Soviet Jewry

Why this Chapter exists

The biggest Jewish migration of the century after 1948.

Between 1968 and the end of the century, about 1.6 million Jews and their family members walked out of the Soviet Union and the countries that replaced it. Most went to three places: about one million to Israel, between 325,000 and 400,000 to the United States, and between 150,000 and 220,000 to Germany, with smaller groups reaching Canada, Australia, and beyond. It was the largest single movement of Jews in the second half of the twentieth century, and it redrew the map of where Jews live.

The Cold War was a clash of systems: capitalism against communism, NATO against the Warsaw Pact. More than two million Jews lived on the Soviet side of it. Their religion, schools, and language were taken apart piece by piece. They lived through a late-Stalin persecution known as the Black Years. A war in 1967 reawakened their identity, and their struggle to emigrate became one of the best-known human-rights movements of the age.

The Pale, before 1917

The largest Jewish community on earth.

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Empire held about 5.5 million Jews, more than any other country in the world. Most of them were packed into the Pale of Settlement, the strip of western territory where imperial law allowed Jews to live, and almost nowhere else. Life in the Pale was so cramped and so dangerous that it had already driven the great wave of emigration from 1881 to 1924, to New York, Buenos Aires, London, and Palestine. The American side of it is told in the American Jewry Chapter. Most of the empire’s Jews stayed.

Theirs was a dense, organized world, much of it built in the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Unit 2 · Ch. 07 · The Jews of Poland and Lithuania). It had religious schools (the heder for young children, the yeshivot for advanced study), trade guilds, merchant networks, and a lively Yiddish press and Yiddish theater. It had political movements of every stripe: the socialist Bund, the various Zionist groups working for a Jewish state in Palestine, the religious parties. Most people’s daily language was Yiddish. Hebrew belonged to prayer and study, and Russian was the language for dealing with the wider empire. Within a few years of the revolution, the Soviet state set about taking this world apart.

Revolution and civil war

Freed on paper, then caught in the bloodshed.

The February Revolution of 1917 freed Russia’s Jews on paper within weeks. On April 2, 1917, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Pale’s restrictions on where Jews could live, work, study, and vote. When the Bolsheviks, Lenin’s communist revolutionaries, seized power that November, they kept that legal equality in place even as they remade the rest of the country.

Then the civil war came, and with it some of the worst anti-Jewish violence between the old pogroms, the mob attacks on Jewish towns under the tsars, and the Holocaust. From 1918 to 1922, Jewish communities were attacked by Ukrainian nationalist forces, among them troops of the government led by Symon Petliura. They were also attacked by anti-Bolshevik White armies, by Polish troops during the 1919–1921 Polish-Soviet War, by freelance bands roaming the countryside, and, less often and on a smaller scale, by units of the Red Army. Estimates of the Jewish dead differ sharply. The lowest credible estimate is 50,000, and the historian Jeffrey Veidlinger counts more than 100,000 killed. Far more were driven from their homes.

The early Soviet years pulled Jewish life in two directions at once. The new regime outlawed antisemitism by decree in 1918 and opened the upper ranks of Soviet politics, the military, science, and the arts to Jews. The same regime methodically dismantled Jewish religious and communal life. It shut religious schools, persecuted rabbis and other religious officials, suppressed Hebrew as a “clerical” language, banned Zionist groups, and abolished the kehillot, the self-governing community councils Jews had run for centuries. The one corner of Jewish life the state allowed to survive (and even, for a while, encouraged) was secular Yiddish culture, channeled through a body called the Yevsektsia.

The Jewish Section

The Jewish bureau that dismantled Jewish life.

The Yevsektsia (short for Yevreyskaya sektsiya, “Jewish Section”) was the Jewish bureau of the Communist Party, set up in October 1918. Its job was to carry Soviet policy into the Jewish population: to take apart the old religious and communal world and replace it with a Soviet, Yiddish-speaking, secular one. It never had more than about 1,500 activists, organized in about 70 local units. They were Jewish Communists who had themselves grown up inside the very communities they were now dismantling.

The work was blunt. The Yevsektsia closed synagogues and religious schools, put religious officials on trial for “counter-revolutionary” activity, and pushed Hebrew out of public life. In its place it built Soviet-Yiddish institutions: Yiddish schools, a Yiddish press, Yiddish literature, and Yiddish theater, including the Moscow State Jewish Theater, founded in 1919. The result was a Jewish life that was still Jewish in language and culture but stripped of its religion and its old self-government.

