How easy was it to leave the Soviet Union and become an American citizen during the Cold War? Was it reasonably possible for a nobody Ivan Q. Ivanov to vacation in America or otherwise get on American soil without having to, say, sneak across the Bering Strait in a raft? (Tactics like Viktor Belenko flying his Foxbat to Japan are Right Out.) Would it have made any difference if Ivan did get to Manhattan?
Obviously, getting from East Berlin to West Berlin wasn’t possible without Great Escape-level theatrics. And these days, getting from Cuba to Miami requires illegal rafts and evading the border patrol of both countries involved. Was it similar for someone inside the USSR?
(And, as a final question, was it appreciably different in the period before the Second World War?)
Ayn Rand described her 1926 emigration from the USSR during HUAC testimony in 1947:
John McDowell: (R-Congressman, Pennsylvania): You came here in 1926, I believe you said. Did you escape from Russia?
Rand: No.
McDowell: Did you have a passport?
Rand: No, Strangely enough, they gave me a passport to come out here as a visitor.
McDowell: As a visitor?
Rand: It was at a time when the relaxed their orders a little bit. Quite a few people got out, I had some relatives here and I was permitted to come here for a year. I never went back.
Slight hijack. This reminds me of a buddy who was US Army on the border with East Germany. He said it was enormously difficult having to stand and watch the East German guards shoot their people who tried to make a mad dash for it. As much as he wanted to shoot the East German guard, if he or anyone else had done so, it would have been a one-way express ticket to Leavenworth.
Not so much of a thread hijack, but perhaps your thirst for such knowledge begs a reading of “MiG Pilot”… the story of Viktor Ivanovich Belenko. (1976 defector)
It will not answer your questions as much as it will probably add weight to your questions.
My favorite part was when he thought a regular supermarket was set up for him by our government.
My understanding is that your chances of getting an exit permit depended on a lot of factors, including which country of the Communist bloc you were in, where you wanted to go, and what you told Communist authorities you were doing there. Quite a number of Yugoslav citizens worked as guest workers in Italy. They commuted to their jobs in Italy in the morning and returned to their homes in Yugoslavia in the evening. Then again, Yugoslavia was Communist, but it was regarded as some sort of a renegade by the other nations in the Communist bloc.
East Germany was rather reluctant to grant exit visa, because many of its citizens were eager to escape to West Germany. But it was not entirely impossible; if you were able to convince the authorities that you had sufficient reasons to travel to the West, you could get an exit visa for temporary stays - athletes competing in sports competitions in the west, of course, but also rather ordinary people working for Eastern companies which had commercial contacts to the West. Some of them returned at the time prescribed, others decided to seize the opportunity and stay abroad. I also read that ordinary GDR citizens whose records were not bad in the eyes of the government had chances of getting exit permits for vacation to countries like Greece. Generally, it seems to have been a matter of discretion; if you had a family staying home, or if you had had an exit visa before and returned in time, this would increase your chances of getting another one.
Keep in mind that getting out of the Soviet Union wasn’t the only problem for potential emigrants; probably a bigger problem was getting in to another country. A Soviet citizen who managed to make it to the West, either illegally or on a tourist/business/student visa, wasn’t automatically going to be welcomed to stay forever by the respective government. Certainly some emigrants may have been able to make a legitimate case for political asylum, but your average non-political worker would have been an economic migrant and treated little differently than, say, the Mexican illegal immigrants in the US.
There were many different eras and things changed over the 70 some odd years the Soviet Union lasted.
From about 1967 to 1989ish was the era of the "“refusenik” mainly and typically (but not exclusively) these were Jews who the USSR didn’t want to see end up in Israel an American ally.
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*A typical excuse given by the OVIR the MVD department responsible for provisioning of exit visas was that the persons who had been given access at some point in their careers to information vital to Soviet national security could not be allowed to leave the country. *
During this era, an application for a Visa was often treated as a criminal offense and the applicant could expect anything from low level harassment to loss of job, schools for the kids to actual Soviet-era jail.
I have travelled to Russia pretty frequently on business, but well after the cold war. They still have the internal checkpoints set up in some places in Russia. Several times I’ve driven through the one between St. Petersburg and Vyborg, which is close to the Finnish border. According to my Russian colleagues, you needed the proper documentation to even get close to the border.
The Soviet Union in 1926 was still organizing itself, and in doing so was becoming far more tyrannical. During the period from the 1920s and the 1930s, virtually all personal and civil rights were revoked. Rand’s experiences would likely have been far different in, say, 1936.
