What Happened?
Gitelman, Zvi
WHAT HAPPENED? Between 1971 and 1981, some 338,000 Soviet citizens were allowed to emigrate to Western countries. Of these, about 260,000 were Jews (or very close relatives of Jews), 68,000 were...
...Since 1971-72, when the emigration flow began, there has been a decline of over 40 percent in the number of Jews in institutions of higher education...
...In 1970, 1,027 Jews emigrated and 341 ethnic Germans...
...Emigration will resume if Soviet-Western relations improve and if the West convinces the Soviet Union that it maintains an interest in seeing to it that Soviet people are permitted to exercise their right to leave...
...The rest of the decline may be explained partially by the disproportionate number of young people among the emigrants (the young are always disproportionately represented in migrations) and the over-representation of the Georgian and Central Asian Jews, those with the highest levels of fertility...
...Or as one woman from Kiev put it simply, "Everybody was going, so I went, too...
...The German Democratic Republic, Cuba, North Vietnam and other countries have found emigration an expedient way of dealing with domestic problems, and over the last decade the Soviets have at least learned to live with it...
...This change in direction of movement is due neither to Soviet policy nor to recruitment by American Jewish organizations, but to the decline in the attractiveness of Israel after the 1973 war and, even more, to the changing makeup of the emigrant population...
...In addition, Jewish emigration opens up job and housing opportunities for local residents and expands opportunities for mobility of non-Jews...
...The Soviet reasoning here is quite logical: If Jews are potential emigres, why should the state bother to educate them...
...In short, the dramatic increase in the volume of emigration was not in any way meant to suggest that emigration or free choice was now legitimate...
...But we may have a clue to policy in the following data: While 84 percent of visa requests from Lithuania were granted, and 62 percent of those from Latvia, and 49 percent of those from Georgia, only 31 percent were granted in the RSFSR, 36 percent in the Ukraine and 26 percent in Byelorussia...
...To put it differently...
...But we would be right to assume that in a system where people are not permitted to cast a protest vote with their hands, they will try to do so with their feet...
...As emigration grew, the authorities refused to make their peace with it...
...There is no evidence, for example, that other nationalities have been clamoring to leave the Soviet Union...
...Instead of dying, it grew geometrically as those who had never considered the possibility of emigration saw for the first time a realistic chance to leave the country...
...it has preserved the Jewish tradition and the commitment to return to Zion...
...From their point of view, the emigration is welcome because Jews overwhelmingly assimilate into the Russian rather than the local culture (except in Georgia...
...The potential for emigration, created by conditions within the Soviet Union, is very much alive, and we know that several hundred thousand people have received vyzovy and that chain migration alone will insure continuing pressure for emigration...
...ZVI GITELMAN I. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union subscribes to at jeast four international agreements that provide for the right of every individual to leave his country (and to return to it), in Soviet law a citizen does not have the right to emigrate at will...
...The doors were not open for very long, but they were open long enough and wide enough to cause noticeable demographic and political change within the Soviet Union...
...These negative examples frighten others into not even applying to leave...
...By contrast, about 85 percent of those emigres who have come to the United States are from that same heartland, from the RSFSR and the Ukraine, with very few from Georgia and Central Asia...
...How can the emigration movement be prevented^from serving as a dangerous precedent to others with causes of their own...
...Still other potential political consequences of emigration have thus far been successfully avoided...
...But the saga is most likely not yet over...
...Still, the Soviets had the experience and the resources to repress such dissi-dence...
...And a third of these Asian-Caucasian emigres are under 18, as compared to less than a fifth of the European emigres...
...When the USSR wishes to send a positive and conciliatory signal westward, it pushes the pawns forward on the board...
...These differences probably tell us as much about the Jews of these areas as they do about policy...
...Demography: The Soviet Union has a manpower shortage, the result of both the losses of 1941^5 and the more recent decline in European fertility and the rise in infant and male mortality...
...But following the invasion of Afghanistan, the Olympics boycott and the election of an American Administration committed to a policy of rhetorical anti-Sovietism, emigration declined by more than 50 percent in each of the two successive years...
...Thirty-six percent of the emigrants who go on to Israel are Georgian, Mountain and Central Asian Jews...
...All these factors—differential levels of Jewish consciousness and nationalism, different types of family, economic and vocational structures, and different calculations and motivations by republic and local officials— help shape Soviet policy and help explain the uneven results of that policy...
...Still, until the authorities make their policy rationales and processes explicit—if they ever do—discussion remains at best informed speculation...
...This means that the last channel of upward mobility for Jews has been very much narrowed—the higher echelons of the Party, the government, the KGB and the military having been closed to them long before...
...Why has<fhe traditional Soviet policy been against emigration...
...Twenty-eight percent of Central Asian Jewish emigres have families of six or more, compared to only two percent of the European emigres...
...The reason for this bifurcation is clear: The Asian group is "pulled" to Israel...
...Of these, about 260,000 were Jews (or very close relatives of Jews), 68,000 were ethnic Germans and 10,000 were Armenians...
...How can they be prevented from spreading, from swelling into a mass movement among all the nationalities and social classes in the country...