In early 1930, as Stalin consolidated his power, the Party disbanded its nationality sections, the Yevsektsia among them. The Soviet-Yiddish culture it had built carried on through the 1930s under steadily heavier pressure, until it was nearly wiped out in the postwar years described below.

Birobidzhan

A “Jewish homeland” at the edge of Siberia.

In 1928 the Soviet government picked an unlikely spot for a Jewish homeland: Birobidzhan, a region in the Russian Far East about 6,000 kilometers east of Moscow, up near the Chinese border on the Amur River. It became the official Jewish Autonomous Oblast on May 7, 1934, part of a wider Soviet system of giving each major nationality its own territory. Yiddish was named an official language there alongside Russian.

The idea was openly pitched as a Soviet answer to Zionism. It would give Jews a national territory inside the Soviet Union, secular and socialist and Yiddish-speaking, without the “bourgeois nationalism” the Soviets accused the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine of carrying.

Birobidzhan was swampy, mosquito-ridden, brutally cold in winter, and poor farmland. Jews never moved there in the numbers the planners hoped. At its peak in 1948 the region held about 30,000 Jews, roughly a quarter of the population. Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s and the postwar Black Years hit the community there too. By the 1959 census it was down to about 14,000. It was about 9,000 by 1989, about 1,600 by 2010, and about 840 by 2021, well under one percent of the region. Birobidzhan still carries its Jewish Autonomous Oblast title today, with only a small Jewish community remaining.

War, soldiers, and the Black Book

The Holocaust on Soviet soil, and the first attempt to document it.

The Second World War brought the Holocaust onto Soviet territory, the mass shootings told in detail in the Einsatzgruppen Chapter. About 5 million Jews lived in the Soviet Union when Germany invaded in June 1941. Across 1941 to 1944, the mobile killing units, the Order Police, the German army, and local collaborators murdered roughly 2.5 million of them. The Jews who survived were mostly those evacuated east ahead of the German advance, those who served in the Red Army, and those whose homes lay beyond the reach of the German occupation. About 500,000 Soviet Jews served in the Red Army, and about 200,000 of them died.

The Soviet state’s main Jewish wartime project was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the JAC, formed in April 1942. Its mission was to rally Jewish support abroad, above all American Jewish support, behind the Soviet war effort. Its chairman was Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948), director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and the leading figure of Soviet Yiddish stage life. Its members included the great Soviet Yiddish writers Itzik Fefer, David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Leyb Kvitko, and David Hofshteyn.

The JAC raised money, published, and sent its people abroad. Mikhoels and Fefer spent seven months in 1943 touring the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Britain. They spoke to about 50,000 people at the Polo Grounds in New York, and brought in millions of dollars in war relief. The committee also tried to record what was being done to Jews on Soviet soil. Its great documentary project, The Black Book, edited by the writers Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, was one of the first attempts anywhere to document the Holocaust through the testimony of its victims. It was ready to print in 1946, and the Soviet authorities suppressed it. The manuscript survived in secret and was finally published in Russian in Jerusalem in 1980 and in English the next year.

The killing sites met the same silence. Babyn Yar is the ravine at the edge of Kyiv where at least 33,771 Jews were shot on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the killers’ own count. The Einsatzgruppen Chapter tells that story. For thirty-five years the Soviet state put up no memorial there. In 1961 the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published “Babi Yar” in the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, and Dmitri Shostakovich set the poem in his Thirteenth Symphony, first performed in Moscow on December 18, 1962. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the poem, the Moscow press printed not a word about the premiere, and further performances were barred until lines were changed. The monument that finally went up in 1976 referred to the site’s estimated 100,000 victims without saying that Jews were among them. A menorah for the Jewish dead was raised there on September 29, 1991.

The Black Years · 1948–1953

Stalin turns on the Jews.

The “Black Years” (HaShanim HaShchorot in Hebrew, chernyye gody in Russian) run from about 1948 to Stalin’s death in March 1953. In those five years the Soviet state tore down the Jewish cultural world it had allowed to exist before and during the war. The campaign was dressed up as a fight against “cosmopolitanism” and “Zionist agents of imperialism,” but its targets were Jewish.

