Patterns of Soviet Jewish emigration in the post-Stalin era

To understand the plight of Soviet Jews who sought to leave the USSR in the post-Stalin period and were frequently stymied and blocked, Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, points to the experience of the Levin family who attempted to emigrate in 1965.

The family, who were in Vilnus, Lithuania, attempted to leave the Soviet Union to reunite with relatives in Israel, Zborovsky says. They filed out lengthy forms listing every family member they could remember and every place they ever lived.

The Soviet state informed them that their application was rejected.

During the next 15 years, the couple tried again. And again. And again.

Each time the USSR said no, citing “particular reasons” but declining to provide specifics she says.

When the couple finally won approval to leave, their non-Jewish daughter-in-law and grandson were required to stay, reflecting the USSR’s ethnic approach to immigration.

“Everything that could have gone wrong with their emigration process happened to go wrong for them,” Zborovsky says. “It was a form of state harassment.”

Stories such as this are at the heart of Zborovsky’s research into the emigration of more than a million Jews from the Soviet Union during the decades following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.

Zborovsky says there was not one single reason driving people to leave. “Their emigration is just as wrapped up with their Jewish identity as it is with their belief that they want to live in a Western capitalist society,” she says. “It is so hard to narrow down anything to one particular impetus or one particular problem.”

Zborovsky has a personal connection to the topic, as the child of Jewish Soviet refugees who came to the United States in 1989. From her family, she gained the language skills that allows her to research in this realm.

She was attracted to the narratives of Soviet Jews, whose life stories captured events including the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the daily minutia of life in a communist state. “They were at an intersection of so many 20th century events, ranging from the Cold War to debates about Israel-Palestine,” she says.

The central focus of her work is on emigration, who can leave, versus immigration, who can come in. Her dissertation research dives deep into the experiences of Soviet Jews and how they worked through and around the USSR’s complex and what Zborovsky calls its “ambivalent” emigration system.

The USSR and migration politics

In practice, living in a nation spanning 11 time zones meant that Soviet Jews were not a monolith, Zborovsky says. Those living in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which became part of the USSR later than other republics, were used to having their own institutions. In Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, many Jews were not white-passing, which had racial implications upon their immigration to Israel and the U.S. And in Georgia and Azerbaijan, Jews had greater religious freedoms that differed from Jews living in Moscow, especially regarding ownership of religious texts or the celebration of holidays.

Under official Marxist doctrine, Zborovsky says, people only migrated for labor reasons, and, as there was supposedly no lack of work, no class conflict, and no inequality in a socialist state, there were no valid reasons to emigrate.

“If you accept that material inequality is the force driving all immigration and emigration, it was a bit of a Marxist anathema to have a group of people who wants to leave,” she says. “The Soviet state was so deeply anxious about their departure and what that would mean for the USSR. Soviet Jews were overrepresented in fields of medicine and engineering which, in the time of a Cold War, would mean quite a significant brain drain. And if one group of citizens could leave, what was to stop another from joining them?”

Thus, the Soviet Union allowed emigration for two reasons: repatriation, or returning to one’s ethnic homeland, or family reunification. In reality, repatriation wasn’t an option because each minority group was given its own republic within the USSR. Jews were handed the territory in Birobidzhan, near the border with China. A loophole only arose with the mass displacement of Jews to the Middle East after the Holocaust and the subsequent establishment of Israel. Soviet Jews now had an avenue to both “repatriate” and “reunify with family” outside the USSR.

Diving into international archives

At the start of her dissertation, Zborovsky imagined that she would have to visit three countries to obtain information in their archives: Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. During the last few years, global conflict and travel warnings blocked her paths. “I realized I had nowhere to go, and it inspired me to think more creatively,” she says. That forced her to look elsewhere and take both a diplomatic and social-history approach to her research, which ultimately transformed the story she was studying to a more expansive one.

She turned to countries including Lithuania, Georgia, and the Netherlands. In Lithuania, she had access to KGB documents, with hundreds of pages on every single family that applied to emigrate from that republic. The Dutch archives were a primary source because of the role the government played as an intermediary between Israel and the USSR, which did not have diplomatic ties with each other.

“Many documents I would have found in Russia or in Israel were also going to be in The Hague, albeit in Dutch,” she says. “The Dutch government is getting letters from everyone”—the U.S., Israel, the USSR, and Soviet Jews themselves.

At one point, the Georgian government prevented her from visiting, calling her research a security threat. That opposition was eventually dropped, and she was allowed to enter and visit the archives.

Zborovsky then juxtaposed those sources with oral histories from Soviet Jews and documents sent to her from inside Russia. The Center for Jewish History also provided a variety of sources.

As Zborovsky reviewed reports in Lithuania, she discovered the agency often used a more layered reasoning to reject emigration. As the KGB, the Soviet Union’s feared intelligence agency, analyzed whether Jewish families had the right to depart the USSR, it assessed them through both ethnic and economic terms. Did they have Soviet family members dependent upon them, or were their professions valuable to the Soviet state?

There were also a large variety of hoops that potential émigrés were required to jump through. Jews applying to emigrate, no matter their age, had to receive permission from any living parents as well as ex-spouses if the couple had a child.

Implications for today

Zborovsky says one early realization from her research was that some categories or terms that she once took for granted have “quite unstable” meanings, such as “repatriation,” “citizen,” or “refugee.” “Terms that I thought were quite simple had different definitions depending on the decade or place. They had a lot of levels to them,” she says.

Among the other lessons relevant to modern times is the effect of the Soviet Jewish diaspora on the world she says. Today, 20% of the Jewish population of Israel, 10 percent of the U.S. Jewish population, and 90% of the German Jewish population are Soviet Jewish émigrés or their descendants. “You can’t think about a lot of the questions that divide American or Israeli Jews today without thinking about the arrival of Soviet Jews,” Zborovsky says.