...3. They mounted a media campaign depicting emigres as naive fools, at best, or traitors and opportunists, at worst...
...Before 1974, nearly 100 percent of the emigrants went on to Israel...
...It remains a sad truth that the option of dissent within the Soviet Union has been largely silenced...
...As for the emigres, they have resettled with remarkable ease, considering their unpreparedness for Western societies, and they have already made significant contributions to those societies...
...Jews from the Caucasus and Central Asia make up less than ten percent of the Soviet Jewish population as a whole, but are 24 percent of the emigres...
...2. They discouraged applications to emigrate, either by making the process bureaucratically cumbersome (visa offices rarely opened, absurd certifications required from aged parents, divorced spouses, house committees...
...Similar arguments may hold for the Baltic republics, Moldavia and the West Ukraine, for each of these areas poses problems of ethnic and religious dissent to the central authorities...
...emigration is regarded as a political dispensation, a special privilege conferred by the state—and only for the purpose of family reunification...
...Such movements are not supposed to exist...
...Indeed, those Jews, such as Anatoly Shcharansky, who have tried to bridge the two movements have been treated more harshly than those who have merely attempted to leave the USSR, rather than to reform it...
...An alternative explanation is that central directives assign higher emigration quotas to some regions and lower quotas to others in line with national calculations...
...Little wonder that most of those who came after the first wave of Zionists headed for America...
...Over 70 percent of emigres from the RSFSR and Ukraine do not go to Israel, whereas only six percent of the Georgians and 13 percent of the Central Asians do not...
...Finally, traditional anti-Semitism may also motivate local officials to cooperate in getting rid of the Jews—even though that is precisely what (some of) the Jews want...
...It would be reasonable to assume, for example, that the central authorities permit Georgian officials to issue more exit visas because—so the central authorities may calculate—Georgian Jews contribute less to the Soviet economy than, say, the scientific intelligentsia concentrated in Moscow and Leningrad...
...And in fact, it seems that the great majority of Armenians who have been allowed to leave are those who were born outside the USSR and immigrated to the Soviet Union in the late 1940s...
...The aim of this movement—to leave the country, not to reform it—was less threatening than the aims of other dissident groups...
...or by denying permission to emigrate to prominent people who are then relegated to a limbo, permitted neither to leave Soviet society nor to re-enter it...
...The "Zapadniki" came from the vibrant Jewish societies of Poland, Romania and the Baltic, were never fully acculturated in the USSR and also have positive reasons for emigrating to Israel...
...But this is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the more the educational opportunities are closed, the more potential emigres are created...
...There seems to be a cadre of professional malcontents and potential returnees whose names appear over and over in Soviet articles describing the plight of emigres...
...There are, in fact, two distinct streams of Jewish emigration, the one headed to Israel and the other to the United States...
...The last word on emigration rests with administrative authorities...
...Thus, the emigration of the Jews removes some agents of Russification and increases the proportion of, say, Lithuanian or Latvian speakers, something many of the local elites desire...
...But those from the heartland are second and third generation Soviet Jews, cut off from world Jewry over half a century ago, deprived of their last Yiddish school by 1938 and with a Jewish consciousness kept alive largely by anti-Semitism...
...It was— and is—a concession the Soviets grant reluctantly, only when it serves some overriding purpose...
...At the same time, the Georgian Jews are seen as a disruptive element in an already troublesome republic, so there is reason to want to be rid of them...
...A still more concrete consequence for the Jews has been that higher education has been closed to them...
...For Jews, the decline was from 51,000 to 24,000 to 9,450...
...Congress and the pressure of West German politicians who threatened not to ratify the 1972 Soviet-German treaty normalizing relations and increasing trade...
...Examples here are the "diploma tax" of 1972-73 and the requirement of first-degree kinship (i.e., parents or children, not siblings) with people in Israel only, enforced in 1980-82...
...Nor was it so perceived by the authorities, for whom emigration remained a function of international relations...
...III...
...What happened...
...The Soviet argument that the emigres are special cases, people with many relatives abroad, with special histories, has apparently been accepted by other Soviet peoples...
...So why not open the gates for a bit...
...But its demographic composition presented a more difficult challenge than did the composition of other groups...
...Even people whose greatest desire was to be accepted into established Soviet society reluctantly reach the painful conclusion that neither they nor their children have a future in their native country...
...Western public opinion would be placated, the movement would disappear and local authorities would have vacant jobs and apartments to allocate to loyalists...
...All the Jews are going, so should I stay behind...
...And so...
...In addition, there is a great deal of variation by republic in the proportion of Jews requesting vyzovs (invitations from Israel)—from less than ten percent of the Jews in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to 14 percent in the RSFSR to over half in the Baltic and Georgia...
...Emigration, especially of skilled labor and of the highly educated, would exacerbate the shortage...
...Cutting across geographical and social boundaries, it was an "all-Union" problem...
...But the emigration movement did not behave in accordance with these calculations...
...Some observers have suggested that the variation is so great that it must be due to different local policies pursued by republic officials or even lower authorities...
...Emigrating became fashionable...
...instead, emigration began to acquire a life and a dynamic of its own...