The turning points:

• The murder of Solomon Mikhoels. January 13, 1948, in Minsk. Mikhoels was killed by the secret police and the scene staged to look like a traffic accident. Stalin ordered it personally, and officers of the MGB security ministry carried it out. The 1953 government memorandum that exposed the murder named the men who staged it. The point was to remove the public face of Soviet Jewish culture. Mikhoels was given a large public funeral. The truth about his death was admitted only after Stalin died.
• The shutdown of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. November 20, 1948. The JAC was dissolved by Politburo decree, the cover story being that its wartime work was finished. Over the following year its members were arrested on charges of “espionage” and “bourgeois nationalism.”
• The arrest of the Yiddish writers. 1948–49. About 110 people were arrested in connection with the case, among them the leading Soviet Yiddish writers and cultural figures. Their institutions were shut one after another: the Yiddish press, the Yiddish publishing house Der Emes (closed November 1948), the Moscow State Jewish Theater (ordered closed in November 1949), the Yiddish schools.
• The Night of the Murdered Poets. August 12, 1952. After a secret trial, thirteen JAC members and Soviet Yiddish writers were shot at Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, among them Peretz Markish, Itzik Fefer, David Bergelson, David Hofshteyn, and Leyb Kvitko. The date is marked every year as the Night of the Murdered Poets (Di nakht fun di dermordete dikhter). The trial records stayed sealed for decades. The fullest account came only after 1991, in Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov’s Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Yale University Press, 2001).
• The Doctors’ Plot. Announced January 13, 1953. Nine prominent Soviet doctors, six of them Jewish, were arrested and accused of scheming to murder Soviet leaders through deliberate mistreatment. Whether the Doctors’ Plot was meant to lead to a mass deportation of Soviet Jews is still debated (see Contested elements below). Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and no deportation took place. The accused doctors were freed on April 3, 1953, and the new leadership admitted the charges had been invented.

By the end of the Black Years, the secular Yiddish world the Soviets themselves had helped build over thirty years was gone: its press, theater, publishing, and schools were closed, and its writers killed, imprisoned, or silenced. Most Soviet Jews by then spoke Russian as their first language. Yiddish survived only as a thin, state-controlled remnant of its former public life.

After Stalin

A thaw for almost everyone but the Jews.

Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, eased much of the terror, releasing political prisoners and, at the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, denouncing Stalin’s crimes in the famous “Secret Speech.” Soviet cultural and intellectual life loosened. For Jews, though, the thaw was thin.

What the post-Stalin years looked like for Soviet Jews:

• Religious and cultural life stayed boxed in. The state allowed a sliver of religious practice (about 100 synagogues operated nationwide, far below the prewar number) but it would not let the secular Yiddish world destroyed in the Black Years be rebuilt.
• The verdict on the JAC was overturned. The JAC members shot in 1952 were cleared after death in 1955–56, though the paperwork stayed quiet for years.
• The 1959 census. The first count since 1939 found about 2.27 million Soviet Jews, a steep drop from the roughly 5 million of June 1941, above all because of the Holocaust.
• The coded language continued. Official rhetoric kept reaching for words that Soviet readers understood to mean Jews (“cosmopolitan,” “rootless,” “Zionist”) through the years of Khrushchev and of Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982. Moscow’s stance on Israel (relations cut in 1953, restored, then cut again in 1967) made Jewish identity look politically suspect.
• The economic-crimes trials. In a wave of trials for “economic crimes” in the early 1960s (currency dealing, “speculation”) about 250 people were executed between 1961 and 1964, and by one count roughly 60 percent of them were Jewish. Many observers then and since read the pattern as antisemitism in practice.

The 1967 turning point

A distant war wakes a generation.

The Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states, fought June 5–10, 1967, sent a shock through the Soviet Union. Moscow sided with the Arab states, cut relations with Israel on June 10, and launched a fierce campaign in the press, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and laced with old antisemitic themes.

Inside the Jewish community the campaign had the opposite effect. The identity the Soviet state had spent fifty years trying to erase revived. Scholars point to 1967 as the spark for what became the refusenik movement and a broad Jewish reawakening:

• Open declarations of Jewishness. Soviet Jews (including the assimilated, secular, city-dwelling, well-educated majority) began identifying publicly as Jews in ways the system had not allowed, often tied to Israel and to Zionism.
• Underground revival. Secret Hebrew study circles, secret religious teaching, and underground cultural activity spread from 1967 on, at personal risk.
• Visa applications. Jews started applying to emigrate to Israel in large numbers. The state turned most of them down and punished the applicants: firing them, taking their housing, harassing them, often arresting them. Those refused permission to leave became known as otkazniki: refuseniks.

The refuseniks

The people the Soviet Union would not let leave.