In general, the people who were allowed to temporarily leave the Soviet Union were people who were politically reliable, powerful, or recognized experts in their fields. A professor would be given a visa to attend a conference, an athlete would be given a visa to compete internationally, an engineer or businessman would be given a visa to temporarily work abroad on projects the Soviet government approved of.
Note that these people had several things in common: They had lots to lose by defecting, as they often had significant assets and status in the Soviet Union. They tended to live well, so had no incentive to leave for financial or lifestyle reasons. And they were the kinds of people who probably didn’t have any state secrets to give up or horror stories to tell. Sometimes, these people would travel with KGB minders who kept tabs on them and made sure they followed the script given to them for what they could say, where they could go, etc.
Don’t believe a word of the claim that the Soviet Union was egalitarian - it wasn’t. Sure, everyone made close to the same amount of money, but that just meant the real economy found other ways to distribute goods. A famous athlete might make the same income as a factory worker, but it would turn out that the state would have a Dacha on a lake that the athlete could ‘use’ indefinitely for ‘training’. To prevent him from being late for important matches, the state would provide a ZIL limousine and driver - permanently. If you were in a special class, you could shop in special stores not open to the public, where you could find high quality goods not available elsewhere at any price.
And so it goes. People who had these kinds of perks often found it easy to travel out of the country.
But if you were a mill worker in an 800 sq ft apartment shared with five family members, and your uncle was arrested for being a refusenik and therefore you decided you wanted to take your family out of the country, you were utterly out of luck. Merely asking for the visa could be enough to have you harassed, your job taken away, your name removed from the 10 year waiting list for a car, etc. So most people just hunkered down, kept to themselves, and tried to make the best of it.
DevNull: Indeed. The Linux fortune files (filled with all kinds of statements, sourced and unsourced, sensical and inane) have a few excerpts of interviews Belenko gave shortly after his defection. They make interesting reading whenever they come up at random (or I search through the source files).
psychonaut: Yes, successfully gaining asylum in America was part of my original question.
jimmmy: That sounds close to what I would expect. Not quite North Korea crazy, but very controlling and very petty and vindictive. It’s amazing how much abusive governments act like abusive partners or parents.
If you read the stories of people who did defect, you can see how hard it could be. Mikhail Barysnikov’s defection was planned for months. He waited until he finished a show in Toronto, then pushed through a throng of fans to lose his KGB tail and jumped into a waiting getaway car in the back alley. Rudolph Nureyev dodged his guards, jumped over a security barrier in an airport in France and ran for it.
Alexander Godunov dodged his KGB guards in New York and ran to the American Embassy, which granted him asylum. But the Soviets arrested his wife who was along for the trip, and tried to haul her out of the country. The Americans actually sped to the airport and blocked the plane from taking off, then boarded it to ask Godunov’s wife if she wanted to stay behind. But she was surrounded by KGB and refused to talk (she probably had threats made to her family at home, etc). So the plane took off with her on it, and Godunov never got a chance to see her again.
Follow up question: How hard is it to leave Russia and the other former Soviet republics today? Whenever I think about movies I’ve seen about defection (White Nights; Moscow on the Hudson) and the stories I heard about refuseniks, I wonder whether all of that is a distant memory. Can people now get out fairly easily, assuming that they can find another country to accept them?
Getting out of Russia now is a matter of getting into another country; depending on what country that is, it can be more or less difficult, but it doesn’t have much to do with Russia itself. Now, a Russian citizen traveling within Russia does have to register with the police in the place they’re visiting, and carry documentation to prove that they’re where they’re supposed to be. If they are caught without it, they get harassed by the police a little and have to pay a bribe.
Foreigners traveling in Russia have to get a visa to do so. If you have ever thought American bureaucracy sucked, you haven’t applied for a visa to travel in Russia.
My major professor, a Jewish refusenik, left the USSR in 1973. There were a few complicated factors in his leaving–he was a successful academic and somewhat prominent in the Moscow refusenik scene, and his wife was the youngest ever political prisoner of the USSR (arrested and sent to Kazakhstan at nine years old) and the granddaughter of a Yiddish language novelist who had been given a much-publicized monkey trial and then executed. The USSR was not happy about letting them out, but because of a bureaucratic slip-up, they got the forms permitting them to emigrate to Israel.
In the months before they emigrated they were subject to a lot of harassment. A KGB agent was assigned to follow them everywhere, they were stopped by the police on the street and given a hard time, and their apartment was bugged. In the end they got out okay, but everything my professor had ever published disappeared from Soviet libraries overnight.
So, it was irritating for them, and took a long time, but they did not come to physical harm.
Given the rumours and reality of persecution for “acts against the state” If Ivan P Ivanoff wasn’t a “Politcal Refugee”, but made a run for it / applied for asylum would he then become a poitcal refugee?