...One such consequence is that the alleged disloyalty to the USSR of the emigrating population groups is confirmed in the eyes of others, and they are rendered as unacceptable into polite society...
...As one student of migration puts it, "Once it is well begun, the growth of such a movement is semi-automatic: So long as there are people to emigrate, the principal cause of emigration is prior emigration...
...Emigration is actively discouraged and made into a high-risk, costly and painful process...
...There are several reasons for this: Ideology: If large numbers of people freely choose to leave the Soviet Union, that would offer empirical evidence that the USSR is not the most attractive society in the world—the more so since very few people choose to immigrate to it...
...As such, it is regarded with suspicion, for it presents a real problem of control...
...So, in 1979, when a SALT treaty ratification was needed, a record 51,000 Jews were allowed to leave...
...employers, etc...
...Moreover, whereas other political dissidents were mostly drawn from the intelligentsia, the Jewish movement included people of all ages, levels of education and social categories...
...Between the 1970 and 1979 Soviet censuses—a period during which 177,000 Jews emigrated—the number of recorded Jews fell by 340,000...
...The Soviets have never explained the reasons for the shift, but we can surmise that it was the result of two kinds of pressures that were brought to bear at a propitious time: The Jewish movement for aliyah—emigration to Israel—had been building since 1968 and had received wide publicity in connection with the December 1970 Leningrad plane hijacking trial...
...Emigration is selective and fluctuating, and, as we have seen, some social categories are over-represented within it...
...V. Not since 1970 have there been so few emigres from the Soviet Union as there are now...
...We learn some interesting things about Soviet emigration policies by examining the composition of the emigre population...
...There was a comparable decline for Germans and Armenians...
...The most obvious impact, of course, has been on the demography of the Jewish, German and, to a lesser extent, Armenian populations...
...Nor has there been a coalescence of the emigration movements with general political dissidence...
...It was at this point that the Soviets made a serious miscalculation...
...another 25 percent are the "Zapadniki" of the peripheral areas that were absorbed into the USSR in 1939-40...
...Others left in order to try to improve their economic position, to seek adventure or simply to see the world, which the Soviet citizen cannot do as a tourist...
...though the flow continued, the Soviets sought to depress it in several ways: 1. They enforced legal provisions that can be suspended when the authorities so choose...
...That leaves only 40 percent from the Slavic heartland...
...There are now at least 5,000 of these "refuseniks" among the Jews alone...
...Moreover, many left as "secondary migrants," people who are not themselves motivated to leave but are simply joining relatives or friends who have decided to leave...
...The people involved in emigration are pawns, no more...
...It is likely that even if emigration quotas are set in Moscow, republic and local officials in the non-Russian areas are happy to cooperate...
...Zvi Gitelman, Professor of Political Science, is Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan...
...Unfamiliar with emigration as a "snowballing" problem and quite possibly unaware of the depth of alienation of Soviet Jews and Germans, the authorities may have believed that they need only open the gates temporarily, that once they permitted a small number of noisy malcontents to leave, the emigration movement would die...
...The variance in emigration by region extends also to immigration, to the choices emigres make once they leave the Soviet Union...
...When emigration has been set up as a social pattern, it is no longer relevant to inquire concerning individual motivations...
...The countries of immigration were painted in the darkest colors, and the experiences of emigrants were described with unremitting negativism...
...Their basic conception had not changed: The right to emigrate was a concession to reprehensible people, not a legal or natural right...
...It reached from the Baltic to the RSFSR, the Caucasus and out to Central Asia, with its centers in cities accessible to Western tourists and media...
...These processes, however, may be slowed by the political and social consequences of emigration...
...Who determines such variations, and how are they determined...
...Clearly, Jews in the peripheries find it easier to leave than do those in the heartland...
...So we can expect a further aging and shrinking of the Soviet Jewish population...
...And why was that policy changed in 1971?How,ifat all,did the decade of emigration change the nature of the Soviet system...
...But if these considerations determined Soviet policy and behavior from 1928 to 1970, what happened in 1971...
...And what, if any, are the chances for a resumption of the flow...
...Moreover, presuming that the more nationally conscious Jews (and, for that matter, Germans) are more likely to leave, we may expect that the rate of Jewish and German acculturation and assimilation will now be even more rapid...
...Now the emigration has slowed to barely a trickle, as it had been for the four decades from 1928, when legal emigration was essentially halted, until 1971...
...Security: A system that censors everything, from novels to beer bottles, that severely restricts tourism and suppresses data routinely published in other countries, perceives every emigre as the bearer of secret or privileged information, not only on where missile sites are located (something no emigrant might know)—but also on the availability of meat in Cheliabinsk Politics: Emigration is a spontaneous movement, one that arises from below...
...in 1971, 13,022 Jews and 1,140 Germans...
...They are "pushed" from the Soviet Union more than they are "pulled" by Israel...
...that proportion dropped to one-third or less by the late 1970s, with the great majority going to the United States...
...What made them respond in a different way in the case of the Jewish movement was the external pressure generated by the Soviet Jewry movement in the West, the linkage of trade and emigration by the U.S...
Vol. 7 • October 1982 • No. 9
