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In the eyes of the post-war ‘free world’, the specificity of Soviet totalitarianism became clear first from the fact that people and ideas were prevented from circulating. However, the model of a hermetically closed frontier, already tested in the USSR in the late 1930s, was difficult to put into practice after 1945 as the flows brought about by the Second World War as well as the habits of the border populations went against this brake on mobility, whether it be at the local, regional or international levels. Based mainly on the Soviet Interior Ministry’s archives and emphasizing the decisive step of 1946, this article shows, on one hand, the arsenal of measures taken by the Soviet authorities to close the new western frontier of the USSR, from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea, and on the other hand, the evidence of cross-border links that these same authorities were attempting to eradicate. It was only at the end of the 1940s that the frontier became a tangible reality on the ground and in people’s minds and that its transgression was perceived on both sides as an eminently political act.