The Russian-Jewish Transnational Social Space: An Overview

After the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, over 1.6 million Jews and their non-Jewish family members from Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western countries. Large communities of former Soviets found themselves in the diverse national contexts of the receiving countries as either refugees or independent migrants.¹ Soon after establishing an initial economic and social foothold, former Soviet immigrants started rebuilding their social networks, both within each new homeland and across national borders. These networks, spanning four continents, based on common language, culture, and historic legacies, mainly come to the fore as informal social spaces, although there are also some examples of successful civic associations representing common interests of Russian immigrants or Russian Jewry at large. This introduction examines the roots of Russian Jewish identity in the Former Soviet Union and presents an overview of some major trends in late twentieth century Russian Jewish migration to the West.

The Major Waves of Contemporary Russian Jewish Emigration

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the condition of Jews under Soviet rule had been that of a special ethnic (rather than religious) minority, which was both persecuted and privileged, but always mistrusted.² After experiencing an upsurge of emancipation and upward social mobility during the first three decades of Bolshevism, since the end of World War II Soviet Jews were subjected to covert institutional policies of exclusion from higher education and prestigious careers, and lived in the shadow of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli media campaigns, augmented by everyday social anti-Semitism. Yet, paradoxically, having faced routine institutional discrimination from school age and throughout their working lives, Jewish parents aspired to excellence in education and cultivated the value of hard intellectual effort in their children. This attitude and effort eventually earned them a respectable place in most professions such as medicine, science, education, law, culture, and the arts. It can be argued that Soviet Jews excelled both in spite of and due to their discrimination. This complicated relationship between Russian Jews and the Soviet power structure made Jewish professionals an indispensable part of the Soviet technological and cultural elite from the early 1920s and, despite varying degrees of state anti-Semitism, Jews retained this special status up to the end of the twentieth century.³ Some were devoted loyalists of the regime, others cynical collaborators, while still others were convinced dissidents, overt or covert; yet all carried for life a stigma of their "ethnic disability" vis-à-vis the surrounding Slavic majority. Many Jews despised the Communist regime and, after the short-lived thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, lost any hope for political and economic reforms. Wishing for a better future for themselves and their children outside the Iron Curtain, where their efforts would yield greater rewards, many Jews quietly considered the subversive option of emigration.⁴

In the early 1970s, Brezhnev's regime made concessions to Western pressures, and Jewish emigration became Russia's key bargaining chip in trade negotiations with the United States. Although other ethnic migrants—mainly Germans and Armenians—were allowed to leave around the same time, Soviet Jews became effectively the only ethnic group granted the exceptional privilege of mass emigration from the Soviet empire under the pretext of return to their historic homeland of Israel. Between 1971 and 1981, around 250,000 Jews left the USSR, forming the third wave of Russian Jewish immigration in Israel and in North America, the two previous waves having arrived at the turn of the twentieth century and after World War II.⁵ During the following decade from 1980 to 1988, the deteriorating Soviet regime reversed its emigration quotas to the pre-1970 level, so that only a few thousand Jews could leave under exceptional clauses.⁶

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe, and the subsequent collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, the Jewish exodus resumed at unprecedented levels. The experiences of the 1990s-era émigr...