Soviet Jewry and the Refuseniks

What happened

The Soviet Union spent the late 1940s and early 1950s taking apart the Jewish life it had spent the war years advertising. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, created during the war to raise support for the Soviet cause abroad, was dissolved in November 1948, and its leadership was later executed. ¹ Its chairman was Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor and director, who was killed in a staged car accident on Stalin's orders. ¹ He died on January 13, 1948, in what was later shown to be a political assassination ordered by the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria. ² On August 12, 1952, thirteen Soviet Jews, among them several prominent writers, were executed on treason charges that had been fabricated. ¹ The night is remembered as the Night of the Murdered Poets. ¹ Five years to the day after Mikhoels was killed, on January 13, 1953, Pravda ran the claim that nine doctors, six of them Jewish, were plotting to kill Soviet leaders. ²

What followed over the next three decades was quieter and more bureaucratic. Jews who wanted out applied for exit visas. Many were refused, and a refusal could last years, during which you were a person the state had marked. Ronald Reagan, in a 1984 statement, described a Soviet campaign of officially tolerated antisemitism in broadcasts and articles, the creation of an "Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public," and continued harassment of individual refuseniks. ⁹ Two years later a White House statement summarized what was at stake as the right "to emigrate, practice their religion, or maintain their Jewish identity." ¹¹

Two things gave the refuseniks a lever. The first was the Helsinki Final Act, signed by thirty-five nations on August 1, 1975, whose third basket committed signatories to human rights including freedom of emigration and the reunification of families divided by borders. ⁵ Dissidents in the Soviet bloc formed Helsinki monitoring groups to track Soviet compliance with those commitments, which the State Department's own history credits with helping open up freedom of movement and speech. ⁵ The second was American trade law. The Jackson-Vanik amendment denied normal trade treatment and U.S. credit programs to nonmarket-economy countries that deny citizens "the right or opportunity to emigrate" or that impose "more than a nominal tax on emigration or on the visas or other documents required for emigration." ³ The same section bars relief for any country imposing more than a nominal "tax, levy, fine, fee, or other charge on any citizen as a consequence of the desire of such citizen to emigrate." ³

Anatoly Shcharansky, later Natan Sharansky, was the best known of them. He was among the dissidents the Soviet government tried for monitoring compliance with the Helsinki agreement. ⁸ He was sentenced in July 1978 to thirteen years for "treason, espionage and anti-Soviet agitation," held first at Vladimir prison about 100 miles east of Moscow, then moved to a criminal facility at Chistopol, roughly 500 miles out, which made visits from family far harder. ⁶ President Carter, speaking in Bonn the day the sentence came down, said he spoke "with the sadness the whole world feels," and pointed out that the Soviets had pledged two years earlier at Helsinki to respect exactly these rights. ⁷ Reagan's 1984 statement marked the seventh anniversary of Shcharansky's arrest and noted that Jewish emigration had "fallen to its lowest levels since the late 1960's." ⁹

He was released on February 11, 1986, and the White House said Reagan spoke by telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and with Sharansky and his wife, who had just landed in Tel Aviv; Chancellor Kohl of West Germany had helped arrange the exchange. ¹⁰ Three months later Sharansky sat in the Oval Office for thirty minutes and briefed the president on the roughly 400,000 Soviet Jews who had expressed a desire to leave. ¹¹

On December 6, 1987, more than 200,000 people rallied on the National Mall in what was called the largest Jewish rally ever held in Washington, twenty-four hours before Gorbachev arrived for a summit with Reagan. ¹² Vice President George Bush, Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, House Speaker Jim Wright, Elie Wiesel, New York Mayor Edward Koch, and Sharansky himself spoke. ¹² Participants urged Gorbachev to let every Jew who wished to leave the Soviet Union emigrate, and speakers pressed for emigration in the thousands each year rather than individual releases. ¹² Bush pledged that human rights would be high on the summit agenda and that he would raise it with Gorbachev directly. ¹²

The numbers moved at the end of the decade. In December 1990, President Bush said more than 150,000 Soviet Jews had emigrated that year to "new homes, new lives of liberty and dignity." ¹³

Why it still matters

By 2018, roughly 1.1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union were Israeli citizens. ¹⁴ Sharansky went from a criminal prison at Chistopol ⁶ to a phone call with Reagan and Shimon Peres from the airport in Tel Aviv. ¹⁰

Another reason is that a diaspora campaign and a superpower's trade law were aimed at the same target for fifteen years, and the target moved. Emigration figures track that pressure, though not cleanly. Carter's 1980 letter to Senator Jackson noted that about 14,000 Jews left in the year before he took office and 50,000 left in 1979, "the highest level in more than 10 years," and that the rate fell again after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. ⁴

Whether the law did that work is genuinely contested. Supporters of Jackson-Vanik point to the climb from 14,000 to 50,000 and to a law that made emigration a permanent line item in every trade negotiation rather than a favor to be requested. ⁴³ Critics of it, including at the time, argued that emigration rose and fell with the temperature of superpower relations more than with the statute, and Carter's own numbers show the Afghanistan invasion knocking the figure down while the law sat unchanged. ⁴ Both readings fit the same numbers. Our view is that the law's real work was structural. It welded a humanitarian request that Moscow could grant or withdraw at its convenience to something Moscow wanted, which is why the refusenik campaign had a place to stand for fifteen years.

The 1987 rally asked Gorbachev to let every Jew who wanted to leave the Soviet Union go, and criticized the practice of releasing individuals one at a time. ¹² Bush answered it from the podium by promising to raise human rights with Gorbachev the following day. ¹²

The words you'll hear

Refusenik. A Soviet Jew who applied for an exit visa and was refused, often for years. The category covered people denied the right to emigrate, to practice their religion, or to maintain a Jewish identity. ¹¹⁹

Jackson-Vanik. The U.S. trade provision denying normal trade treatment and federal credit programs to nonmarket-economy countries that deny citizens the right to emigrate or charge more than a nominal tax on emigration documents. ³

The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public. A body Reagan's March 1984 statement named as part of officially tolerated Soviet antisemitism, alongside anti-Jewish broadcasts and articles. ⁹

The Helsinki Final Act. The August 1, 1975 agreement among thirty-five states whose human rights section covered freedom of emigration and family reunification, and which gave Soviet dissidents a document to hold their own government to. ⁵

Night of the Murdered Poets. August 12, 1952, when thirteen Soviet Jews, several of them leading Yiddish writers, were executed on fabricated treason charges after the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved. ¹

Doctors' Plot. The January 13, 1953 Pravda allegation that nine doctors, six of them Jewish, were conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. ²