Assembly of Captive European Nations

The ACEN undertook a number of activities to accomplish its goals.  With funding from the Free Europe Committee, the organization was able to establish a main office in New York, as well as offices in Paris, Bonn, and London and delegations throughout the world. The generous funding allowed the ACEN to sponsor symposia and exhibitions in addition to mailing thousands of letters and reports to government officials.  ACEN-published materials were distributed throughout the United States and abroad, provided free of charge to libraries, schools, and institutions.

Beginning in 1959, the ACEN promoted the annual commemoration of Captive Nations Week, an event that spurred a torrent of correspondence to government officials throughout the United States to ensure that the captive nations were not forgotten. The ACEN sponsored an anti-communist photo and essay display called the "Soviet Empire Exhibit," graphically depicting scenes of Soviet persecution along with facts about existing standards of living.  The exhibit opened in New York in 1958 and subsequently in cities around the world.

The late 1960s saw a decrease in ACEN activity, with a number of foreign delegations closing their doors.  As the Cold War entered a period where open antagonism gave way to policies of detente, support of organizations such as the ACEN gradually fell away.  In 1971, Free Europe, Inc., was ordered to suspend all financial assistance to ACEN activities as of January 1972 in the name of economizing and "budget-trimming." ( Free Europe Committee was covertly funded by the CIA in order to further the U.S. government's Cold War attempts to fight communism through the use of exiled nationals ). The remaining international offices were closed on short notice and all publication activity came to a halt.  With the support of individual sponsors, a skeleton crew endeavored to keep the ACEN going, but within a couple of years, even this effort stopped.

The ACEN provided a valuable service to its governmental and private anti-communist supporters: by keeping abreast of communist persecution and publicizing this knowledge in the strongest of terms, organizations such as the ACEN could say aloud what government officials could only think.  In vehement declarations, the ACEN condemned the Soviet Union and garnered the support of public and private citizens for its cause.  When the United States government deemed activities in this vein no longer useful in the climate of a changing political agenda, they withdrew support.