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.
Industry Reviews
"...highly persuasive... Illustrated with fascinating stories..." -- Foreign Affairs
"Both seasoned Sovietologists and newcomers to Cold War history will find food for thought in this creative reevaluation of the era's geopolitics." -- Publishers Weekly
"A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey 'from tyranny to liberty'." -- Kirkus
"Erik R. Scott's Defectors is a groundbreaking work of Cold War history and a real page-turner. Scott combines excellent storytelling with powerful arguments about migration, sovereignty, borders, and international law. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in Soviet-American relations and their impact on the wider world." -- Francine Hirsch, author of Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after
World War II
"This timely and deeply researched book shows how the historical conception and implementation of 'walls' can help to situate current debates about globalization and population flows. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the human and political dimensions of the first Cold War, showing how the superpowers colluded as well as competed in their efforts to define their borders." -- Diane P. Koenker, University College London
"Erik Scott deftly incorporates the motives, trajectories, and experiences of Soviet defectors into a subtle analysis of the efforts made by the major state protagonists during the Cold War to manage international migration in the post-World War II era. His carefully researched, illuminating, and intriguing book deserves to be widely read by students of international history." -- Peter Gatrell, author of The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a
Continent
"Zooming in to the case of the Soviet Union, Scott broadens our perspective on the critically important topic of emigration and the efforts to prevent it in the Cold War world. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand more about the haunting effects of defection." -- Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
"Scott has written a compelling new study of the Cold War, documenting numerous cases of citizens behind the Iron Curtain who found creative, daring, and dangerous ways to escape the Soviet system and gain freedom in the West between 1945 and 1991. He analyzes defectors' motivations and their tracking by the KGB and other agencies. Scott also examines how these defectors had an impact on the way nation-states competed for them and helped establish rules for
political migration and asylum... Scott's research is impressive and his narrative is strong because he draws from the stories of specific people who defected to illustrate the overall theme quite
effectively." -- Choice
"Defectors is a must-read for historians of the Cold War, globalization, and migration. Scott not only makes a compelling case for understanding the Cold War in terms of both superpower competition and "superpower collusion". He also proposes a genealogy of current efforts to restrain non-elite migration. In a conclusion that charts the fall of the defection paradigm, he argues that Cold War mobility regimes, with their prioritization of "political"
refugees, are "ill-suited to shelter migrants fleeing the 'slow violence' of climate change, deforestation, toxic drift, and other humanmade disasters". The book thus offers a profound rethinking of the past and
a new perspective on the problems of the present." -- Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, American Historical Review
