Untold tales of the Cold War: the Russians of Xinjiang and the CIA
The Cold War may be over, but incredible stories of the era’s tragedies and intrigues are still emerging. US historian Charles Kraus recalls one such tale – involving a small group of Russians caught in the Cold War crossfire between the USSR and China in Xinjiang, Chinese Central Asia – in the current issue of Cold War History. Through archival research and an interview with one of the last survivors, Kraus details how more than 100 ethnic Russians living in Xinjiang in the 1940s came to be involved, at various points, with a Kazakh warlord, the government in Moscow, the Chinese