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Soon after the formation of the Soviet Union, emigration restrictions were put in place to keep citizens from leaving the various countries of the Soviet Socialist Republics, though defections still occurred. During and after World War II, similar restrictions were put in place in non-Soviet countries of the Eastern Bloc, which is consisted of the communist states of eastern Europe. Following is a List of Eastern Bloc defectors.

Background

Creation of the Eastern Bloc

Bolsheviks took power following the Russian Revolution of 1917. During the Russian Civil War that followed, coinciding with the Red Army's entry into Minsk in 1919, Belarus was declared the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia. After more conflict, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was declared in 1920. With the defeat of the Ukraine in the Polish-Ukrainian War, after the March 1921 Peace of Riga following the Polish-Soviet War, central and eastern Ukraine were annexed into the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1922, the Russian SFSR, Ukraine SSR, Byelorussian SSR and Transcaucasian SFSR were officially merged as republics creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union.

At the end of World War II, most eastern and central European capitals were controlled by the Soviet Union. During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union began the creation of the Eastern Bloc by directly annexed several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These included Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), Lithuania (became Lithuania SSR), part of eastern Finland (became Karelo-Finnish SSR) and northern Romania (became the Moldavian SSR). Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania, the People's Republic of Albania, and later East Germany from the Soviet zone of German occupation.

Emigration restrictions

Two months after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the new regime instituted passport controls and forbade the exit of belligerent nationals from Russia. Beginning in 1919, travel abroad required the approval of the NKVD, with the additional consent of the Special Department of the Cheka added later. In 1922, after the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, both the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian SFSR issued general rules for travel that foreclosed virtually all departures, making legal emigration all but impossible. However, the Soviet Union could not control its borders until a system of border guards was created through a special corp of the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (GPU), such that by 1928, even illegal departure was all but impossible. In 1932, internal passport controls were introduced.. When combined with individual city Propiska ("place of residence") permits, and internal freedom of movement restrictions often called the 101st kilometre, these rules greatly restricted mobility within even small areas. When the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was promulgated, virtually no legal emigration took place, except for very limited family reunification and some forced deportations.

By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to controlling national movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Eastern Bloc countries stressed the debt that individuals owed to socialist states, which offered care from birth, including subsidized education and training and, thus, they justified the emigration restrictions as an "education tax" with the states having a right to recoup its investment. Open emigration policies would create a "brain drain", forcing the state to readjust its wage structure at a cost to other economic priorities. Up until 1952, however, the lines between East Germany and the western occupied zones could be easily crossed in most places. Accordingly, before 1961, most of that east-west flow took place between East and West Germany, with over 3.5 million East Germans emigrating to West Germany before the 1961, On August 13, 1961, barbed-wire barrier that would become the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was erected by East Germany. Two days later, police and army engineers began to construct a more permanent concrete wall. Along with the wall, the 830 mile zonal border became 3.5 miles wide on its East German side in some parts of Germany with a tall steel-mesh fence running along a "death strip" bordered by bands of plowed earth, to slow and to reveal the prints of those trying to escape, and mined fields.

Defectors

Although international movement was, for the most part, strictly controlled, there was a steady loss through escapees who were able to use ingenious methods to evade frontier security. Numerous notable Eastern Bloc citizens defected to non-Eastern Bloc countries. In East Germany, the term Republikflucht (flight from the Republic) was used for citizens trying to leave East Germany without prior approval by the authorities. Ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) pamphlets stated "leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity". While media sources often reported high level defections, non-prominent defections usually went unreported. The number of non-public "black stream" defectors is not known. On June 15, 1970, twelve mostly Jewish defectors were caught attempting to escape via aircraft, and were assigned harsh sentences, including death sentence for the two leaders, which was later commuted to 15 years in a labor camp. At least six attempted skyjacking defection attempts were made from Armenia, the Soviet Union and Lithuania from 1970 to 1971. Among the notable defectors from East Germany, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the People's Republic of Romania, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Hungary, the People's Republic of Albania and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia before those countries' conversions from Communist states in the early 1990s were:

See also

• List of Cold War pilot defections
• List of KGB defectors

Notes

1. ^ Dowty 1989, p. 69 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
2. ^ Dowty 1989, p. 114 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
3. Eastern bloc, The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.
4. Hirsch, Donald, Joseph F. Kett, James S. Trefil, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy',' Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002, ISBN 0618226478, page 230
5. Wettig 2008, p. 69 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFWettig2008 (help)
6. Roberts 2006, p. 43 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFRoberts2006 (help)
7. ^ Wettig 2008, p. 21 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFWettig2008 (help)
8. ^ Senn, Alfred Erich, Lithuania 1940 : revolution from above, Amsterdam, New York, Rodopi, 2007 ISBN 9789042022256
9. Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, Stalin's Cold War, New York : Manchester University Press, 1995, ISBN 0719042011
10. Roberts 2006, p. 55 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFRoberts2006 (help)
11. Shirer 1990, p. 794 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFShirer1990 (help)
12. Granville, Johanna, The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, Texas A&M University Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58544-298-4
13. Grenville 2005, p. 370-71 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGrenville2005 (help)
14. Cook 2001, p. 17 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFCook2001 (help)
15. Wettig 2008, p. 96-100 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFWettig2008 (help)
16. ^ Dowty 1989, p. 68 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
17. ^ Dowty 1989, p. 70 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
18. ^ Dowty 1989, p. 115 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help) Cite error: The named reference "dowty115" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
19. Dowty 1989, p. 116 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
20. Dowty 1989, p. 121 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
21. Mynz 1995, p. 2.2.1 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMynz1995 (help)
22. Senate Chancellery, Governing Mayor of Berlin, The construction of the Berlin Wall states "Between 1945 and 1961, around 3.6 million people left the Soviet zone and East Berlin"
23. Pearson 1998, p. 75 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFPearson1998 (help)
24. Dowty 1989, p. 124 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDowty1989 (help)
25. Black et al. 2000, p. 141 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBlackEnglishHelmreichMcAdams2000 (help)
26. Turnock 1997, p. 19 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFTurnock1997 (help)
27. ^ Krasnov 1985, p. 2 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKrasnov1985 (help)
28. "Wer die Deutsche Demokratische Republik verläßt, stellt sich auf die Seite der Kriegstreiber ("He Who Leaves the German Democratic Republic Joins the Warmongers")" (HTML). Notizbuch des Agitators ("Agitator's Notebook"). Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Agitation Department, Berlin District. November 1955. Retrieved 2008-02-17. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
29. Krasnov 1985, p. 5 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKrasnov1985 (help)
30. ^ Krasnov 1985, p. 124-5 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKrasnov1985 (help)

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• Eastern Bloc defectors
• Eastern bloc