East European Politics and Societies and Cultures Volume 29 Number 1 February 2015 92–95 © 2015 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0888325414566073 http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Crossing the Borders of Friendship: Mobility across Communist Borders Mark Keck-Szajbel (Guest Editor) Center for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies, European University Viadrina Dariusz Stola (Guest Editor) Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Center for Migration Research, Warsaw Keywords: mobility, East Central European history, cultural history, travel and tourism, twentieth-century history T his collection of articles brings together scholars from the United States and Europe to explore mobility writ large in communist East Central Europe. While twentieth-century European mobility has increasingly become the focus of histori- ography, significant gaps still exist in the research. Especially with reference to the Soviet bloc, scholars have only recently begun to explore how people crossed bor- ders. Where there is research, it is largely limited to individual states. 1 The gap in literature is all the more surprising, since the communist period brought dramatic changes to East Central Europeans’ mobility, both domestic and interna- tional. This to a large extent resulted from the simultaneous development of new means of transport and communication. While the train was already transporting millions at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was only later that citizens got used to the automobile and highway, even more so airplane and airport, as well as telephone and television, which brought the voices and images of distant people and lands close. Moreover, the history of international mobility is a differentia specifica of com- munist states. Communist regimes, emphatically established as modernization proj- ects, were eager to embrace these technologies and to make spatial, especially domestic, mobility an important instrument of social change, but they were also highly ambivalent in their attitudes toward the opportunities these technologies and mobility offered to their subjects. The Soviet satellites of Central and Eastern Europe took from their Big Brother a deep, if not paranoid, suspicion of the outside world, and strong isolationist and autarkic tendencies, especially towards the capitalist West. The degree of communist control of travel abroad has been historically unique. No other regime developed mobility control policies and institutions of comparable reach, size, and complexity. 2 As a consequence, the history of international mobility 566073EEP XX X 10.1177/0888325414566073East European Politics and SocietiesKeck-Szajbel and Stola / Crossing the Borders of Friendship research-article 2014