Customer Reviews

They Did Not Dwell Alone: Jewish Immigration from the Soviet Union, 1967-1990 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)

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When the fight, as in the Cold War, is to decide the fate of the entire world, what happens with a couple of hundred thousand people matters not a jot. This book is an involved and cosmopolitan Dutch diplomat's technical review of the details of a forgotten Cold War accident that let quarter-million Jewish refugees get out of the air-tight Soviet Union during the 1970s detente. A student of 20th-century history would round out his knowledge by reading this superbly written and well-researched book.

My own experience is of a 1979 teenage refugee in an ex-"refusenik" family, and this book explained to me this impossible event that re-channeled my life. Soviet Jewish emigration was a big public issue in the US and Europe in the 1970s, but that world is long gone and today this event is remembered by almost no one.

While this book is a very valuable and vivid description of that utterly forgotten historical accident, it leaves out the chance confluence of geopolitical circumstances that brought it about. A chapter on the origins of this emigration (perhaps a Scowcroft or a Kissinger should write it) would need to cover (1) the perpetually misguided and flip-flopped Soviet Middle East policy that included at different times arming to the teeth Israel, Nasser and Saddam, and the complete Soviet break with Israel in 1967; (2) the mutation of Soviet Communism into a chauvinistic Russian empire with a bigoted national socialism since World War II; (3) the awful harm to the Soviet image all across the Western political and generational divides due to the 1968 Czechoslovakia invasion; and (4) the horrified Russians' sudden tactical need for commercial and policy options in the West after the Sino-Soviet split blew up into a shooting border war in 1969 and raised an anguished Russian specter of national extinction at the hands of a new Golden Horde. The senile Soviet geopolitical miscalculations that ended the detente (and with it emigration) in 1979-1980 should also be better explored. The reader of this book is probably assumed to have all this knowledge going in.

The book also gives too much credit to the refugees; overlooks the ugly ethnic nationalism of relevant Israeli policies which stand in sharp contrast to the decency of the Americans and the Dutch; and makes a common mistake of greatly over-estimating the importance of brave Soviet dissidents in their country's evolution. The dissidents' internal effect on the Soviet Union was in fact negligible, but they usefully helped turn even the New Left Western opinion against the Soviets. Refuseniks were dissidents not willingly but by default. The departing refugees included some admirable folks and even a future Google co-founder, but too many others among them were every bit as squalid, intolerant and corrupt as any Soviets - as today's character and politics of the Russian community in Israel amply illustrate. Israel's high-level, revolting late-1980s idea to use the police of Communist Romania to forcibly prevent a new wave of Soviet Jewish refugees from going to countries other than Israel is discounted by the author as only a PR blunder.

Perhaps all these gritty and realist discussions could someday be the subject of another book, one I look forward to reading. The book before us now is a useful description of a once-publicized but now forgotten bit of Cold War history, and a testament to the author's own obvious humanity.