He is the author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (2016) and editor of The Russian Review.
Scott applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World, and reported the following:
Defectors gained fame for crossing some of the most heavily fortified borders of the Cold War world, and their flight in turn imbued these borders with even greater political significance. While Berlin Wall was the most famous section of the Iron Curtain, the line dividing capitalism and communism took many different forms. Speaking of the Inner German Border, page 99 of Defectors notes:Learn more about Defectors at the Oxford University Press website.The Inner German Border was long, at over 600 miles; it was winding, with broad bulges and cul-de-sacs; it divided villages, spread across rivers, ran along a major autobahn route, and even made its way into the Baltic Sea.The page goes on to discuss some of the border enforcement technologies that emerged during the Cold War: concrete guard towers, anti-personnel mines attached to tripwires, floodlights, closed-circuit surveillance cameras, and concealed gamma-ray detectors.
One of the most interesting discoveries I made in researching this book was that borders between allied socialist countries were also uneasy places. Later on in this page, I explore how Soviet bloc states shared border technologies even as the Soviet Union spied on border enforcement officers in other Warsaw Pact countries and defended the primacy of its claims on defectors. As I write toward the end of the page:A 1958 agreement concluded between the USSR and its socialist allies established the basis for any member state to extradite criminals from any other member state. However, in a telling sign of the hierarchy within the alliance, extradition from the Soviet Union could be prevented if the individual was also accused of committing a crime on Soviet territory, a loophole that allowed Moscow to hold individuals from neighboring socialist states who entered the Soviet Union without authorization.These hierarchies within the communist camp created resentment among the Soviet Union’s allies and ultimately helped undermine the Iron Curtain.
While Defectors explores the construction of Cold War borders in many other places across the globe, page 99 does give the reader a good sense of the primary ideological fault line of the era.
--Marshal Zeringue
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