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.
“I began looking at how the cold war played out on Sydney’s main street and from there I just couldn’t stop,” says Nilsson. “As the temperature of the cold war rose, so did the temperature on George Street.”
In an era when the country was divided over Robert Menzies’ bid to outlaw the Communist party, it seems improbable in retrospect that on any given weekend night in the early 1950s, Sydneysiders could hear strains of balalaika music and vodka-fuelled toasts to Stalin and Lenin as they promenaded the top end of George Street.
In the basement of 737 George Street, the Russian Social Club conducted its exuberant unlicensed libations and nostalgic homages to the Soviet motherland. Directly across the road sat the seething Russia House, a rival social club defined by its abhorrence of communism in all its forms. Public disturbances between the two clubs were not unheard of.
Subterfuge and shifting identities
Between 1947 and 1952, about 170,000 refugees from displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy arrived in Australia. The Russian community in Australia almost tripled to more than 13,000, drawn from the European camps and the diaspora in Shanghai after Mao Zedong’s defeat of the nationalists in 1949.
The Russian émigrés who landed in Sydney after the second world war were not welcome at Russia House, whose membership chiefly consisted of “White Russians” – those who had fled their homeland after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Red Russia met across the road and the Russian Social Club plied its members with Soviet-supplied pamphlets, magazines, papers and films extolling a communist utopia in a motherland many had never set foot in.
The newly formed Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) considered the club a hotbed of anti-Australian activity and a recruitment HQ for Soviet-sympathising spies. Indeed, Nilsson’s book suggests the Russian Social Club played a pivotal role in the cold war in Australia.
It was the favourite Sydney haunt of the Canberra-based Soviet diplomat – and, as it later emerged, Soviet spy – Vladimir Petrov. It was at the Russian Social Club that a self-styled Mata Hari introduced the Soviet embassy boss to the man who would ultimately convince him to defect, Dr Michael Bialoguski, a Polish émigré who infiltrated the club while on the Asio payroll.
Nilsson’s book delves into the lives of Russian Social Club members – now all dead – who never achieved the level of public notoriety Bialoguski obtained, following the royal commission that followed the Petrov affair that turned him into Australia’s most famous foreign-born Asio-recruited spy.
Displaced Comrades peeks into the lives and psyches of what Nilsson calls Australia’s “cold war misfits”, as seen through the lens of Asio surveillance. She discovered a niche community who not only knew or believed they were under the constant watch of the Australian government, but expected it and in some cases encouraged it.
“Many of these people had come from countries where security surveillance had been normal and natural,” Nilsson says, referring to the migrants’ previous experiences with the Soviet Union’s NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, the German Gestapo during occupation, the Japanese occupation forces in Manchuria and Mao’s communist China.
“Subterfuge, shifting identities and tidying up biographies was a form of self-survival.”
For some it even added a bit of glamour to their dreary postwar lives in a new country where “beer and races” appeared to be the definition of cultural sophistication.
Within the Russian Social Club, members spied and informed on each other, and according to records accessed by Nilsson, some even appeared to share their intel with both sides on the cold war front, thoroughly confounding an adolescent spy agency whose operations at times were more akin to a scene from a Coen brothers comedy than a John le Carré thriller.
Sydney’s Mata Hari
One Russian Social Club enigma Asio never appeared to resolve was Lidia/Lydia Mokras, the aforementioned self-styled Mata Hari who the agency concluded “wanted to be in on all the intrigues, and usually on both sides”.
Mokras’s approach to identity and background could at best be described as fluid, continually inventing and reinventing herself and shifting her allegiances as circumstances required. At various times both Soviet intelligence and Asio thought she was working for the other side. When she embarked on an affair with Bialoguski, it appeared the couple began informing on each other, with the latter telling Asio he “felt that she might be an agent for one side or the other, playing some kind of double game”. Some years later he would conclude his former lover was simply a pathological liar, but Nilsson thinks this an unfair assessment.
“Yes, I think she made up a lot of stuff, but I think that was a strategy which made sense to her,” Nilsson says. Mokras had been a teenage girl living under German occupation in Ukraine.
“She learned early on that having a lot of different versions of your life, and keeping in contact with different people on all sides of things, was the best way to keep yourself safe.”
Another Russian Social Club operative who continued to confound Asio was a Red Army fighter pilot who reinvented himself as an Australian engineer, businessman and eventual pillar of Canberra civic service.
At the club, Alexander Dukin would thrill his audience with tales of his time working for Soviet intelligence before the war. But some members believed his pro-Soviet credentials were actually a front for his true “radish” identity – red on the outside, white on the inside – and his suspected role in Petrov’s defection, either real or imagined, contributed to him eventually being turfed from the club.
Dukin resettled in Canberra, where his close friendship with a long-suspected KGB spy at the Soviet embassy, Vladimir Alekseev, placed him under close Asio surveillance.
For years, Dukin’s phone was tapped,, but that did not get in the way of the Howard government bestowing on him a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2002 for services to the Russian community.
“If you wanted the image of the typical immigrant from post World War I [sic] Europe who literally helped build this country, you couldn’t do better than Alexander Dukin,” the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in an obituary in 2015.
Dukin was “proudly Australian”, the piece said, but “he never forgot his Russian heritage”.
The incomplete and highly redacted records Asio ceded to the National Archives mean Nilsson’s lively but unavoidably patchwork social history of pro-Soviet Australian migrants raises more questions than it answers.
“Understanding how to read those files was quite a learning curve because nothing in them can be taken at face value,” she says.
“There’s a lot of detective work that goes into deeply contextualising a file as much as you can, figuring out which bits you can trust.
“But there are so many question marks and questions I can’t answer … and I probably won’t ever be able to.”
Displaced Comrades is published by Bloomsbury Academic.
