A Purim “Shpil” in Soviet Moscow

The time was 1987, the place Moscow. Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was at a near-standstill. In 1986, out of the roughly 1.5 million Jews remaining in the USSR, only about 900 were allowed to leave. Tens of thousands of refuseniks—Jews who had applied for permission to emigrate, been denied or placed on hold, and were meanwhile punished for their effrontery and persecuted—were left in what seemed like an interminable state of limbo. Among them were my father, my mother, and I, then close to my twentieth birthday.

And then in early spring 1987, thanks in part to the society-wide reforms inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev, to mounting pressure from the U.S. and its political allies, and to the heroic efforts of the Soviet refusenik movement, the cloud appeared to lift; by the end of that year, we along with many others would win deliverance. And so the holiday of Purim in March of that year stands out as one of our brightest memories.

The story of Purim, after all, as told in the biblical book of Esther, is a story of sudden redemption in the face of unimaginable odds. Myth and memory have mingled and lived on in Purim traditions—which is why, for Jews in post-World War II Russia, associations with ancient Babylonia and Persia rang close to home. Older people spoke of March 5, 1953, the day of Stalin’s death, as a day of Jewish liberation. They were referring to the anti-Semitic campaign of Stalin’s last years, culminating in the so-called Doctors’ Plot when many Soviet Jews feared the worst. In my refusenik youth, the idea of a miraculous escape from persecution, an escape through some fateful intervention, resonated with special significance.