Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World

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. (July)