactions. Arguments within the thesis have been drawn from a variety of sources, including court cases, legislative materials, government-produced publications and unpublished documents, news articles, photographs, oral history testimonies, and personal archival documents. Data on the experiences of non-perpetrator immigrants and Holocaust survivors is also compared to that of immigrant perpetrators in order to accurately determine the unique role of perpetration within the post-war immigration process. In each area of inquiry, perpetrators' individual agency is prioritised, rather than complying with prevailing trends which have employed top-down, governance-focused analyses of perpetrator immigration.

The period between 1905 and 1923 was one of immense political instability around the world, but particularly in Russia and Ireland. Both countries emerged from this period with new state structures: Russia as part of the Soviet Union, and Ireland with the end of the union with Britain as the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, following what is now commonly known as the 'Irish Revolution'. This thesis uses a broad, bilingual source base and a transnational approach to investigate Irish responses to news from revolutionary Russia, and to analyse comparatively Russian representations of Ireland. It contributes to an expanding literature on the global histories of the Russian and Irish Revolutions, exploring the translation of political ideas and texts across borders and nations. Through analysis of Irish and Russian archival papers, photographs, newspapers and published sources, this thesis demonstrates a greater range of political connections between revolutionary Russia and Ireland than previously acknowledged by other scholars. The thematic chapters consider attitudes to Russia among Irish conservative, unionist, religious and nationalist groups, rather than solely Irish radicals and left-wing organisations which are the focus of most existing Irish-Soviet studies. The diversity of Irish engagement with Russia is exemplified by the varied experiences of Irish men and women who served in Russia during World War One. Moreover, Russo-Irish connections were not one-way: there was Bolshevik and early Soviet optimism about Ireland's potential to help destabilise the British empire. The Communist International also tried to expand its reach in Ireland after its creation in 1919. Yet perceptions of shared interest did not always lead to increased cooperation and understanding. Anti-communism gained considerable momentum in Ireland after 1917, promoted strongly by the Irish Catholic Church. Misinformation, language differences, limited choice of news sources and national and ethnic stereotyping helped shape newspaper coverage and eyewitness accounts. Often, news from Russia reached Ireland through Britain, which coloured interpretations. Crucially, Russian and Irish political actors and publications interpreted foreign events to suit their own political agendas and as part of wider visions for domestic and global change.

This thesis examines a little studied aspect of the Soviet Union’s history, namely the activities of the mass membership of the Communist Party during the interwar period, specifically 1926-1941. Based on extensive research in central and regional party archives, it revisits a number of specialised scholarly debates by offering an account of key processes and events of the period, including rapid industrialisation and mass repression, from the viewpoint of rank-and-file communists, the group of people who had chosen to profess active support for the regime without however acquiring positions of political power. The account provided is in the form of an in-depth case study of the party organisation of the Red Putilov – later Kirov – machine-building plant in the city of Leningrad, followed by a shorter study of communist activism in another major Leningrad institution, the Red-Banner Baltic Fleet. It is shown that all major political initiatives of the leadership generated intense political activity at the bottom levels of the party hierarchy, as the thousands of rank-and-file members interpreted and acted on central directives in ways that were consistently in line with their and their colleagues’ interests. As these interests were hardly ever in harmony with those of the corresponding level of the administrative state apparatus, the result was a nearly permanent state of tension between the executive and political branches of the Soviet party-state at the grassroots level. The main argument offered is that ultimately, the rank-and-file organisations of the communist party were an extremely important but contradictory element of the Soviet Union’s political system, being a reliable constituency of grassroots support for the regime while at the same time placing significant limits on the ability of state organs to actually implement policy. This thesis therefore challenges interpretations of Soviet state-society relations based on binary narratives of repression from above and resistance from below. It identifies instead an element of the Soviet system where the line between society and the state became blurred, and grassroots agency became possible on the basis of a minimum level of active support for the regime. It is further argued that the ability of the mass membership to influence the outcome of leadership initiatives was predicated on the Marxist-Leninist ideological underpinnings of most major policies. In this way, this thesis also contributes to the recent literature on the role of ideology in the Soviet system. The concluding chapter considers the value of the overall findings of this thesis for the comparative study of 20th century socialist states.

The breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 has had a variety of significant repercussions on Chinese politics, foreign policy, and other aspects. This doctoral project examines the evolution of Chinese intellectual perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, before and after the collapse. Relying on a larger body of updated Chinese sources, this thesis will offer re-evaluations of many key issues in post-Mao Chinese Sovietology. The following topics will be explored or re-examined: Chinese views of Soviet policies in the early 1980s prior to Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of power; Chinese perceptions of Gorbachev’s political reform from the mid-1980s onward, before the outbreak of the Tiananmen Incident in 1989; Chinese scholars’ evolving views on Gorbachev from the 1980s to 1990s; the Chinese use of Vladimir Lenin and his policies in the early 1980s and early 1990s for bolstering and legitimizing the CCP regime after the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Incident, respectively; and the re-evaluations of Leonid Brezhnev and Joseph Stalin since the mid-1990s. First, the thesis argues that the changing Chinese views on the USSR were not only shaped by the ups-and-downs of Sino-Soviet (and later Sino-Russian) relations, China’s domestic political climate, and the political developments in Moscow. Even more importantly, views changed in response to the earth-shaking event of the rise and fall of world communism in the last two decades of the 20th century. Second, by researching the country of the Soviet Union, Chinese Soviet-watchers did not focus on the USSR alone, but mostly attempted to confirm and legitimize the Chinese state policies of reform and open door in both decades. By examining the Soviet past, Chinese scholars not only demonstrated concern for the survival of the CCP regime, but also attempted to envision the future direction and position of China in the post-communist world. This included analysis of how China could rise to be a powerful nation under the authoritarian one-party rule, without succumbing to Western democracy and the sort of collapse that doomed the USSR. In short, Chinese research on Soviet socialism has primarily served to trace the current problems of Chinese socialism, in order to legitimize their solutions – rather than a truth-seeking process devoted to knowledge of the Soviet Union.

This study investigates the evacuation of 60,000 French and Belgian children to Switzerland between 1940 and 1945. This humanitarian action was initially implemented by a coalition of Swiss charities but because of its growing popularity and increasing scope, the Swiss Red Cross joined the efforts in 1942. Despite the devastation, food scarcities and logistical limitations of the Second World War, these children were successfully fed, clothed and housed in Swiss households for three-month periods before they returned home. Given the massive diplomatic and material challenges, it is surprising that such a large transnational evacuation for vulnerable, foreign children was generally effective. By evaluating both how these evacuations were conducted and why participating governments sought to support or prohibit their implementation, this thesis reveals new information that challenges the standard narratives of the wartime actions of the Allies, Nazi Germany and Switzerland. Britain and America’s role in the evacuation does not support their reputation as righteous victors, but as bickering governments strategizing to strengthen their post-war political position in Europe. Nazi Germany’s authorization of the evacuation deepens our knowledge by demonstrating how “humanitarian” operations were circuitously manipulated as a way to increase Nazi control. The noteworthy hospitality of Swiss citizens significantly diverged from the strict immigration policies imposed by their government, a finding which both challenges and reinforces the controversy surrounding Switzerland’s prohibitive, internationally-condemned refugee policies. Overall, this thesis recasts each participant in a new light by questioning the motivations of governments at war, the value of children in war, and the logistics of wartime humanitarian operations.

The Western historiography of Stalin and Stalinism produced in the period 1925 to the present day is a strikingly varied body of work in which the nature of Stalin, his regime and his role within his regime have been and continue to be the subject of debate. This characteristic is all the more striking when we consider that from the earliest years of the period under study there has been a general understanding of the nature of the Stalinist regime, and of the policies and leader which have come to define it. This thesis analyses the principal influences on research which have led to this body of work acquiring such a varied nature, and which have led to an at times profoundly divided Western, and more specifically Anglo-American, scholarship. It argues that the combined impact of three key formative influences on research in the West over the period of study, and their interaction with each other, reveal recurring themes across the whole historiography, while also accounting for the variety of interpretations in evidence. The first impact identified is the lack of accessibility to sources during the Soviet period, which posed a constant and real obstacle to those in the West writing on Stalin and Stalinism, and the impact of the removal of this obstacle in the post-Soviet era. The second is the influence of wider historiographical trends on this body of work, such as the emergence of social history. Finally the thesis argues that evolving Western attitudes to Stalin and Stalinism over this period have played a key role in constructions of Stalin and his regime, demonstrating an on-going historical process of the othering of Russia by the West. The extent and nature of this othering in turn provide a central line of enquiry of the thesis. Tightly intertwined with all three impacts has been the changing global political context over the period in question which provides the evolving and influential contextual backdrop to this study, and which has given this body of work a deeply political and personal character.