page_title: Emigration from the Eastern Bloc
section_title: Increasing transnational restrictions
hierarchical_section_title: Emigration from the Eastern Bloc / History / Increasing transnational restrictions
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Grensovergang Helmstedt-Marienborn - lichtmast / commandotoren / brug
context_page_description: Emigration from the Eastern Bloc was a point of controversy during the Cold War. After World War II, emigration restrictions were imposed by countries in the Eastern Bloc, which consisted of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe. Legal emigration was in most cases only possible in order to reunite families or to allow members of minority ethnic groups to return to their homelands.
  Eastern Bloc governments argued that strict limits to emigration were necessary to prevent a brain drain. The United States and Western European governments argued that they represented a violation of human rights. Despite the restrictions, defections to the West occurred.
  After East Germany tightened its zonal occupation border with West Germany, the city sector border between East Berlin and West Berlin became a loophole through which defection could occur. This was closed with the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Thereafter, emigration from the Eastern Bloc was effectively limited to illegal defections, ethnic emigration under bilateral agreements, and a small number of other cases.
context_section_description: Up until 1952, the lines between Soviet-occupied eastern 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 1961, which comprised most of the total net emigration of 4.0 million emigrants from all of Central and Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1959.  In response to growing numbers crossing the borders, the Soviet Union instituted tighter border controls around their zone, the Inner German border. In 1955, the Soviet Union passed a law transferring control over civilian access in Berlin to East Germany, which officially abdicated the Soviets from direct responsibility of matters therein, while passing control to a regime not recognized in the west.  When large numbers of East Germans then defected under the guise of "visits", the new East German state essentially eliminated all travel to the west in 1956.  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."
  Restrictions implemented in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War stopped most east–west migration, with only 13.3 million migrations westward between 1950 and 1990.  By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to controlling national movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc (along with China, Mongolia and North Korea), with heavy restrictions preventing such emigration.  A Hungarian economist stated that "it was quite obvious that the socialist countries—like other countries—intended to prevent their professionals, trained at the expense of their society, from being used to enrich other countries."  Eastern European spokesmen maintained that they were keeping would-be emigrants from suffering from insufficient linguistic and cultural preparation.  They also 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. Bulgarian and Romanian representatives had long argued that they could not afford to match western salaries and, without emigration restrictions, they "would become like Africa."  The restrictions presented a quandary for some Eastern Bloc states that had been more economically advanced and open than the Soviet Union, such that crossing borders seemed more natural—especially between East and West Germany where no prior border existed.
caption: Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing wall and guard tower
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