Indonesian Political Exiles in the USSR

ABSTRACTThis article examines political exile as a particular form of migration, with reference to Indonesians living in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) when the military regime came to power in their homeland. With the rise in Jakarta of the New Order under Major-General Suharto after 1 October 1965, thousands of Indonesians in socialist and communist states abroad were effectively isolated. Faced with detention or execution if they returned home, Indonesian leftists and other dissidents who were scattered across some dozen states spanning the Sino-Soviet divide became unwilling exiles. Several thousand Indonesians were then studying in the USSR, where they were one of the largest foreign nationalities in Soviet universities and military academies. Many spent nearly half a century as exiles, struggling to survive first the vicissitudes of the cold war and then the global transformations that came with the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. The most influential grouping of Indonesian...