Abandoned (emigration)

In the 1960s - 1980s in Soviet society, the desire of a person to emigrate from the USSR by legal means was no longer considered a crime, but was viewed by the authorities as a betrayal of fellow citizens. The process of submitting and processing applications for exit was accompanied by a number of bureaucratic formalities and wires designed to make it as difficult as possible, and better to make mass emigration impossible. Prior to the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973, the USSR did not formally recognize the right to free emigration, and the issuance of exit permits depended only on the position of the authorities.

Emigration attitudes were particularly strong among Soviet Jews , but also among other national groups — Soviet Germans , Greeks , Armenians , and religious groups that were under pressure from the authorities — Old Believers , Pentecostals , Baptists , Adventists , and Catholics .

Emigration attitudes among Jews sharply increased after the Six-Day War of 1967 and the war of 1973 , when the USSR fully took the side of the Arabs in their armed struggle against the State of Israel and supported radical Palestinian movements . The six-day war caused the rise of the national consciousness of Soviet Jews. On June 10, 1968, a year after the break in relations with Israel, the Central Committee of the CPSU received a joint letter from the leadership of the USSR Foreign Ministry and the KGB of the USSR signed by Gromyko and Andropov with a proposal to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate from the country. In the late 1960s - early 1970s, the policy of the Soviet Union regarding repatriation to Israel softened, and in 1969-1975 about 100 thousand repatriates from the USSR arrived in Israel. In the early 1970s, after the Leningrad aircraft business (attempts to hijack and hijack a passenger plane abroad), the Soviet authorities eased restrictions on emigration from the USSR for other groups of people willing.

However, in the early 1980s, after the start of the Afghan war and A. D. Sakharov’s exile, the authorities decided to “close” emigration, and many of those who had previously filed applications with the OVIR for exit, were refused. They were called refusal or, in English, refusniki ( refuseniks , from English. To refuse - “refuse”), although the refusals were practiced before. If in 1979, 51,333 people received exit visas, in 1982, 2,688 visas were obtained, in 1983 - 1,315, and in 1984 only 896. The Soviet authorities declared that there were no more families awaiting reunification, although the families of many refusers were abroad ^[1] .

The reasons for refusal were: service in the Soviet Army, the secret nature of the job of the applicant or the remaining relatives, material or other objections of the remaining relatives, “inconsistency with the interests of the Soviet state”.

Refugees were often prosecuted, for example, dismissal from work , and then prosecuted under the article for parasitism ^[2] .

In defense of the refusers, and especially the “ prisoners of Zion ” (that is, the arrested refusers), a significant movement developed in the USA, England, France, Israel and other countries:

• In 1959, Shabtai Beit-Zvi created the Maoz Society in Israel, which since 1968 was led by Golda Elin .
• In 1964, Jacob Birnbaum founded the organization “ Fighting students for Soviet Jews ” in the USA " ^[3] .
• Since 1969, the Jewish Defense League , created by Rabbi Meir Kahane , began an open struggle for the liberation of Soviet Jewry ^[4] .
• Since 1968, Michael Sherburn joined the struggle for the liberation of Soviet Jews, who maintained telephone contact with hundreds of otkazhnikov from his office in England ^[5] .
• In 1968, and founded the Southern California Council in Defense of Soviet Jews ^[6] .
• In 1970, the Union of Committees for the Defense of Jews in the Former USSR was founded in Washington, which included several local organizations of the United States.
• In 1974, the Jackson-Vanik amendment was adopted in the United States. Presidents Carter and, especially, Reagan played a big personal role.

The phenomenon disappeared after perestroika , the collapse of the USSR and the adoption of laws on freedom of entry and exit from Russia.

December 19, 2011 in Israel, a special pension compensation program was approved for the otkazniks, who fought for the rights of Jews to leave for Israel ^[7] .

• Natan Sharansky
• Victor Brailovsky
• Iosif Mendelevich
• Joseph Runner
• Vladimir Slepak
• Alexander Smilyansky
• Alexander Lerner
• Veniamin Levich
• Marc Azbel
• Julius Edelstein
• Efraim Kholmyansky
• Meiman, Naum Natanovich
• Ilya Essas
• Pinchas Polonsky
• Benjamin Fine
• Ida Nudel
• Arie Volvovsky
• Julius Kosharovsky
• Shraer-Petrov, David
• Herman Branover
• Aba Taratuta

In literature

• "Herbert and Nelly" - a novel by David Shraer-Petrov

In the cinema

• " Moscow on the Hudson "
• " Refusenik "

• Emigration of Jews from the USSR
• Zionism in the USSR
• Mahanaim
• Fifth paragraph
• Exit visa

• Altshuler Mordechai. Who are the 'Refuseniks'? A statistical and demographic analysis // Soviet Jewish Affairs. - 1988. - March ( vol. 18 , No. 1 ). - p . 3-15 . - ISSN 0038-545X . - DOI : 10.1080 / 13501678808577591 .

• Sociological portrait of Leningrad refuseniats 1982
• About the Moscow Symposium "Failure of the regime"
• Y. Kosharovsky. "We are Jews again. Essays on the history of the Zionist movement in the former Soviet Union"
• Vladimir Kremer. How to leave the USSR to Israel (The full text of the samizdat manual ..., written by an anonymous author, allegedly in the 1970s, was published in the collection “Jewish Samzdat”, vol. 23, Jerusalem, 1981) . - © " Notes on Jewish History ", March 2012. - T. № 3 (150) .
• Prisoners of Zion (Neopr.) . soviet-jews-exodus.com: Association “Remember and Save” - Documentation Center of the Jewish National Movement in the Soviet Union. Circulation date December 21, 2012. Archived December 23, 2012.