Captive Nations 2025: Open Auditions? (Patreon)

It's that time of year again.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC)'s Captive Nations Summit 2024 unfolded on July 11. Two days later, July 13, the alleged assassination attempt against Trump occurred in Butler, PA. This year's Captive Nations Summit was scheduled for July 14.

Suffice to say, the dating alone intrigued me. Captive Nations often seems to occur against the backdrop shifting political grounds. The 2022 gathering featured a brief appearance by Madam Zelenska before she departed for a meeting with Jill Biden. The war in Ukraine was only a few months old then and she was in town to beg for more funding. Nowadays this is so common that no big productions involving Ukraine's First Lady are needed.

That's hardly the only change that's unfolded during the intervening years. Past Captive Nations have always featured a heavy Ukrainian presence as well. Which made this year's line up all the more curious:

This was the first year without a single speaker, live alone a panel, dedicated specifically to the war in Ukraine. To be sure, Paula Dobriansky certainly invoked it a time or two during her Q & A, but her discussion was more broadly speaking about her father and his work on Captive Nations.

This was also the shortest Captive Nations I've attended thus far. In the past, the event has always gone for at least three hours, if not four. This year, it was only scheduled for two hours and it didn't even make that. Paula Dobriansky was nearly ten minutes late, which held the event's start time up till nearly 1:15. The panel wrapped up about five minutes early and instead of a Q & A, it simply ended at 2: 45 so that lunch could be served.

Not that I was complaining about the shortened time. I went up to DC Sunday night on the heels of an especially stressful week. Orion St. Peter's band Ilsa was playing out with the NOLA sludge legends Eyehategod. I'm not the world's biggest Eyehategod fan, but I wasn't going to pass up the chance to see such a storied band live.

And they did not disappoint. After nearly 40 years and some serious substance abuse issues, it was heartening to see that Eyehategod can still bring it live.

I ended the night helping Ilsa unload their gear. The activities of Sunday night made for an amusing contrast the next day.

Unlike Paula Dobriansky, I was 15 minutes earlier. It turned out, the spot I picked was magnet for interesting characters. The person sitting next to me turned out to be Pastor Cong Chinh Nguyen of the Asian Religious Council for Justice and Peace (ARCJP). Pastor Nguyen has been cited in not one, but two separate US congressional commissions on torture. This isn't that surprising as the US Congress tends to be far more interested in torture committed overseas, especially by nominally "communist" governments (Nguyen is Vietnamese), than domestically. No, I wasn't able to find out if his organization is some kind of successor to the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League, but it certainly sounds like it provided some inspiration at a minimum.

Elsewhere, I found myself sitting behind someone who looked remarkably like a younger version of Lee Edwards, who passed away in December 2024. The Not-Lee Edwards was especially interested in me, constantly shooting me dirty looks throughout the panels and eyeballing during the reception afterwards. He spent much of that time talking to this really creepy Israeli that's been in attendance every year. Amusingly, the Not-Lee Edwards nearly lost it when I took a picture of the actual Lee Edwards' little tribute:

After making the audience wait for ten minutes, Paula treated us to another variation on the same stump speech she uses every year to commemorate her father's role in launching Captive Nations. What warranted the additional time allotted to her this year (besides being the only real "name" speaker at this year's summit) was the recent publication of Unyielding Resolve. Unfortunately, I was unaware of the work's release prior to the summit. Otherwise, I would have procured a copy and tried to get her to autograph it for me.

No, Paula didn't write this book... at least not officially. She characterized it as Lev Dobriansky's unpublished memoirs, which she had invested several years working into a readable book. In assessing how the book characterizes her father's legacy, Paula was sure to emphasize his foresight:

• Containment would not be enough

• In recognizing the threat was not communism, but Russian imperialism

• That "Russia minus Ukraine = zero"

• Lev's purpose for Captive Nations was always the destruction of Russian imperialism

• The title of Unyielding Resolve was a reference to her father's commitment towards destroying Russia

• That the book is the closest thing the public has to a history of Captive Nations

Before my fellow WACL nerds snag a copy of this work, be forewarned: Paula noted the entire memoir was roughly 800 pages, which she cut down to a slim 300. She went out of her way at a few points to emphasize the amount of edits made to the book... Solely because of the publisher, mind you. It's not like Paula Dobriansky would want to cover up her father's links to the OUN-B, or anything of that nature...

One of the more interesting points Paula made was the role her father played in launching what we would now think of as "identity politics." Lev realized the Americans and the Soviets had gotten it all wrong from as far back as the 1950s, she confided: They thought it was all about economic wellbeing --how many color TVs, microwaves, and new cars they could supply their domestic populaces with.

What they failed to consider is that other things fueled the public more than money. There was also family, nationalism, religion, and a variety of other labels that constituted one's identity. The side that recognized this in the Cold War would be the one to prevail and Lev made it his mission to ensure the US would drift in this direction.

