Gal Beckerman: Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny
[Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at The Forward, is the author of the forthcoming “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.”]
LATE one summer night 40 years ago this month, Yosef Mendelevich, a young Soviet Jew, camped with a group of friends outside the Smolny airport near Leningrad. The next morning, they planned to commandeer a 12-seat airplane, fly it to Sweden and, once there, declare their purpose: to move to Israel, a dream they had long been denied....
Early the next day, as the plotters walked onto the tarmac, they were...caught. The K.G.B. had known of their plan for months. And the two leaders were later sentenced to death....
The essential weakness of the Soviet Union was exposed: to survive, the regime had to imprison its own population. This would be the beginning of the end.
Jews were understandably at the forefront of the emigration battle. Even as they were forbidden to exercise any kind of Jewish identity, they also had no option to assimilate in Soviet society. Their internal passports were stamped “Jew,” a word that three generations after the 1917 revolution signified little more than their status as outsiders. Many had come to feel that their existence inside the Soviet Union was untenable, that the only way to escape this paradox was to move away. But the doors were firmly shut; those who requested permission to leave were refused and then ostracized....
Worldwide reaction to the news was immediate. Overnight, the small cause of Soviet Jewry — until then supported only by impassioned students and isolated activists — became a mass movement. Italian longshoremen in Genoa refused to unload Soviet ships. Students in Stockholm marched with torches through the streets. Even Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist president, called for clemency. In Israel, air-raid sirens blasted through the cities and 100,000 people gathered in front of the Western Wall. In Washington, Richard Nixon held an emergency meeting with leaders of Jewish groups....
The bravery of the hijacking plotters also ignited a movement in the United States that would lead Congress, a few years later, to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld preferred trading status from the Soviet Union until it allowed tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate. The American action so exasperated Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, that he demanded that his Politburo find more creative answers to the “Jewish question.” “Zionism,” he told them, “is making us stupid.”...
When Soviet Jews finally emigrated en masse — nearly 1.5 million by the end of the 1990s — it looked like just another happy side effect of the Soviet Union’s collapse, another wall crumbling. Forgotten were the decades of pushing from the inside. The Soviet Union might have gone the way of China and had an economic liberalization that ignored human rights. But this option was not open, because the Soviet Jews made it clear that any change would need to include open borders.
As a result, not only were hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Berlin Wall and, eventually, an empire — a world-shaking transformation born from the hopes once placed on a small airplane that never even left the ground.
Read entire article at NYT
LATE one summer night 40 years ago this month, Yosef Mendelevich, a young Soviet Jew, camped with a group of friends outside the Smolny airport near Leningrad. The next morning, they planned to commandeer a 12-seat airplane, fly it to Sweden and, once there, declare their purpose: to move to Israel, a dream they had long been denied....
Early the next day, as the plotters walked onto the tarmac, they were...caught. The K.G.B. had known of their plan for months. And the two leaders were later sentenced to death....
The essential weakness of the Soviet Union was exposed: to survive, the regime had to imprison its own population. This would be the beginning of the end.
Jews were understandably at the forefront of the emigration battle. Even as they were forbidden to exercise any kind of Jewish identity, they also had no option to assimilate in Soviet society. Their internal passports were stamped “Jew,” a word that three generations after the 1917 revolution signified little more than their status as outsiders. Many had come to feel that their existence inside the Soviet Union was untenable, that the only way to escape this paradox was to move away. But the doors were firmly shut; those who requested permission to leave were refused and then ostracized....
Worldwide reaction to the news was immediate. Overnight, the small cause of Soviet Jewry — until then supported only by impassioned students and isolated activists — became a mass movement. Italian longshoremen in Genoa refused to unload Soviet ships. Students in Stockholm marched with torches through the streets. Even Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist president, called for clemency. In Israel, air-raid sirens blasted through the cities and 100,000 people gathered in front of the Western Wall. In Washington, Richard Nixon held an emergency meeting with leaders of Jewish groups....
The bravery of the hijacking plotters also ignited a movement in the United States that would lead Congress, a few years later, to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld preferred trading status from the Soviet Union until it allowed tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate. The American action so exasperated Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, that he demanded that his Politburo find more creative answers to the “Jewish question.” “Zionism,” he told them, “is making us stupid.”...
When Soviet Jews finally emigrated en masse — nearly 1.5 million by the end of the 1990s — it looked like just another happy side effect of the Soviet Union’s collapse, another wall crumbling. Forgotten were the decades of pushing from the inside. The Soviet Union might have gone the way of China and had an economic liberalization that ignored human rights. But this option was not open, because the Soviet Jews made it clear that any change would need to include open borders.
As a result, not only were hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Berlin Wall and, eventually, an empire — a world-shaking transformation born from the hopes once placed on a small airplane that never even left the ground.