The refusenik movement (the Soviet Jews denied exit visas, and the worldwide network that rallied to them) ran from about 1970 to 1991. Its key figures and moments:

• The Leningrad affair. June 15, 1970. A group of Jewish activists led by Eduard Kuznetsov and the pilot Mark Dymshits, and including Sylva Zalmanson and Yosef Mendelevich, tried to seize a small Soviet airliner near Leningrad and fly it to Sweden and on to Israel. They were caught before takeoff and put on trial. The first Leningrad trial that December handed Kuznetsov and Dymshits death sentences. An outcry around the world got those commuted to fifteen years in prison. The trials turned the refusenik cause into an international one and set the pattern for the decade to come.
• Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky. The most famous refusenik of all. Born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky in 1948 in Donetsk, he was a computer specialist and a strong chess player. Denied an exit visa in 1973, he joined the refusenik movement and worked alongside the physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Arrested on March 15, 1977 and charged with espionage and treason, he was convicted in July 1978 and sentenced to thirteen years, much of it in solitary confinement at Chistopol Prison and the Perm-35 labor camp. On February 11, 1986, he was freed in an East-West prisoner exchange and walked across the Glienicke Bridge from Potsdam, in East Germany, into West Berlin. He went straight to Israel and took the Hebrew name Natan Sharansky. He went on to serve in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as a government minister several times over, as deputy prime minister, and as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel from 2009 to 2018.
• Ida Nudel. Known as the “Guardian Angel” of the movement, a Soviet engineer who looked after refuseniks who had been jailed or exiled inside the country. She was arrested in 1978, exiled to Siberia, and finally allowed to leave for Israel in October 1987 after a long international campaign.
• The Prisoners of Zion. The name Israel and the wider movement gave to Soviet Jews jailed for activity tied to emigration, Jewish identity, or Zionism. Hundreds of people carried that designation over the decades across the Soviet period.
• The network abroad. American Jewish groups, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (founded 1964), the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, ran a steady campaign from the 1960s through the 1980s. Their rallying cry, “Let My People Go,” borrowed from the Passover story, became one of the defining American Jewish causes of the postwar era. On December 6, 1987, a day the organizers called Freedom Sunday, more than 200,000 people filled the National Mall in Washington, the largest Jewish rally the capital had ever held. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived the next day to meet President Reagan. Parallel networks worked in Britain, Canada, France, and Australia.

Jackson-Vanik · 1974

America ties trade to the right to leave.

The Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974, written by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles Vanik of Ohio, made a direct bargain: a communist country could only get normal U.S. trade terms and credit if it let its people emigrate freely. Any such country that “denies its citizens the right or opportunity to emigrate,” or charges more than a nominal tax to do so, was locked out of those benefits.

Congress passed it as part of the Trade Act in December 1974, and President Gerald Ford signed it into law on January 3, 1975. It landed in the middle of the American push for détente, warmer relations and big economic deals with Moscow, built by Nixon and Kissinger and inherited by Ford. It tied that effort to how the Soviet Union treated its own Jews, which caused diplomatic friction.

Moscow’s reaction was hostile. Soviet officials called the amendment an intrusion into their internal affairs and renounced the 1972 trade agreement in retaliation. Emigration still climbed through the decade to its peak in 1979, then fell to about 900 by 1986 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended détente. Historians have argued ever since about whether Jackson-Vanik helped or hurt. Some conclude that it cut emigration in the short run but increased it over the longer run, helping open the way to the mass emigration of the late 1980s and 1990s.

The amendment stayed formally in force against Russia until December 14, 2012, when a law granting Russia permanent normal trade relations repealed it. The same law enacted the Magnitsky Act, a human-rights measure. It continued to apply to some other former Soviet states.

The first wave out

The door opens a crack: the 1970s.

The first real wave of emigration came in the 1970s: about 250,000 Soviet Jews left between 1968 and 1980. It worked through a narrow, specific channel: the Soviet authorities allowed emigration only to Israel, and only on the grounds of “family reunification.” That meant an applicant had to produce a vyzov, an official invitation from a relative in Israel, which the Soviet bureaucracy then used to grant or deny an exit visa.

The wave peaked in 1979 at about 51,000 people. Through 1973 nearly all went to Israel. After that, a growing number “dropped out” at the transit point in Vienna (the Hebrew term was noshrim, “dropouts”) and headed instead for the United States, Canada, or Australia. By the late 1970s roughly two-thirds were choosing the United States.

