'A Handful of Jews Who Arouse Acute Emotions in the United States for No Reason': Brezhnev’s Politburo and Soviet Jewish Emigration

• In Event: Transnationalism in Soviet Jewish Identity and Emigration

Abstract

In theory, the campaign for the Soviet Jewry’s right to emigrate championed Soviet Jewry as a whole, but in practice it concentrated on a small group of activists, denied their exit emigration visas and stuck in the Soviet Union as refuseniks. The heroic narrative that the refuseniks and their benefactors in the West built around Soviet Jewish emigration was adopted by many of the later (post-)Soviet Jewish emigrants, and remains dominant both among Soviet Jews and in scholarship today. Using newly declassified documents from the Russian archives, this paper puts the decisions of the Soviet leadership about Jewish emigration into a broader context of their domestic and foreign policymaking. Deconstructing the ideological worldview of the Soviet leaders and bureaucratic practices within the CPSU Central Committee’s apparatus, it reveals how the campaign for the Soviet Jewry was perceived in the Politburo as an unjust offensive of International Zionism against the Soviet state, which, in turn, defined the limits of success in a struggle for the Soviet Jewry’s rights.

Author

• Dmitry Asinovskiy, Tel Aviv U (Israel)