Why didn't the Soviet Union let its citizens leave?

Honestly, it is more complicated than people are making out.

Soviet workers experienced increased relative living standards from 1929, and perceived their increases to be continuous and probable until the great patriotic war. This was contrasted with the kholkhoz, (as opposed to sovkhoz) policy producing a new and angry proletariat, who were only brought into the system by perceived skill advancements. The GPW is a thing unto itself. So prior to 1949, there were systemic limits on the desire to externally migrate because of forced internal migration and an unwillingness of major external migration targets to accept migrants, even in permitted (10 million peasants?).

Post GPW a significant body of proletarians had bought into the system: you pretend to pay, we pretend to work.

Similar relations in the soviet-style societies, but with periodic attempts at revolution (1953, 1956, 1968).

yours,
Sam R.
 
The Soviet Union was a lie. That lie being that dictatorship was somehow democracy; that loss of freedom was freedom. And people fled that lie, when given the chance, thus proving it as a lie. And the Soviets would not tolerate that. Their treatment of exodus was the same as their rule, and that of their puppet leaders in other nations. Citizens were expected to embrace the lie, tolerate it, or keep quiet and work with others. And when they did not, the hammer fell. The simple act of leaving was protest and dissent the Communists would never tolerate.

This. (Filler).
 
Why were the Soviet Union, and communist governments in general, restrictive of travel abroad? Wouldn't it have been more useful to allow dissidents to leave than to keep them in?
I think it was more about keeping skilled and professional career classes than anything else. Doctors and engineers, barring their pursuing a career as a Party bureaucrat, are stuck living at the same standard as a janitor with an IQ of 82. If there's any way for them to sell their inelastic services, they're going to find it.
 
I think it was more about keeping skilled and professional career classes than anything else. Doctors and engineers, barring their pursuing a career as a Party bureaucrat, are stuck living at the same standard as a janitor with an IQ of 82. If there's any way for them to sell their inelastic services, they're going to find it.

Being a party bureaucrat was actually a fairly significant step down in pay from being a skilled professional in the USSR, at least in the first few decades (until the Brezhnev era I think).

Now, in East Germany this was indeed what the restrictive travel was about. West Germany offered skilled professionals from the East automatic citizenship and very high salaries and financial benefits if they immigrated. With the East's huge economic disadvantages vis a vis the West (the East had been poorer even pre-war, no Marshall Plan aid, they had to pay reparations to the Soviets whereas the US made sure the West got out of doing that), they couldn't compete financially with that.
 
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