On the American side, two laws shaped how Soviet Jews were received. The Refugee Act of 1980 set up the modern U.S. refugee system. The Lautenberg Amendment of 1989 (named for Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey) made it far easier for Soviet Jews and certain other Soviet religious minorities to enter as refugees. The Lautenberg framework ran for the main Soviet Jewish population through about 2011 and continues for some groups today.

The great exodus

The dam breaks: 1989–1995.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming Soviet leader who took power in 1985 and loosened the whole system, the emigration walls came down. As part of the wider late-1980s liberalization, the restrictions collapsed across 1988–89, and the largest part of the whole century-long exodus followed: about 1.3 million people from 1989 through 2000.

How the great wave broke down:

• 1989–91. About 490,000 Soviet Jews left. Most, roughly 330,000, went to Israel, with large numbers also reaching the United States. Germany’s intake of Jewish refugees began in 1991.
• 1992–95, after the collapse. About 440,000 more. When the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991, the economic and political chaos across the new states pushed even more people out. Israel took in about 265,000 and the United States about 130,000. Germany took a large share of the rest, with smaller numbers to Canada and Australia.
• After 1995. Emigration kept on through about 2000 and then slowed.

The effect on the Jewish map was enormous. Israel took in about 900,000 of the emigrants of 1989–2000, its biggest single wave of immigration since the founding years of 1948–51. The American Jewish community gained between 325,000 and 400,000 Russian-speaking Jews, reshaping major centers like Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and the wider New York area, and parts of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Smaller communities took root in Toronto, Montreal, Sydney, and Melbourne.

The world they built

The Russian-speaking Jewish world today.

The Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, mostly the product of that post-1968 exodus, now numbers some 2.2 million people, counting the second generation. About 1.3 million live in Israel, about 600,000 in the United States, about 200,000 in Germany, around 50,000 in Canada, about 25,000 in Australia, and smaller communities elsewhere.

The main communities today:

• In Israel. About 1.3 million Israelis trace their roots to the Soviet Union and its successors, counting the children of immigrants, nearly a fifth of the country’s Jews. They have shaped Israeli politics, built a Russian-language press and broadcasting scene, and become woven into the country’s economy and culture.
• In America. Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, “Little Odessa”, is the heart of it, with large communities also in Manhattan and Queens (Forest Hills, Rego Park). The community runs its own institutions: the Council of Jewish Émigré Community Organizations (COJECO), a Russian-language Jewish press, and a network of schools, synagogues, and cultural groups.
• In Germany. The Holocaust had all but ended Jewish life there. Today about 90 percent of Jews in Germany are post-Soviet immigrants or their children, and they rebuilt Jewish life in the country, reopening synagogues and reviving communities in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, and beyond. German Jewish life today is, in its everyday texture, heavily Russian-speaking, with the second generation switching to German.
• Still in the former USSR. Communities remain: in Russia (about 120,000), in Ukraine (about 50,000 before the 2022 war drove further emigration), and in Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic states, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Their life today includes a religious revival led by the Federation of Jewish Communities and the Chabad-Lubavitch network, local synagogues, schools, and steady ties to Israel and the wider Jewish world.

Contested elements

What historians still debate.

• Jews and the early Bolsheviks. Several prominent early Soviet leaders (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Litvinov) were of Jewish origin. The empire’s restrictions had pushed many young Jews toward radical movements, and these men joined the Bolsheviks as individual revolutionaries who had broken with Jewish religious and communal life, not as representatives of Jewish communities. The main organized Jewish movements, religious, Zionist, and Bundist, opposed Bolshevism in 1917. The antisemitic conspiracy theory of “Jewish Bolshevism” was fed by forgeries like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, covered in the Protocols Chapter. Once in power, the Bolsheviks dismantled Jewish religious and communal life, as told above.
• Who did the killing on Soviet soil. The official Soviet line after the war was that only the German occupiers had murdered Soviet Jews. The scholarship that became possible after the 1991 archive opening documents the part played by local auxiliaries (Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian) in those killings. How to weigh that record against the enormous Soviet sacrifice in the war (about 27 million Soviet citizens died, including roughly 2.5 million Jews) is still argued over in the successor states.
• Would Stalin have deported the Jews? Historians debate whether Stalin truly intended to deport the whole Soviet Jewish population in 1953. The evidence pointing that way includes the barracks reportedly under construction in Birobidzhan and Kazakhstan, the anti-Jewish press drive of early 1953, and the precedent of his earlier deportations of whole nationalities. Those included the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Volga Germans. It leads a number of scholars to conclude the deportation was planned and stopped only by Stalin’s death. Others, including Gennady Kostyrchenko and Joshua Rubenstein, find no documentary evidence of a concrete plan. The question stays open.
• The “dropout” controversy. When growing numbers of emigrants in the late 1970s chose destinations other than Israel, it set off a sharp argument in the Jewish world about whether Soviet Jews should be helped to settle wherever they chose or steered toward Israel. The historian Frederick Lazin traces that argument between Israel and the American Jewish establishment.

