Defectors
How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
A broad-ranging history of defectors from the Communist world to the West and how their Cold War treatment shaped present-day restrictions on cross-border movement.
Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world's attention during the Cold War. Their stories were given sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. Upon reaching the West, they were entitled to special benefits, including financial assistance and permanent residency. In contrast to other migrants, defectors were pursued by the states they left even as they were eagerly sought by the United States and its allies. Taking part in a risky game that played out across the globe, defectors sought to transcend the limitations of the Cold War world.
Defectors follows their treacherous journeys and looks at how their unauthorized flight via land, sea, and air gave shape to a globalized world. It charts a global struggle over defectors that unfolded among rival intelligence agencies operating in the shadows of an occupied Europe, in the forbidden border zones of the USSR, in the disputed straits of the South China Sea, on a hijacked plane 10,000 feet in the air, and around the walls of Soviet embassies. What it reveals is a Cold War world whose borders were far less stable than the notion of an "Iron Curtain" suggests. Surprisingly, the competition for defectors paved the way for collusion between the superpowers, who found common cause in regulating the spaces through which defectors moved. Disputes over defectors mapped out the contours of modern state sovereignty, and defection's ideological framework hardened borders by reinforcing the view that asylum should only be granted to migrants with clear political claims.
Although defection all but disappeared after the Cold War, this innovative work shows how it shaped the governance of global borders and helped forge an international refugee system whose legacy and limitations remain with us to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this radical reassessment of U.S.-Soviet relations from 1944 to the U.S.S.R.'s collapse in 1991, historian Scott (Familiar Strangers) demonstrates how Washington and Moscow, through "self-interested acts of inter-imperial collusion," regulated the defection of Soviet citizens to America. Citing declassified KGB records and other materials, Scott notes that American officials, under the 1951 Refugee Convention, encouraged the several million Soviet citizens displaced in Germany to seek asylum in the U.S., but also took measures to make sure only select defectors (mostly those with military and science backgrounds) were actually admitted. The Soviets, on the other hand, were determined to repatriate "nonreturners" and engaged in a massive tracking effort with diligent officials concocting schemes to lure individuals home, often enlisting family members still living in the U.S.S.R. to apply pressure. Scott relates in detail several high-profile defection cases—including the 1970 hijacking of a Soviet domestic passenger plane by a father and his 13-year-old son—to show how both superpowers contrived to control defection and regulate international spaces in their own national interests. He also suggests that Cold War–era stratagems, based on limiting human migration, are still in place and ill-serve peoples trying to escape the "slow violence" of climate change, deforestation, and other human-made disasters. Both seasoned Sovietologists and newcomers to Cold War history will find food for thought in this creative reevaluation of the era's geopolitics.
