Soviet Jewry

It's only bloody money

David Levy

When it was first announced from Moscow that the Kremlin had drastically raised the price of exit visas for certain categories of would-be Jewish emigrants to Israel, my immediate reaction was one of jubilation. It was not long, however, before I realised that most other people received the news with gasps of dismay.

It must have been those gasps of dismay that have apparently persuaded the Israeli government to discourage the raising of money to pay the new exit taxes and have led the American State Department to take a similarly dim view of this new milestone in the unfolding drama of the Soviet Jewish emigration to Israel. Wherefore, then, my first impulse to rejoice at the news?

Six and a 'half years of reporting the Moscow scene made it seem to me that if anybody could get out of the Soviet Union by paying, that was certainly progress. The Soviet Union is a place that does not let its citizens emigrate at all — saving now the Jewish exceptions. Studying this phenomenon of the Soviet Jewish emigration very closely, I am struck by the enormous misunderstanding of it in the West. The gap between fact and emotion is so wide as to cause at least one editor of a right-wing Jewish newspaper whom I encountered to be totally unaware that the Soviet Union does not normally allow any of its citizens to emigrate. He thought the Kremlin was discriminating against Jews in this regard, and that Soviet gentiles were free to come and go as they pleased.

The fact is, Soviet gentiles see the present Jewish exodus, even such as it is, as but one more example of how the Jews allegedly always 'make out.'

"The Jews have gone and done it again, and more power to them," more or less sums up what I have gathered to be kind, gentile Soviet opinion on this issue.

In the present instance of the new exit tax, the misunderstanding in the West is reflected in the cry of "Blood money!" This is a particularly misleading piece of demagoguery because the present case is worlds apart from the grim demands that Hitler made, to which the term "blood money" is an obvious allusion.

It is also a very dangerous piece of demagoguery that could just strengthen the hand of the hardliners in Soviet policymaking circles and lead to an even tighter situation on Jewish emigration than existed before the new tax was promulgated.

One can easily imagine the arguments that went on in the Politburo when one of the fifteen men first mooted the idea of getting off the hook of not letting valuable Jewish brains emigrate, while the outside world cried shame, by seeking financial compensation for the damage that this brain-drain does to the Soviet economy.

Someone else must have jumped up and objected. "They'll call it blood money and make even worse propaganda hay against us. Not on your life. Let's just stand pat and not let these scientists go."

But apparently such tough-liners were overruled. And, right on schedule, the reaction they predicted in the West has come about. In fact, however, the idea that highly educated Jewish intellectuals may now emigrate from the Soviet Union for mere money should be welcomed as a big new step forward in ultimately letting these troubled waters find their own level.

"It's only bloody money," would be far more appropriate a response than "blood money."

How the amounts of money may be justified, whether exorbitant or reasonable, is another matter. But in the end, when the complexities and the total stakes are taken into full account, it's just a quibble. And the money is certainly there for the collecting.

By demanding what it feels to be adequate compensation for the cost of a Jewish scientist's education, and the computed damages to the state economy caused by his departure, the Kremlin is at least recognising the fundamental principle of an individual's right to leave his country, under certain secondary conditions. And that is well nigh revolutionary, a veritable milestone not only in Soviet history but also in the much longer but still very relevant record of Russian history.

Even Tsarist Russia, in which Soviet xenophobia has its roots, made emigration as difficult as it could. Quibbling over the price, and asking a high one at the outset, is something one should expect, and even perhaps bargain hard over. But simply to rant away against it does nobody any good and squanders a big new opportunity to get Jews out of the Soviet Union who really want to leave and who really have something to contribute to the West that the Soviet state did originally make possible.

Only the demands of an all-out propaganda war, in which the distinction between fair means and foul ceases to matter, can justify the "blood money" cry.

Besides, thank God it is not a question of buying Jews otherwise slated for slaughter, which is what blood money was in Hitler's time, and which, when used now against the Soviet leaders, certainly entitles them to regard it as a calumny of the first water, and certainly must discourage them from trying further to break the log-jam.

As for demanding any money at all, all too easily is it forgotten that the Soviet Union is a very poor country in terms of the social cost of things, so that it is a bad show all around when someone with a higher education ups and leaves. The Russians regard all citizens as debtors to the state, but particularly those with higher education. (This, incidentally, is what has always been behind the sad absurdity which sees the Soviet state locking all those grown-up citizens in as though the country were one vast boarding school.) Accepting the debtor view of citizenship as justified for the moment, it is only logical that the state should demand settlement of the debt before permitting debtors to leave. Up till now, the Soviet state has, notwithstanding its own logic, refused to be bought out all the same. Now that appears to be changing, and it is an exciting development.

One can of course argue endlessly over the nature of the debt that Jewish scientists owe to the Soviet state. But why? Who needs it? One thing, however, in unarguable: the very real damage to the Soviet state economy that would be caused by large-scale departures of Jewish scientists.

Some observers even go so far as to talk about the collapse of Soviet science if such came to pass.

An extravagant claim? Perhaps. But it mirrors the kind of alarm in the Kremlin that somehow seems to explain an exorbitant demand and to make that demand seem rather more reasonable, rather more good news than bad.

David Levy is Moscow correspondent of the Montreal Star, and founded the Moscow Bureau of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.