Recap: Erik Scott on “Defectors. How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World”

Erik Scott, Professor and Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies Center Director at the University of Kansas, spoke at the REEES Program of the Yale MacMillan Center about his new book, Defectors. How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World, moderated by David Engerman, the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History. Defectors lays out the broad ranging history of defectors from the Communist world to the West during the Cold War. The book also analyzes how their Cold War treatment has shaped present-day restrictions on cross-border movement across the post-Soviet world. 

Scott told attendees about how these defectors seized the world’s attention during the Cold War where their stories were given sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. He spoke of the 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. Scott also shared his current project on hostage taking in the Cold War.