On Jews and Israel, Gorbachev’s legacy is under threat

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It’s an open question whether Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) he introduced as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985-91 would lead to its collapse. But his decisions, taken under international pressure, to allow mass Jewish emigration and to enable religious freedoms were carefully considered.

“Mikhail Gorbachev has died. 3 million Soviet Jews owe him their freedom,”  summed up Pinchas Goldschmidt, Moscow’s chief rabbi from 1993 until earlier this year, in a tweet Tuesday night.

As a consequence of Gorbachev’s policies (introduced amid the struggle for Soviet Jewry, notably backed by US president Ronald Reagan), vast multitudes of Jews were able to leave, notably to Israel — an influx of hundreds of thousands of new citizens whose sheer numbers initially challenged Israel’s absorption capabilities but whose skills, diversity and passion have become integral to the modern, thriving Jewish state.

Moreover, Gorbachev gradually recognized and confronted antisemitism in the Soviet Union, memorably sending a speech for an aide to deliver at Babyn Yar in 1991 that acknowledged, unprecedentedly, that “venomous sprouts of antisemitism arose even on Soviet soil,” and elaborating: “The Stalin bureaucracy, which publicly disassociated itself from antisemitism, in fact, used it as a means to isolate the country from the outside and strengthen its dictatorial position with the help of chauvinism.”

He openly lamented that it was that antisemitism that had prompted so many Jews to seek to leave the Soviet Union. Their exodus, he said on a visit to Israel in 1992, was a “loss for our land and society.”

“Only in the days of perestroika did we finally succeed in putting an end to the signs of antisemitism,” he said on that trip, receiving a tremendously warm reception here less than six months after he resigned as president.

Ironically, Gorbachev has passed away precisely as Vladimir Putin’s Russia is tangling with the Jewish Agency, moving to shut down the quasi-governmental Israeli organization that handles Jewish emigration.

Until he invaded Ukraine, Putin cultivated warm relations with Israel, but that has changed since Israel under prime minister Naftali Bennett tried to steer an impossible middle path on the conflict and, under Prime Minister Yair Lapid, more firmly condemned Russia’s actions. The tussle with the Jewish Agency, playing out in a Russian court process whose result Putin can doubtless determine, is hardly coincidental. (Likewise, Russia’s increasingly vehement criticism of Israeli military activities to prevent Iran from establishing a deepening hold in Russian-controlled Syria.)

The same Rabbi Goldschmidt who Tuesday night eulogized Gorbachev recently warned that, in the current climate, Putin’s Russia may again move to prevent Jews from leaving. A critic of the Ukraine invasion who is now living in Israel — rather than being “in exile,” he prefers to say he is “a rabbi who is not living in his community” — Goldschmidt cited the fear “that the Iron Curtain will close completely, and that one day it will become impossible to leave Russia at all.”

In his later years, Gorbachev became a marginal but bitter critic of Putin, declaring a decade ago that Putin was “castrating” Russian democracy, and asserting that Russia now “embodied the worst bureaucratic features of the Soviet Communist party.”

Today, it would seem, Gorbachev’s legacy relating to Jews and Israel may also be under threat.