A Bridge to the West: Yugoslavia as a Transit Country for Czechoslovak Emigrants from the 1960s to 1980s
Abstract
Based on the analysis of documents from the archive collections of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav government and party institutions, this research paper deals with the phenomenon of the Czechoslovak citizens' emigration to the West through the territory of socialist Yugoslavia. The chronological focus lies in the 1970s and 1980s, in the period of Czechoslovak normalisation.
At the beginning, the normalisation authorities limited the travel to Yugoslavia for economic and political reasons. One of the political reasons was the attempt to stop Czechoslovak citizens from using tourist stays in Yugoslavia to emigrate to the West.
The Communists considered the emigration of ČSSR citizens to be a negative phenomenon. From their point of view, emigration was a workforce drain and damaged the national economy.
It also undermined the legitimacy of the socialist system and the current establishment, whose own citizens preferred to live in the capitalist countries. But during the 1970s, the political leadership, headed by Gustáv Husák, revised their attitude towards travel to Yugoslavia.
Czechoslovak tourism was important for the economic relations with Yugoslavia, which was one of the most important partners of ČSSR in foreign trade. Giving the citizens an opportunity to spend a holiday on the Adriatic Sea was also an important gesture and aimed to support the population's positive attitude towards the Communist Party and the socialist system.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Czechoslovak leadership put a lot of effort into getting their Yugoslav partners to promise that they will prevent the illegal emigration of Czechoslovaks through Yugoslavia. However, the 1981 agreement was ineffective.
The Yugoslav path in the 1980s and before was one of the important means of Czechoslovak emigration to the West. Regardless of this fact, the number of Czechoslovak tourists in Yugoslavia increased all the time and in the mid-1980s tourists from Czechoslovakia were one of the five biggest groups of foreign visitors to Yugoslavia.
The research paper follows different ways of crossing the Yugoslav borders by Czechoslovak tourists, the changes in the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav policy in dealing with this phenomenon, and the work of the Belgrade UNHCR office.