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Guest editor’s introduction

In the second half of the 1960s, the predominantly Russian-assimilated Soviet Jews started to explore their Jewish heritage, inspired by the Aliyah (Hebrew: ascent) movement. Referring back to the events narrated in the Book of Exodus, Russian Jews, a “stepchild” and silent minority in the officially proclaimed multinational Soviet family, identified as people of the galut (Jewish diaspora, more precisely exile). For them, leaving the Soviet Union and relocating to the “original homeland” for which they yearned, Israel was collectively conceived as both an exodus (liberation and flight) and Aliyah. However, since authorities denied most Soviet Jews exit visas, and the process of waiting for the permission to leave the country often lasted for years, they became “refuseniks.” State refusal and discrimination played a major role in the birth of a Jewish underground, which continued to exist until Soviet political liberalization at the end of the 1980s. Scholars often point to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which the Israelis achieved a rapid victory against the Soviet-supported Arab forces, as a trigger for the Jewish national renaissance. Indeed, the victory stirred enthusiasm among Soviet Jews and initiated the development of a broad cultural and political underground movement. The actual cause for the emergence of the Jewish national movement, however, lies not in international events but in a series of notable events in Soviet history, of which the experience of relative spiritual freedom during the period of the Khrushchev Thaw played a significant role. Irena and Nati Cantorovich identify precisely this peculiar pendulum between cultural concessions on the one hand (e.g. the 1960 translation of The Diary of Anne Frank or the publishing of Ilya Ehrenburg’s memoirs People, Years, Life), and the regime’s simultaneous stigmatization of Jewish matters on the other hand as the stimulus for the revival of Jewish political and cultural self-reflection. The discussion about certain aspects of the totalitarian Soviet past and the partial renunciation of the Socialist Realist canon, which became possible in the 1950s, paved the way for an alternative understanding of history. Not only did it foreshadow a revision of the past, it also pointed out cultural and ethnic differences that existed in Village prose – a sort of Russianethnic “back to the roots” literature – and later in the so-called shestidesiatniki literature of the 1960s generation. The end of the cultural thaw, which finally came with the ouster of Khrushchev and his replacement by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, provoked the emergence of an underground counter-culture. The restrictions on public intellectual activity caused the development of the informal culture and dissident movement. In this respect, the 1967 SixDay War merely consolidated the gradual individualization of Jews in (semiand anti-) public life. As Petr Vail and Aleksandr Genis argue, “The Six-Day War completed the process of the ‘manifestation’ of Jews in the Soviet society.” Despite its internal heterogeneity, which will be explicitly highlighted and analyzed in this issue, Jewish unofficial culture was one of the most visible of all the Soviet non-conformist communities. The character of its dissent can be traced back firstly to social and political disobedience, which manifested in the organization of “nationalist” and “particularistic” (in the language of the Soviet authorities) Jewish cultural events, in the observance of religious customs in an officially atheistic state, and, finally, in the public request to leave the Soviet