Flight to Freedom
Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List.
by Valdislav Karsnov.
Hoover Institution. 264 pp. $16.95.
Only a slave society produces defections, a word still burdened by a pejorative root signifying a failure, or lack, but which has come to denote the opposite: proof that even at the risk of death, the human spirit refuses enslavement. That is no hyperbole; as Vladislav Krasnov shows in Soviet Defectors, the act of defection from the Soviet Union has in many cases constituted sufficient grounds for the KGB to seek a person’s murder.
Krasnov, having defected to Sweden in 1962 as an employee of Radio Moscow, is himself on the “KGB Wanted List.” He has since received a doctorate in Russian literature from the University of Washington and currently teaches at the Monterey Institute in California. In 1977 Krasnov came across the existence of a secret list of defectors. Every three to six years, it seems, the KGB prepares a volume of 2,000 to 6,000 personal entries, interspersed with bimonthly “update bulletins,” all stamped “absolutely secret.” A typical entry is about 150 to 200 words, and includes a physical description of the defector, names and places of residence of his relatives, circumstances and date of defection, description of subsequent activities abroad, and the sentence—usually death.
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The list Krasnov himself has compiled for this study is made up of 470 defectors from 1945 to 1969. While it excludes failed defections, would-be defectors who were returned to the Soviet Union by the West, those who returned voluntarily, or died, as well as those whose defection has gone undetected by the KGB, it nevertheless is broad enough to provide a useful basis for understanding the general phenomenon. Under Khrushchev, for example, the typical defector was likely to be a sailor in the merchant marine who jumped ship while on a port call in Canada, a factory technician who crossed the state border to Turkey, or a young soldier who escaped to West Berlin before the building of the Wall. By contrast, during Brezhnev’s first years in power (October 1964 to April 1969), the typical defector was a scholar sent to the West or a distinguished Soviet intellectual.
After the beginning of the 1970’s, when limited emigration was at last permitted from the USSR, Soviet defection actually seems to have increased. According to Krasnov, even Jews continued to defect, despite the relative liberalization of emigration laws applying to them. In 1973, for example, when about 30,000 Jews left the USSR legally, Leonid Goldgur, a sailor, jumped ship in Japan to go to Israel. Soviet Jews defected in later years, too, as if in defiance of the legal emigration procedures which not only involved a humiliating process of “selection” but also turned rejected applicants into pariahs of Soviet society. Among the best-known Jewish defectors are the chess champions Victor Korchnoy and Lev Alburt; the prize-winning pianists Mikhail Rud and Vladimir Ashkenazy as well as the violinist Naum Fruman; and Aleksandr Jourjin, a twenty-six-year-old nuclear-physics graduate of Moscow University who defected in August 1979 by walking across Finland to Sweden.
Krasnov devotes an entire section to “Defection as a Form of Dissidence,” offering the examples of Yuri Vlasenko, whose attempt to defect through the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1979 ended in his death, and Lithuanian dissident Vladas Sakalys, who defected across the Finnish borde r. Other would-be defectors, whose attempts failed, usually wound up in labor camps with other dissidents.
Some of the failed attempts can unfortunately be attributed to U.S. policy—as in the case of Simas Kudirka, the Lithuanian radio operator whom U.S. officials returned to his ship in 1970, and, more recently, the case of the Ukrainian sailor Miroslav Medvid who jumped ship in New Orleans last October. Needless to say, this policy enrages Krasnov, who appeals to the American government to recognize that defection is first and foremost an issue of human rights.
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But things are not always so simple. Absent from Krasnov’s book is a discussion of the serious vulnerabilities of some defectors. Oleg Tumanov, a Radio Liberty editor who returned to Moscow in April 1986 after two decades in the West, is a case in point. Tumanov, whose name appears on Krasnov’s list, had gotten to stay in the West (according to U.S. intelligence) as a result of a drinking brawl. Subsequent marital and other personal problems eventually prompted his return to the USSR where, in a recent interview with the Soviet foreign-affairs magazine New Times, he has already revealed information damaging to Radio Liberty and the West.
This is hardly to suggest that defectors should be shunned, but rather that they require very special attention. Krasnov is correct to urge the U.S. to take the plight of defectors seriously, and to view it “in the context of the global competition between the U.S. and the USSR for the hearts and minds of people around the world.” But his unqualified endorsement of all defectors as “fellow human beings who . . . have managed to retain their essential humanity” begs the question of who is a genuine defector and who is not, who may even be a double agent, or a person susceptible to blackmail and other such influences.
Krasnov recommends that the U.S. “proclaim and implement a genuine open-door policy by issuing an official promise to the effect that any person defecting from the USSR would be exempt from regular immigration procedures.” He might have mentioned in this connection that the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act was modified in March 1980 by eliminating the “preference” language stating that refugee status could be given to persons with a well-founded “fear of persecution on account of race, religion, or political opinion [if] they have fled from any Communist or Communist-dominated country or area.” This section, quite simply, needs to be restored.
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