DEFECTORS

A densely researched examination of the defector program constructed in the West as a response to Soviet restriction of movement during the Cold War.

The harboring of defectors from the Soviet Union in their “leap to freedom” was a tremendous coup for the West. However, as historian and Russian Review editor Scott shows in this multilayered academic study, it was also a delicate balancing act between the two Cold War powers. The right to seek asylum was affirmed in the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and refugee protections were later detailed in the 1951 Geneva Convention. Although originally designated as those who fled from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, political defectors came to encompass migrants from China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere in the socialist world. The backgrounds of the defectors were diverse—from artist to sailor to politician to embassy administrator—and their cases often uneasily straddled the “political and ideological fault lines of the Cold War.” In the U.S., the National Security Council created a defector program by the early 1950s, with the aim of selecting Soviet defectors who could be helpful in relaying intelligence information and whose stories of flight would aid the Cold War narrative of West versus East. However, not all defectors were welcome, nor did they have an easy time adjusting, and many even returned to the Soviet Union. Scott looks at many cases that were more complicated than that of Victor Kravchenko, “the Soviet official who fled while on assignment in Washington [and] published I Chose Freedom in 1946, just as the battle lines between the Cold War’s superpowers were being drawn.” Scott makes a strong argument that limiting border movement became an integral part of “globalization’s architecture” and that “defectors were both the catalysts for the delimiting of previously open spaces and the most visible representatives of the consequences of enclosure.”

A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey “from tyranny to liberty.”