А там — на четверть бывший наш народ.
The history of Jewish emigration from the USSR, of which I was an supernumerary in its final act, would not have been the same, if it hadn’t been for the creation of the State of Israel in the wake of the Second World War, as a solution to the problem of two million displaced Eastern European Jews in the middle of Europe at its end. These were civilians freed from concentration camps, but unable or unwilling to return to their homes. The French and the Italian Jews went back, but the Polish and the Ukrainian and the Hungarian Jews’ homes were taken by the neighbors who had denounced them, and the occupying Red Army had no desire to intervene.
The solution found by the victorious powers was to create a new country for these people — the idea which had been around for some 70 years, — in its goal, if not in its reason, and was known as Zionism. All the USSR, USA and Britain had to do was cede a swath of land ruled by Britain under the UN mandate, which was running out. The displaced Eastern European Jews were shipped to Palestine and left there to tend for themselves. They did fine, and in three years declared themselves an independent state, which was immediately recognized by the Soviet Union. A quarter of Israel’s founding population spoke or understood Russian.
The avaricious Stalin saw Israel as a potential client state that would be useful in weakening Western influence in the Middle East and as a foothold in the region fermenting with decolonization. Soviet military advisors (Jewish officers who had distinguished themselves in the War) and armaments were sent to help Israel build its military with the supposed goal of fighting the British colonial rule. In reality, like all other Stalin’s diplomatic schemes, this one also flopped, when 50 thousand Muscovite Jews, encouraged by the government’s new official pro-Zionist rhetoric, came out to the streets to greet the arrival of Israel’s first ambassador in 1949. The party-approved language of the “historic homeland,” albeit intended for the external consumption, gave the 2.5 million Soviet Jews, most of whom came of age in the time of Stalin’s genocide and the Holocaust, for the first time in 30 years, a sudden hope of ethnic dignity and even repatriation. Just as abruptly as it had been adopted two years earlier, the pro-Israel foreign policy was scrapped, but the short-lived Soviet military assistance proved instrumental in Israel’s miraculous repulsion of the Arab invasion of 1949, in which the USSR already switched sides, looking for new clients among the Arab nations.
The fleeting hope of Jewish repatriation was succeeded by the increasingly ardent antisemitic public discorse and state exactions, whose intensity grew with each Arab-Israeli war resulting in growing Western influence in the Middle East, while the Arab states, in service of the Soviet Union, took heavy losses in treasure, blood and public opinion. What happened in the 1950s and 1960s was a confluence of four independent, to the extent any contemporaneous historical events can be independent, developments. The American society moved to a higher moral ground during the Civil Rights Movement. With its ethos of final deliverance from slavery and commonly appropriated biblical symbolism of the Exodus, many Americans felt receptive to the idea of moral obligation before the Soviet Jewry. Furthermore, American Jews, moved by the latent realization of the scale of the anti-Jewish atrocities committed during the War, saw the Soviet Jewry as the last Jewish tribe still enchained. On the opposite end, the political thaw in the USSR, following Stalin’s death in 1953, ushered in some political laxity and with it the first political dissidents, who, encouraged by the Western support, staged occasional protests demanding freedom of emigration. Finally, the rise of Israel’s influence over the American politics biased it heavily toward pressuring the Soviet Union to let the Jews go, rather than ending the persecutions.
All this culminated in 1975 with the adoption of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a case study in how much American — or any other country’s — foreign policy is determined by its domestic politics. The Jackson-Vanik amendment precluded the Administration from extending a normal trade status to the countries that restricted freedom of emigration. Neither the USSR nor the Jews were mentioned in it by name, but there is no doubt that those were the intended target audience. Neither Senator Henry Jackson nor Representative Charles Vanik were Jewish, but both of their aides, who worked on the text of the amendment, were and later went on to prominent careers within the Israeli lobbying establishment in Washington.
The amendment elevated the status of Soviet Jews from third rate citizens to pawns in the geopolitical prime-time called the Cold War. The USSR had been increasingly falling behind in high technology it needed to keep up in the arms race, and desperately sought access to the Western markets where these technologies could be acquired. To signal to the West its willingness to ease emigration restrictions, the USSR cracked the exit door ajar and gradually allowed some two hundred thousand Jews to leave during the 1970s. By the time I was in high school, in the late 1970s, Jewish emigration became common knowledge. Despite the draconian application rules, many more people applied than were allowed to leave. Those who were denied became known as отказники, or refuseniks.
As an unexpected upshot, Jews rose in currency with their fellow Soviet citizens. Marrying one was a non-Jew’s only hope to move to the West, because the application process required that at least one member of the family be a Jew. In early 1988, just months before I applied for the exit visa, I ran into a former university classmate. She had come for a job interview to the lab where I had been working since graduation. She recognized me, I recognized her and we ended up walking together to the metro station. In that short stretch of time she confided in me, a perfect stranger, that she wanted to marry a Jew to get out. Had she been a bit more artful about it, her beguiling beauty would have been much harder to resist.