Defector stories – high level personnel who escaped from the former USSR and sought asylum in the West – made for gripping propaganda. Ideologically driven people, attracted by the magnetic appeal of freedom and capitalist consumerism, risked their lives to escape the dreary life of Communist tyranny. Sounds like a great morality play; the triumph of the indefatigable human will to freedom over totalitarian conformity.

How true is this picture? While there is a grain of truth in this fable, the stories of defectors, and the motivations of US and British policies in utilising them, tell a more complicated picture. This subject should be examined closely, because it has relevance for our times. US imperial policy towards regimes it deems adversarial remains essentially unchanged – mobilise extreme ultranationalist groups to advocate for regime change, and create a domestic culture sympathetic to that objective.

It is no secret now that defectors from the Eastern bloc were viewed not only as heroes to be cultivated by US and British intelligence agencies. Numerous scholars, such as Benjamin Tromly, have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that US intelligence agencies encouraged and publicised the plight of defectors, attempting to create a consensus for capitalist economic and cultural policies at home, while demonstrating to the Moscow leadership the ‘superiority’ of capitalist consumerism.

They were used as political and intelligence assets, valuable sources of information about the inner workings of the Soviet security and military apparatus. Russian emigres, for instance, were actively recruited and organised by the CIA and its predecessors (the OSS) to serve as anticommunist forces in covert actions against the Eastern block.

Consider the high profile defection, in 1948, of two Soviet combat pilots. Flying their plane into the American zone of occupation in Austria in 1948, Peter Pirogov and Anatoli Borzov were transferred to the United States, where they were celebrated as heroes. Welcomed by the American intelligence establishment, they received adulation in the media. Was this not clear evidence that American consumerism and individual liberty superior to Soviet drudgery?

The defectors, who had undergone miserable experiences in the Soviet Union, received surreptitious support from the CIA. Pirogov, only a few months after his escape, wrote a bestselling book in English, and settled into a house paid for the CIA. He was immediately cultivated for intelligence information about the inner workings of the Soviet military system.

Defectors’ stories provided a feeding frenzy for the political sharks of the London-Washington axis. Pirogov, who retreated into a quiet life with his new family, was dropped from the CIA payroll in the 1950s for failing to actively participate in an anticommunist emigre organisation set up by the intelligence community. He went off-script from the narrative as a freedom-loving defector.

Borzov went even further offline from the scripted part as an ideologically zealous defector – he returned to the USSR six months after his defection, dissatisfied with American consumerism and unimpressed by American supermarkets.

The 1950s was a period of intense CIA activity among anticommunist Russian and Eastern European communities. Mobilising defectors was one plank of a multifaceted strategy of using ultranationalist and ex-Nazi collaborators from Eastern European nations as private armies in the Cold War.

It is certainly no crime to seek asylum. During the Cold War, the United Nations ratified the convention on the status of refugees (1951) to elaborate the specific rights of asylum seekers. This was a time when there were refugees from Eastern European nations making up the bulk of Communist nations. Being receptive to those fleeing Communism was in line with human rights doctrine; it was also a cynical exercise in encouraging illegal immigration, an activity demonised by the media in our times.

Non-ideological reasons for defecting from the Eastern bloc nations were routinely minimised. There were defectors escaping imminent arrest or avoiding criminal charges; they were provided lenient treatment given that they were from the ‘captive nations’. The needs of political propaganda superseded considerations of law and order. American-backed dictatorships which produced an outflow of refugees somehow escaped the classification as ‘captive nations’ in the calculations of the Washington Beltway foreign policy experts.

How does this relate to contemporary times?

By way of investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg, an interesting story was published in Bloomberg web magazine. Remember in 2019 the Umbrella revolution which gripped Hong Kong? Thousands of activists were on the streets protesting laws that would bring the enclave closer to the rules and regulations of Beijing. It appears that the participants in that failed adventure are rethinking their positions.

In 2024, increasing numbers of Hong Kongers, including Umbrella activists, are choosing to work, live and study in Shezhen, China. The record economic growth achieved under Chinese premier Xi Jinping, including the construction of high speed rail, has convinced young Hong Kongers to avail themselves of the economic opportunities in China,

Shopping malls with loads of much-coveted consumer goods, entertainment, booming cultural parks, and all the modern conveniences have appealed to the former democracy activists. They have largely reconciled themselves to the rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC). It is a sign of a regime’s effectiveness to persuade its erstwhile opponents to accommodate and accept new realities. Providing a lower cost of living, cheap housing and work/educational opportunities has certainly placed the Umbrella movement’s NGO-style astroturf revolution into perspective.

Am I suggesting that we all migrate to China this instant? No I am not. Am I advocating adopting Xi Jinping Thought as an official doctrine? No I am not. I am suggesting that defector stories made for exceptional morality tales to soothe our collective conscience. They serve a particular propaganda purpose, disguising the cynical political motivations of the US and British authorities.