From Russia with Love: Dissidents,Defectors and the Politics of Asylum in Cold War India

ABSTRACT

During the Cold War defectors were invariably paraded as propaganda trophies. The wider political significance of defections has hitherto been interrogated almost exclusively in an East–West binary. Utilising recently declassified documents from three continents, attention is focused on the elided role played by the developing world in the Cold War asylum story and, specifically, that of non-aligned India. By reinterpreting international responses to three Soviet defections that occurred in India in the 1960s, new light is shed upon political asylum as a source of North–South tension and discord.