ABSTRACT
Focusing on post-1948 Czechoslovakia, the chapter investigates the parameters of protection that the Eastern Bloc provided to political refugees from capitalist countries and countries undergoing military and civil conflicts. The analysis approaches the category of “asylum” in state socialism as both a formal and informal status, following political rather than legal criteria. Political refugeedom was constructed from above, both as a result of East-West competition and Cold War securitization of migration, as well as from below, as an expression of personal identity and a communist collective mission. Similar to the Western model of refugee protection, refugeedom in the East involved a vast range of individual motivations and often overlapped with labor migration.
