During the Soviet and Eastern Bloc decades of communism, which dominated almost the entire 20th century, fundamental dissenters to the communist ideology who were locked up between the borders of a tyrannical system rarely matched by history were considered dissidents. They were forced to live a life of harassment and poverty below the average proletariat’s impoverished lifestyle, being denied basic human rights.
But some citizens chose to escape their physical and mental communist prison at any cost to them or their families and became defectors. Politically, the definition of a defector sounds ordinary, “a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause, or doctrine to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.”