What is re-emigration?

Re-emigration means the return of an emigrant to the country of origin, also known as return migration

Important concepts

Aliyah—Jewish immigration to Israel. Literally means "ascent" and symbolizes the return to the historical homeland.
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Yerida—the reverse process: Jewish emigration from Israel ("descent").
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Neshirah - the practice of Soviet Jews leaving the USSR ostensibly for Israel but choosing other countries for permanent residence.

Ostarbeiters—people forcibly taken to Germany for labor during World War II. After the war, many of them were returned to the USSR.
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Filtration camps—facilities where those returning to the USSR after the war were screened for loyalty to the regime.

MGB (Ministry of State Security)—a Soviet state agency responsible for intelligence, counterintelligence, and state security.

Gdud ha-Avoda—a Jewish labor commune in Palestine in the 1920s.

Intelligence file—a dossier on individuals suspected of espionage or anti-Soviet activities.

Formulary file—a personal file on an individual suspected of subversive activity against the USSR (term was used until 1954).

POST-REVOLUTION RE-EMIGRATION

• 1920s-1930s

GEOGRAPHY OF RETURN: Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, China, Mongolia, USA.

In November 1921, an amnesty was declared for 'individuals who served as ordinary soldiers in White Guard military organizations.' Through this, the Soviet authorities attempted to recruit highly skilled professionals, most of whom had fled during the Civil War. Soviet operatives toured the places with large emigrant communities, hosted artistic soirees, and distributed newspapers and leaflets, telling them how great life in the Soviet Union was.
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Upon their return to the homeland, the excitement quickly abated. Instead of the promised wealth, re-emigrants were issued a Soviet passport on the condition that they would have to work for the state for several years. Any property seized from those who had left earlier was not subject to restitution. Many of the emigrants of this period suffered repressions; others were executed on account of their unreliable past.

POST-WAR RE-EMIGRATION

• 1940s-1950s

GEOGRAPHY OF RETURN: Germany, Austria, France, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, China.

The Yalta Conference Agreement of 1945 stipulated that all citizens who had resided on Soviet territory at the outbreak of World War II were to be handed over to the Soviet authorities, regardless of their wishes.
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Most of the re-emigrants of this period were Ostarbeiters and prisoners of war; many of whom, fearing subsequent reprisals, did not want to return to their homeland. To locate and return 'fugitives,” Soviet agents infiltrated the camps for displaced persons. There were many cases of people being simply kidnapped and transported to the Soviet occupation zone.

At the same time, the agents conducted propaganda campaigns portraying their happy lives promising “pardons,” free passage back to the homeland, housing, and work. They also used letters from family members dictated by the MGB, painting a rosy picture of life in the post-war Soviet Union.
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In practice, what awaited the returnees were filtration camps, following which many of them were repressed. Life in the post-war years was so miserable that some of the re-emigrants started planning their escape from the Soviet Union after barely setting foot at the border station.

Jews returning from Mandatory Palestine and Israel

• 1920s-1930s

The project of establishing Jewish agricultural communes and the Jewish Autonomy in Crimea resulted in a curious occurrence: the re-emigration to the USSR from Mandatory Palestine. In 1924, the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation was established, committing to provide the USSR with a 9 million dollar loan to support the Jewish Autonomy project. This set off a wave of re-emigration from Eretz Israel. Entire organized groups of left-wing Zionists returned. Between 1928 and 1929, two hundred former Gdud ha-Avoda labor commune members crossed into the USSR and settled in Crimea. However, the Jewish agricultural settlements on the peninsula were short-lived. During the years of the Great Terror, the re-emigrants from Mandatory Palestine were charged with espionage and repressed, and a number of them were executed.

• 1940s-1950s

Returnees from Israel often fell victim to political persecution. The secret police also targeted those who had managed to leave for Israel after the war. An illustrative case is that of Klara Borisovna Hoffman-Plekhova, born in 1927, a native of Gomel. She fled to Israel from Germany to be married to her fiancé after the war. Like other fugitives, Plekhova, a traitor to the homeland, was tried in absentia by a tribunal and sentenced to execution. Subsequently, Soviet intelligence services found out that she was in Tel Aviv. Intercepting her letters to her family containing complaints about Israel, the MGB decided to have her return to the USSR. They recruited her father, Boris Yakovlevich Plekhov↗, to lure his daughter from Tel Aviv to the USSR. Immediately upon arrival, she was arrested. As her relatives report, Klara was convicted ( the details of the verdict are unknown to us) and stripped of her parental rights.

