In 1985, the year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s appointment as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1140 Jews were allowed to leave. Four years later — the year when the Berlin Wall fell — the number reached 71,000. Almost a million Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel in the following years. This was a measure of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost — an ‘openness’ which had never previously existed in the USSR.
A few weeks after Gorbachev’s elevation, Israeli and Soviet diplomats met secretly in Paris to discuss Jewish emigration and the future of relations between the two countries. In February 1986 Natan Sharansky was released from his strict regime labour camp in Perm in exchange for Soviet spies. Having served nine years, he suddenly found himself being escorted across Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge — and by evening he was reunited with his wife, Avital, in Israel.
This was the beginning of Gorbachev’s policy of allowing prisoners of Zion and long term refuseniks such as the Slepaks and Ida Nudel to leave.
In December 1987, Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and defender of the human rights of Soviet Jews was allowed to return from internal exile in Gorky. Shortly afterwards, Morris Abram and Edgar Bronfman, US Jewish leaders, were invited to visit Moscow for discussions with Soviet officials. This led to the inception of Hebrew and Yiddish courses, the publication of Jewish books and religious texts, the provision of kosher food and a broad revival of Jewish cultural life in the USSR.
Perhaps what was truly remarkable was the sudden cessation of anti-Zionist rhetoric and antisemitic caricatures in the Soviet media. Just a few weeks before Gorbachev’s accession to power, the news agency Tass spoke of “Zionist bankers” financing the Nazis and arguing that the Jews only had themselves to blame for the Shoah.
