Preliminary Programme

The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 effectively ended massive illegal migration from the German Democratic Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany. However, as individuals found a way around the wall, emigration remained a flash point for tension surrounding the legitimacy of the socialist East German state. Despite the considerable social and political consequences for attempting to emigrate, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, retirees, political and religious dissidents and young families continued to seek to emigrate to the West. This paper will examine the state polices implemented between 1973 and 1985 that allowed for legal official emigration from the GDR to the FRG. Alongside the protest space provided by the Evangelical Church, I will evaluate the use of pensioner visas, ransom payments, and prisoner exchange programs by the East German state as tools to control pockets of dissent and discontent during the relatively quiet years before the emigration crisis of the late 1980s. (Show less)

This paper will analyze a particular regime of migration--evacuation--and the itineraries of particular kinds of migrants –evacuees—during the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War. In contrast to World War I when refugees from the borderlands overwhelmed the resources of Russia’s interior, the Soviet government sought to organize the evacuation of people endangered by invasion and place them where they could contribute to the war effort. Characteristic of Stalinist population management, this gargantuan effort presupposed the ability of the state to provide essential transportation, accommodation and gainful employment to over 10 million people over several years. In actuality, evacuees experience bore many resemblances to refugees. However, although refugees are usually perceived as passive, we are more able to see how displaced persons framed, shaped, and acted on their own history through two kinds of sources: a wealth of refugee/evacuee diaries and letters found in archival materials that have been mined in recent decades, revealing a rich culture of writing (and complaining) to authorities; in addition, organizations worldwide are culling rich interview materials that are available electronically. Both sources reveal the extreme importance of immediate family and extended kin in times of disaster. When put in conversation with bureaucratic and state concerns, they allow a view of the ways in which evacuees could influence or even control their placement. (Show less)

'Passport policy' was a policy of international mobility control, its primary instrument were documents required to cross the border – ‘the legitimate means of travel’. The policy, more restrictive than under other modern regimes, was an essential part of the communist regime, and a unique experiment in the effectiveness of state control. Each and every trip outside the Soviet bloc, and thru most of the period under consideration each trip abroad, required applying for a permit. Thanks to the elaborate system of archiving the applications and the revolutionary changes since 1989, which made the police files of the European communist states available for research, the policy is open for investigation. The phenomenon it regulated is probably the best documented social phenomenon of this kind in history. Polish archives alone contain more than 60 kilometers of passport files. Surprisingly, this valuable data remain largely unexploited.
This paper is to encourage research on migrations in communist states and related policies, by presentis selected conclusions from a research project on migrations from Poland, 1949-1989. During this period, international mobility in Poland underwent a notable evolution: from an unprecedented reduction in early 1950s to levels unseen for centuries, to reemergence and expansion since 1956, especially within the Soviet bloc, to a gradual lessening of restrictions for travels to the West since mid-1970s and their eventual explosion in the 1980s. In total, more than two million people left communist Poland for good and short term international mobility took greater scale than ever before: in the 1970s Polish Border Guards registered some ten million exits annually, mainly short visits to the GDR. The system of mobility control had two institutional pillars: the Passport Bureau, a part of the Security secret police that issued (or denied) passports and the border control system. The paper will focus on the Bureau: the policies it implemented and its rules of operation. Among the policies, it will pay special attention to those on two groups that were overrepresented among the emigrants: the Germans and the Jews.

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