On September 24, 2023, 76-year-old Lt. Viktor Belenko died, almost unnoticed, in the small town of Rosebud, Illinois. Reading his obituary jogged my memory: I was drafting my dissertation when, in the summer of 1976, he defected, along with a newly developed Soviet fighter jet, a supersonic interceptor known as the MiG-25, in Hakodate, Japan, a brave and even brazen “flight to freedom” on his part. Those of us who came of age during the Cold War share a special awareness of the high drama often associated with the defection of Soviet bloc citizens such as Belenko to the west. Yet, despite the significance of this core and multifaceted aspect of the superpower rivalry, historian Erik R. Scott's intrinsically interesting, engagingly written, nuanced, and timely book on the subject represents the first global study of defectors, a term the author claims rose and fell with the Cold War. Filling a gaping hole in the historiography, Defectors is based on exhaustive archival research in available holdings in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, the US, and Great Britain, as well as on impressive use of published documents, secondary literature, and Cold War era films, memoirs, and journals.
Scott effectively makes his case that “though a numerically small group, defectors had an outsized political importance” (10). In demonstrating how the histories of migration, especially restraints on migration, and globalization became intertwined, Scott seeks to show how the evolving treatment of defectors shaped current-day policies on cross-border movement, for the superpowers’ competition for defectors ironically gave rise to collusion between them as they imposed “a lasting global architecture of migration by regulating the spaces in between” (19). In unpacking the term defector, a category created by both superpowers, the author reveals the motivations of defectors, which proved to be more complicated and contradictory than the US government and media's depiction of them as people who sought refuge abroad for ideological reasons and the Soviet side's casting them as traitors. Media coverage of celebrated defectors obscured the fact that US authorities had an evolving and complicated algorithm for determining who would be welcomed in the United States as a defector that considered not only political persuasion, but also race, class, and value to America.
The monograph is divided into two parts, each of which comprises three mostly thematic chapters. In part one, Scott examines how the US and USSR divided the world into two “rival but reinforcing spheres governed by different approaches to managing international migration” (19). This part of the book reviews not only the stories states told about defectors, but also the stories they told about themselves. It begins with a close look at how the two countries competed over the control of migration after the war, devising systems for classifying and channeling the migrants as the classification “defector” became the dominant one. To put this in perspective, approximately 450,000 Soviet citizens remained outside the country in 1946, whose government allocated huge resources to find and return them. At this time, the US government had already established a defector program, the psychological underpinnings of which were informed by the postwar popularity of Freudian psychology. To the dismay of those operating the program, few of the defectors, it turned out, fled the Soviet bloc for ideological reasons, even though defectors often told their examiners what the defectors assumed their handlers wanted to hear. The KGB's analysis of what caused people to defect, interestingly, aligned with the CIA's, except that the Soviet side stressed the importance of the west's anti-Soviet propaganda. It therefore established the Committee for the Return to the Homeland to compete with the Tolstoy Foundation and other programs in Germany, and not without some success: between 1955 and 1958, 7,810 re-defected to the Soviet Union, providing grist to the Soviet propaganda mill and making US authorities suspect that Soviet agents lurked among those requesting asylum. A turning point in the history of defection, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 resulted in a precipitous drop in the number of defectors and shifted the phenomenon to one waged across the globe. This proved ever more the case given the Soviet state's system for guarding its borders and monitoring those who did the guarding, thereby making it possible for only a handful to escape each year.
In part two, Scott deftly explores how athletes, cultural figures, and tourists became instruments of the superpowers’ foreign policies and how defectors affected international law. Devoting chapters to Soviets abroad, international waters, and Cold War airspaces, he argues that “the resolution of legal questions concerning borders on land, at seas, and around embassies was crucial to shaping the postwar global order and had profound consequences for migrants” (129). In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, affirming the right to seek asylum. The 1951 Refugee Convention based its definition of refugee on fear of political or other persecution that made it problematic for someone to return home, thereby allowing the National Security Council to categorize as a defector anyone who escaped from the Soviet zone and feared going back. Although the superpowers could not reach agreement on what constituted “humanitarian grounds,” in 1961 they brokered and signed the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, “the most sweeping codification of diplomatic law in history” (142), which enshrined the principle of embassy inviolability but circumvented the issue of asylum.
In fascinating detail, Scott scrutinizes the consequences of the 1954 seizure of the Soviet tanker Tuapse by the Kuomintang on Taipei, which inaugurated a debate on delimiting maritime borders as the ship's captive crew now found itself at the center of international debate and the sea became recognized as a space of ideological peril. Bringing closure to the debate, the 1958 United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea raised the issue of the immunity of state-registered vessels. The disagreements that flared over establishing limits on territorial waters resulted in two subsequent conventions and an even more sweeping one in 1982. The last chapter dissects the story of Pranas Brazinskas and his teenage son Algirdas who, on October 15, 1970, hijacked a plane from Batumi, forcing it to land in the Turkish city of Trabzon, the first successful hijacking of a Soviet airplane, resulting in agreement over treating hijacking as cases of terrorism. Scott concludes that the superpower competition over controlling global migration in the wake of WWII “promised to turn those rendered stateless by mass displacement into citizens, reclaimed by the country they left or welcomed by their country of refuge. In the wake of decolonization and in the aftermath of the Brazinskases’ hijacking, it was clear that statelessness had returned—if it had ever gone away in the first place” (219).
Scott has authored a major, authoritative work, from which I learned a great deal. I have one minor criticism of the book, however, that raises several related question about which I simply wanted to know more. The author convincingly shows the impact defectors had on shaping international law, but I remain unconvinced by his depiction of defectors as migrants and therefore wonder if he might have overstated his claims regarding the legacy of the international refugee system. Migrants often move within and between states and are not necessarily asylum seekers. (Are POWs and Ostarbeitery migrants?) Moreover, despite the porousness of the Iron Curtain and the superpowers’ collusion on some matters involving defectors, Scott could have emphasized more that defection remained essentially a one-way street. After all, how many Americans defected to the Soviet Union who were not implicated in espionage? Did the motivations of Soviet citizens seeking refuge abroad change over time? It is clear why the CIA and government agencies in the immediate postwar period expressed disappointment over the small number of ideological defectors from the USSR, regardless of how the media portrayed them, but might their perspective need deeper probing? Might inchoate beliefs or suspicions that life was better “over there” and grievances Soviet citizens accumulated in dealing with Soviet power—often involving basic issues of human dignity—constitute ideological beliefs? The Soviet side certainly thought so. Soviet citizens who took advantage of new opportunities to leave the country legally in the 1970s, especially Jews and Armenians, and also those who married foreigners and legally migrated can be classified as migrants, but were they viewed as such in the popular imagination? What are Scott's estimates for the number of Soviet defectors and for the percentage of those who reconsidered their action and returned home to the Soviet Union?
These remarks aside, Scott's Defectors will become an essential resource as Russia continues to hemorrhage people in a troubled world marked by new kinds and seemingly endless waves of migrants, refugees, people taken by force to other states, and even defectors, a term that is likely experiencing a revival. Sadly, though, it is hard to imagine in today's climate the kind of unforeseen collusion between Russia and the US resulting in changes in international law that Scott so ably analyzes for the Cold War era.
