The discovery of two rival Russian clubs in the heart of 1950s Sydney and the role their seemingly ordinary members played in Australia’s most explosive spy scandal have inspired a book that sheds light on the shadowy world of cold war espionage.
In Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, Australian Catholic University research fellow Dr Ebony Nilsson trawled through thousands of incomplete files, surveillance reports and tapped phone conversation transcripts to compile a social history of those who acted on the periphery of the Petrov Affair and other intrigues at the height of Australia’s anti-communist fervour.
