Emigration from the Eastern Bloc

• 1. Introduction

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  Emigration from the Eastern Bloc was not merely restricted during the Cold War. It was redefined as treason. A Soviet decree from 1929 stated that any official who went over "to the camp of the enemies of the working class and the peasants" and refused to return would be executed within twenty-four hours of being caught. That single sentence captures the logic of an entire system built not to govern movement, but to abolish it.

  Before the Berlin Wall sealed the divide in August 1961, more than 3.5 million East Germans had already crossed into the West. Ethnic Germans were expelled or fled by the millions. Defectors hijacked planes. A soldier was photographed mid-leap over a barbed-wire barrier. And behind each of those individuals was a state apparatus calculating, in hard currency and in acres of fallow farmland, exactly what it was losing.

  How did restrictions this severe come to exist? What did governments and economists and party secretaries say to justify them? And what finally brought the system down?

• 2. Origins of Restriction

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  Just two months after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the new Bolshevik regime instituted passport controls and forbade the exit of belligerent nationals. This was striking because the movement's original program had explicitly demanded the abolition of passports. The contradiction was set aside in the interest of keeping labor inside Soviet borders and denying opposition armies a recruitment pool.

  By 1919, travel abroad required NKVD approval. A year later the Special Department of the Cheka added its own layer of required consent. In 1922, both the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian SFSR issued rules that foreclosed virtually all legal departures. The system was not yet physical, but it was bureaucratically nearly airtight.

  The physical dimension came later. A special corps of the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, the GPU, created a border guard system such that by 1928 even illegal departure had become nearly impossible. In 1932, as Stalin's first Five Year Plan forced collectivization, internal passport controls arrived alongside Propiska residence permits and what were called "101st kilometre" restrictions. Together these did not merely prevent emigration. They constrained movement within tiny local areas.

  The Soviet newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda later described the decision to emigrate as "unnatural and like burying someone alive." That framing tells you how the state taught citizens to regard the very desire to leave.

• 3. Brain Drain and Economic Logic

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  Yuri Andropov, then the CPSU Director on Relations with Communist and Workers Parties of Socialist Countries, wrote an urgent letter on the 28th of August 1958 to the Central Committee about a significant fifty percent increase in the number of East German intelligentsia among refugees. He stated: "the flight of the intelligentsia has reached a particularly critical phase."

  The economic consequences were not abstract. By 1960 the combination of World War II losses and the mass westward emigration had left East Germany with only 61% of its population of working age, compared to 70.5% before the war. The loss fell disproportionately on engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. The direct cost of manpower losses was estimated at between $7 billion and $9 billion. East German party leader Walter Ulbricht later claimed West Germany owed him $17 billion in compensation. The drain of East Germany's young population also potentially cost it over 22.5 billion East marks in lost educational investment.

  Eastern Bloc governments framed emigration restrictions publicly as protection against exploitation. A Hungarian economist stated that "it was quite obvious that the socialist countries intended to prevent their professionals, trained at the expense of their society, from being used to enrich other countries." Bulgarian and Romanian representatives argued that without restrictions, they "would become like Africa." Eastern European spokesmen also stressed what they called an "education tax": the state had subsidized each citizen from birth and held a right to recoup its investment.

  SED leader Walter Ulbricht saw not only the brain drain but the Grenzganger problem: 50,000 East Berliners crossing daily into West Berlin for work. Meanwhile, rural collectivization campaigns drove off one third of East Germany's wealthier farmers, leaving over 10% of its arable land fallow and producing food shortages that intensified existing scarcities.

• 4. The Berlin Loophole

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  East Germany introduced a new passport law on the 11th of December 1957 that reduced the overall number of refugees leaving the country. It had an unintended effect. The percentage of those leaving through West Berlin shot from 60% to well over 90% by the end of 1958.

  The reason was structural. When the Inner German border was formally closed in 1952, the city sector border in Berlin remained administered by all four occupying powers, making it far more accessible than the rest of the frontier. Anyone who could reach East Berlin could board a subway train to West Berlin. No physical barrier existed. Penalties for those caught were severe, but the absence of a wall made them largely unenforceable.

  Soviet ambassador to East Germany Mikhail Pervukhin observed that "the presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which unfortunately, does not always turn out in favor of the Democratic East Berlin."

  The flow through Berlin swelled: 144,000 in 1949, 199,000 in 1960, and 207,000 in just the first seven months of 1961. On the 15th of July 1961, Ulbricht held a rare press conference insisting that "no one has any intention of building a wall", while making clear that "the outflow has to stop."

  On the 13th of August 1961, a barbed-wire barrier was erected by East Germany. Two days later, police and army engineers began constructing a more permanent concrete wall.

• 5. The Wall and Its Aftermath

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  At the moment of the Berlin Wall's construction, only 11,000 western troops were stationed in the city compared to 500,000 Soviet troops surrounding them in East Germany. The construction closed the largest gap in what was known as the Iron Curtain. Along with the wall itself, the 830-mile zonal border expanded to 3.5 miles wide on its East German side in some areas, featuring a tall steel-mesh fence, a "death strip" bordered by plowed earth to reveal footprints, and mined fields.

  After 1961, only 5,000 people crossed the Berlin Wall over the following twenty-eight years. The total net emigration from Central and Eastern Europe fell to 1.9 million between 1960 and 1969, then to 1.1 million between 1970 and 1979.