Clearly, he succeeded and then some. In 2025, this network has moved well beyond nationalism and the like. As I noted earlier this year, the International Republican Institute (IRI) has utilized transgender people in Bangladesh for questionable ends. This only scratches the surface. The IRI is part of the broader "color revolution" umbrella sponsored by the US Agency for International Development that's drawn so much ire of late.

Paula Dobriansky has been a part of this network her entire career. She worked in the National Security Council under Reagan and with USAID during the Clinton years. Bush the Lesser made her the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, a department knee deep in US "democracy" efforts overseas. Currently, she holds a senior position with the Atlantic Council. By her own admission, her father was instrumental institutionalized identity politics in this network.

Again, Lev Dobriansky likely had links to the OUN-B, an organization made up of real Nazis. As I've tried to emphasize throughout this year, the technique of color revolution is almost exclusively a tool of the Right. It was pioneered under Reagan and refined by Bush the Lesser, both of whom made good use of Paula Dobriansky. Straight from the horse's mouth, this is not a Communist plot to bring about "cultural Marxism." Far, far from it...

Paula made some other interesting statements we shall return to later. For now, I want to briefly touch on the other panel. This one had five speakers: Vi Kha Hoang of Vietnam; Elfidar Ilebir of the Uyghur American Association; Eunsook Jang, a defector from North Korea; Bounleaung Kern Kataviravong; and Rosa Maria Paya of Cuba Decide. They were supposed to represent the dissidents in the five countries that remain officially communistic: Vietnam, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Laos, and Cuba, respectively.

On the whole, this panel felt a lot like an audition. Despite Paula's perfunctory anti-Russian sentiment, the point of emphasis this year was clearly on the non-Russian parts of Asia and Latin America. Which is especially interesting in light of it unfolding on the same day Trump gave Russia a 50 day ultimatum to resolve the war in Ukraine.

Perhaps they simply didn't get the memo? Or maybe they really are out in the cold. It was noted at the end of the summit that Trump had yet to issue a Captive Nations proclamation. Every president has issued a statement, regardless of how tepid, for Captive Nations since Eisenhower. This would certainly be an interesting precedent for Trump to break.

As for the panel, almost every speaker noted that communism was no longer an ideology, but a "tool of repression." Frankly, most of the speakers were nearly unlistenable. The exceptions were Eunsook Jang and Rosa Maria Paya.

Jang was well coached. It was interesting watching her facial expressions while her fellow co-panelists spoke. She made sure to always display the appropriate amounts of sadness, horror and outrage. In many cases, she displayed more passion than those actually speaking, casting various looks across the audience so that we were all on the same page. She was every bit as poised for her own speech, and was sure to emphasize the allegations of sexual abuse in North Korea to good effect.

Rosa Maria Paya was the real star, however. She was just made a Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Fellow prior to the event and seemingly wanted to make sure the VoC got it's monies worth. She asked us to reflect on the consequences of the Western powers allowing five communist countries to exist. As for Cuba, she informed us it was far worse than 10 years ago and that 1.4 million people had disappeared from the island nation over the last four years. Per Paya, Obama was responsible for this via normalizing relations with Cuba. Further, everyone was ready for the coming revolution in Cuba except for the Western powers, she explained.

The final question addressed to Paula Dobriansky during her panel was advice for all the young people in the room: Where should they go to make a difference for their countries? Paula waxed for a moment on the value of public service and the allure of diplomacy. Then came the real sales pitch: the private sector. Non-government organization had so much to offer. She then noted her dear friend Damon Wilson was in the audience.

Like Paula, Wilson had a role in the administration of Bush the Lesser before of winding up at the Atlantic Council. Unlike Paula, he has another gig beyond that: president and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Next to USAID, NED is the major front for US color revolutions. Unlike USAID, NED has largely flown under the public radar.

With that in mind as I watched the second panel, I couldn't help but feel I was witnessing some type of audition. There was no denying this year's Captive Nations was far less well funded than the ones in years past. Moss Robinson told me word on the street is that VoC is having funding issues and I believe it based on what I saw. During the reception afterwards, I overheard numerous people complain of the lack of funding now available. Everyone seemed to be on bated breath, waiting to see how things would play out.

Was Wilson there to assess which of the second panel's speakers made the best pitch for their organization? Or was he making a more general assessment, such as the long term viability of the VoC itself? Regardless, the overriding theme of this year's Captive Nations appeared to be who would keep getting funding, and who was having there's cut.

And rebranding: After going all in on Ukraine for the last few years, the point of emphasis has clearly shifted to the developing world. But whether it will be enough for the VoC to survive is anyone's guess.

While normally the demise of an organization like the VoC would be cause for celebration, I'm given pause when considering what will replace it. While management may be fighting for their political lives, the color revolutions aren't going anywhere.

As for me, I already caught the train back home.