On Choice and Freedom in Transnational Migrations: The Soviet Jewish Migrants in Europe Who Were Left Behind

Abstract

This article discusses the experiences of several thousand Jewish migrants from the Soviet Union who failed to adapt to life in Israel and moved to Western Europe during the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to gain immigrant admission to Western countries. The difficult multi-year sojourn of these people in Europe (mainly in the Roman Metropolitan Area in Italy) highlights the nonlinear and precarious trajectories of emigration from the USSR as well as the political controversies that accompanied this population movement. At the center of analysis are the activities of Western and Israeli government agencies and international organizations that tried to restrict and inhibit the unexpected abandonment of the Israeli destination by ex-Soviet Jewish migrants. The article focuses on a contrast between the ideology and practice of transnational migrations in a divided world. Although the concepts of freedom, legality, and individual choice rhetorically framed the act of leaving the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in practice those benefits were not available to many migrants. Agencies routinely handled migrations on grounds of political calculation, in which the rights, freedoms, and well-being of the migrant were subordinated to policy objectives and institutional priorities, often without much regard for the law. The article pays special attention to the values, language, and mechanisms of political action that the former Soviet people employed in order to reach their goals in the unfamiliar Western world.