Learning How to Emigrate: The Legal and Practical Process of Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1966-1973

• In Event: Transnationalism in Soviet Jewish Identity and Emigration

Abstract

Emigration from the USSR was severely restricted and considered treasonous. Jews were frequently refused the right to emigrate, becoming “refuseniks” and entering into a protracted—sometimes years-, even decades-long—struggle for permission to emigrate. Drawing on diverse sources, including Soviet government documents, samizdat articles, and memoirs, this paper will illuminate the legal, practical, and psychological processes of emigration through which Soviet Jews had to go. This paper will discuss Soviet emigration laws and the financial and emotional strains that this process placed on would-be emigrants. It will focus on the late 1960s and early 1970s, when large-scale emigration began, and will ask how thousands of Soviet Jews, most of whom were not legal experts, came to understand and navigate the complex legal and bureaucratic intricacies in obtaining emigration permission.

Author

• Noam Bizan, U of Cambridge (UK)