  For those who still attempted escape, penalties remained severe. Estimates for those killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall range from 136 to just over 200. About 75,000 people were caught and imprisoned. In East Germany the term Republikflucht was applied to anyone wishing to leave to non-socialist countries, and attempts constituted a criminal act. A 1955 Socialist Unity Party propaganda booklet described leaving as "an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity."

  For those who sought legal permission to emigrate, the process was designed as punishment. Applicants were subject to workplace firings or demotions, denied university access, forced to relinquish their passports, and subjected to years of waiting with no set time limit on decisions. Applications could be denied without appeal on subjective grounds including "the interest of the state."

• 6. Ethnic Emigration and Ransom

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  More than 75% of those emigrating from Eastern Bloc countries between 1950 and 1990 did so under bilateral agreements for ethnic migration. The largest flows involved ethnic Turks from Bulgaria, ethnic Germans from Poland and Romania, ethnic Jews from the Soviet Union, and ethnic Hungarians from various countries.

  The mechanisms behind these flows were often financial. West Germany negotiated the exodus of ethnic Germans from Poland in exchange for large loans. Romania was paid a fixed amount of 5,000 West Deutsche Marks per ethnic German permitted to leave. That rate rose to 7,800 DM in 1983 and to 11,000 DM in 1988.

  East Germany's arrangement was the most systematized. It exported 70,000 political prisoners to West Germany in exchange for 70,000 DM per head, netting the regime 3.4 billion West Deutsche Marks at a moment of financial crisis. East Germany categorized these payments not as ransom but as compensation for the damage those individuals had supposedly inflicted on socialism, plus reimbursement for the cost of their education.

  Most Soviets permitted to leave during this period were ethnic Jews allowed to immigrate to Israel after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970 prompted the Soviets to open very limited ethnic emigration channels. In 1973, the United States Congress made liberalizing Soviet emigration policy a prerequisite for lifting trade barriers, resulting in the emigration of 370,000 Soviet citizens, mostly ethnic Jews.

  The country-level totals reveal the scale of this system. Czechoslovakia saw 1,973,000 emigrants between 1946 and 1982, representing 14% of its population. East Germany registered 3,365,000 emigrants, nearly 20% of its population, almost all of them before the Berlin Wall. Albania, at the other extreme, recorded under 1,000 emigrants in the same period.

• 7. Famous Defectors

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  Joseph Stalin's own daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West, though she returned in 1984. MiG-25 pilot Viktor Belenko flew his aircraft to Japan and handed it to western intelligence. U.N. Undersecretary General Arkady Shevchenko defected while holding one of the most senior positions held by a Soviet national in an international organization.

  The arts produced some of the most public defections. Ballet stars Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova and Alexander Godunov all left for the West. Chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi defected as well. Tennis player Martina Navratilova defected to the United States after the 1975 U.S. Open. Chess world champion Boris Spassky emigrated to France in a fashion the source describes as comparable to defection.

  East German defectors included writer Wolfgang Leonhard and soldier Conrad Schumann, who was photographed jumping the Berlin Wall while it was still under construction. A number of European football players also defected, including Jörg Berger.

  On the 15th of June 1970, twelve mostly Jewish defectors were caught attempting to hijack a plane out of the Soviet Union. The two leaders received death sentences, later commuted to fifteen years in a labor camp. At least six attempted skyjacking defections were made from Armenia, the Soviet Union and Lithuania between 1970 and 1971. Three airliners were hijacked by East German citizens seeking to reach West Germany, the most well-known being the LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 hijacking in 1978.

  Behind the famous names, a far larger number of non-prominent people attempted to leave through means that went largely unreported. The total of these "black stream" defectors remains unknown.

• 8. Collapse and Free Movement

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  By 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signaled a move toward liberalization. Emigration increased following reforms passed in 1986. The flow of ethnic Germans from the Eastern Bloc rose from 42,786 per year in 1986 to 202,673 in 1988.

  In August 1989, Hungary removed its physical border restrictions with Austria. The following month, more than 13,000 East German tourists in Hungary escaped through that opening into Austria. The Monday demonstrations, the Montagsdemonstrationen, began in East Germany, with protesters demanding freedom of travel and democratic elections. Crowds that started at a few hundred at the Nikolai Church in East Berlin chanting "Wir sind das Volk!" grew to exceeding 300,000 the following week.

  On the 9th of November 1989, a government spokesman misstated new regulations and announced that East Germans could cross to the West effective immediately. Before the rules were supposed to take effect, tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded Checkpoint Charlie and other checkpoints. Border guards made hectic telephone calls to their superiors. No one among East German authorities would take personal responsibility for issuing lethal orders. The checkpoints were opened.

  The official dismantling of the Berlin Wall by the East German military began on the 13th of June 1990 in Bernauer Strasse. On the 1st of July, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all border controls ceased. That same month, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl convinced Gorbachev to drop Soviet objections to a reunited Germany within NATO in exchange for substantial German economic aid, removing the final obstacle to German reunification.

  In Czechoslovakia, following the suppression of a student protest in Prague, a two-hour general strike involving all citizens of the country was held on the 27th of November 1989. On the 10th of December, President Gustav Husak appointed the first largely non-Communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948 and resigned, in what became known as the Velvet Revolution.