(Jewish Group) Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91 (2 articles about him and Soviet Jews)

Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader whose reforms included letting Jews leave for Israel, dies at 91

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose reforms, including allowing massive numbers of Jews to emigrate to Israel, changed his country and the world, died at 91.

Russian media said Gorbachev died Tuesday in a Moscow hospital.

“Michail Gorbachev has died,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, Moscow’s chief rabbi from 1993 until this year, said Tuesday on Twitter. “3 million Soviet Jews owe him their freedom.”

It was clear when Gorbachev rose to power in 1985 that he would be different from his predecessors as secretary general of the Communist Party. He was younger, more vibrant, more open to acknowledging where communism had fallen short in the Soviet Union.

But his rise was at first was inauspicious for the movement that had sought for decades to allow Jews to freely emigrate, against the Soviet regime that prevented them from leaving and often punished them for seeking exit at all.

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So, how did Jews fare under Mikhail Gorbachev anyway?

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who died Aug. 30 at age 91, was remembered for allowing Jews more freedom of religion at home and allowing increasing numbers to emigrate. But did the results match his good intentions? As Communist Party general secretary in the late 1980s, Gorbachev had advocated glasnost (openness) as a policy reform, and perestroika (reconstruction), a political movement for reform of Soviet politics and economics.

His efforts would soon be followed by the collapse of the USSR, and Jews in the free world saw cause for optimism after decades of stagnation and antisemitic oppression. A character in Tony Kushner’s 1992 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Perestroika” likened faltering advances in American LGBTQ+ rights to what looked like sudden transformations in the USSR: “Remember back four years ago? The whole time we (were) feeling everything everywhere was stuck, while in Russia! Look! Perestroika! The Thaw! It’s the end of the Cold War! The whole world is changing! Overnight!”

Yet for a number of Soviet Jews, reform and rescue were not quite as miraculously instantaneous as all that. A case in point was Alexander Pinkhosovich Podrabinek, a Soviet dissident and human rights activist of Jewish origin, who was exiled, then imprisoned in a corrective-labor colony for publishing a book on punitive medicine in the USSR.

Podrabinek had taken an interest in the fate of the Russian Jewish dissident poet Vladimir Gershuni, a victim of this type of punitive psychiatry. In the late 1970s, Dr. Gerard Low-Beer, a British Jewish psychiatrist, visited Moscow and unofficially examined nine Soviet political dissidents imprisoned in mental hospitals. Dr. Low-Beer concluded that they were not mentally ill and their incarceration was unjustified on medical grounds.

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