Object Spotlight

The bridge that the Soviet Union used as a door.

A small guard booth, a red-and-white striped barrier across an empty road, and a tall sign in four languages (English, Russian, French, German), all with the same message: you are leaving the American sector. Behind it, a graceful steel arch carries a road over gray water. No one is crossing in the photo. A single guard stands at the booth.

The checkpoint stood at the western end of the Glienicke Bridge, a road bridge built in 1907 across the Havel river on the southwestern edge of West Berlin. After Germany was split at the end of the Second World War, the border between West Berlin’s American sector and Communist East Germany ran down the middle of the bridge, marked by a painted white line. From 1952 on, ordinary people could not cross, and only Allied soldiers and diplomats could use it at all. Because the bridge was remote, sealed at both ends, and closed to the public, the two sides of the Cold War could meet there with no crowds and no cameras. They traded captured agents there so often that Western journalists nicknamed it the “Bridge of Spies.” One of those exchanges, in 1962, is the subject of the Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies (2015).

On February 11, 1986, Anatoly Shcharansky, the most famous refusenik in the world, walked across this bridge to freedom. He had spent nine years in Soviet prisons and labor camps on a false charge of espionage. In 1977, soon after his arrest, President Jimmy Carter said publicly that Shcharansky had never worked for the CIA, the American intelligence agency. Shcharansky was released in an East-West exchange of prisoners, the kind of swap usually made for captured agents. Earlier that day, on the airfield in East Berlin, his escorts from the KGB, the Soviet secret police, ordered him to walk straight to a waiting car. He zigzagged. Press photographers recorded his crossing of the bridge. He flew on to Israel that same day. He told his own story in Fear No Evil (1988).

The bridge reopened to ordinary traffic on November 10, 1989, the day after the Berlin Wall fell, when people from Potsdam streamed across on foot into West Berlin. Today it is an ordinary road bridge again, with a small museum at the Potsdam end. A metal strip in the roadway marks where the border once ran.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History: World War II and the Holocaust. The Soviet Jewish side of the Holocaust, the mass shootings on Soviet soil (told in full in the Einsatzgruppen Chapter), the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the half-million Soviet Jews who served in the Red Army, belongs in the standard Holocaust unit.
• World History: the Cold War. The Black Years, the Doctors’ Plot, the 1967 turning point, the refusenik movement, and the Jackson-Vanik Amendment fit the standard Cold War unit, and offer a case study of how the Soviet state treated its national and religious minorities.
• US History: postwar immigration and civic life. The arrival of 325,000 to 400,000 Soviet Jews across the 1970s through the 1990s belongs in the standard postwar immigration story, alongside the movements covered in the American Jewry Chapter.
• ELA / Literacy: primary-source analysis. Sharansky’s memoir Fear No Evil (1988), the Jackson-Vanik legislative record, and the post-1991 Soviet archival documents give upper-grade students conflicting material to work with.
• For teachers: The main teaching resources include the Memorial Society, the Soviet-dissident history organization founded in 1988 and forcibly shut by the Russian government in 2021–22, its archives preserved abroad. Others are the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and Yad Vashem’s online materials. Sharansky’s Fear No Evil and Yosef Mendelevich’s Unbroken Spirit (Gefen, 2012) both work well as upper-grade primary-source readings.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945) and 10.6 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1945–1991: The Cold War), and NY US History 11.10 (Social and Economic Change/Domestic Issues, 1945–Present, including 11.10b, immigration).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction through the Holocaust on Soviet soil, the mass shootings, and the first attempt to document them.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students evaluate differing points of view and integrate primary and secondary sources, working from Sharansky’s memoir, the Jackson-Vanik legislative record, and post-1991 Soviet archival documents.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14. Students investigate historical context and the multiple causes and effects of the Soviet state’s treatment of its Jewish minority.