• 1960s-1970s

Not everyone was granted permission to re-emigrate to the USSR during these years. Soviet secret services carefully screened for those who might be useful for propaganda. Those who wished to return to the USSR were required to express criticism of the Israeli reality in their applications. These letters would then be published in all USSR periodicals. In addition, the re-emigrants were made to speak on radio and television about how hard life in Israel was and the “subversive activities of Zionism.” In return for their involvement in the anti-Zionist campaign, the returnees got assistance with housing and employment.A perfect example of such cooperation is the story of Ilya Fuizalov↗, a native of Tashkent, born in 1934. Having failed to make it in Israel, he moved to Italy and, from there, sent letters to the editorials of Pravda, Izvestia, and Pravda Vostoka, accusing “Zionist propaganda” of luring Soviet Jews to Israel by deception and “exposing” the harsh life circumstances of repatriates from the USSR. Following these publications, the Soviet embassy in Italy got Fuizalov an entry permit. In exchange for a Soviet passport, immediately upon his arrival in the USSR, at the Chop station in Zakarpattya, Fuizalov reiterated his tearful accounts of the dire situation of his Uzbek friends in Israel. His story was published in the newspaper Zakarpatskaya Pravda.

Why people returned to the USSR

In each period, re-emigrants had their reasons for returning. Most of those returning shortly after the creation of the USSR sympathized with the Communists and believed in the “idea of equality and fraternity.” The World Economic Crisis, which started in 1929, motivated the re-emigration of those who had fallen for the Soviet advertising campaign, claiming that the USSR was strong and economically robust. Many Eastern European Jews were also returning in this period - mainly because of rising anti-Semitism and the coming of the Nazi regimes to power.

The post-war re-emigrants were given no choice. Former POWs and Ostarbeiters were removed from displaced persons camps and taken to Soviet filtration camps in an organized manner. On their way back to their homeland, many people committed suicide.

In 1949-1953, Soviet embassies in several countries launched successful campaigns to promote the Soviet lifestyle. They invited their former compatriots to receptions and showed them movies about the Soviet Union's accomplishments. This was quite effective. Re-emigrants came to the USSR from France, the U.S., Europe, Brazil, and Argentina. In reality, upon arrival, people could not get either housing or work. However, the world felt strongly that all Soviet citizens were eager to return to their homeland.

Return campaigns

Some return campaigns targeted specific ethnic groups. For instance, in 1946-1948, about 100,000 ethnic Armenians whose historical origins were not in Soviet Armenia were brought to the Armenian SSR from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and other countries under the project “On Practical Measures for the Resettlement of Armenians from Abroad to Soviet Armenia” dated February 22, 1946.

what did people bring with them?

The importation of personal belongings of re-emigrants to the USSR often reflected both a practical need and a desire to preserve a piece of Western life. This is why the following items could be found in the suitcases:

Hard-to-find literature

Soup cubes

Children's toys

Tights

Instant coffee

Jeans

Footwear

French perfume

About Parcels from Abroad in the J•doc Digital Archive

In the archival files of state security agencies, we were unable to find information about what re-emigrants brought with them to the USSR. We learned about this from oral testimonies, but we found interesting documents about parcels that were sent to the USSR from abroad.

Reporting notes and special reports returned from the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), v.No.24. Vol. 2, 1951.↗
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About ‘contamination of the Radio Information Committee under the Council of Ministers of the Lithuanian SSR with socially alien and politically dubious persons’, specifying the persons, including: the editor of music broadcasting Shpigelglazas Julius Lvovich (coming from a rich family, his brother had been living in Israel since 1935, during the war he received parcels from his brother and spoke negatively about the quality of Soviet things in comparison with the sent ones, worshipped Western composers, was generally characterised as an anti-Soviet person).

Case No. 2 With original reports, communications and information (returned from the Central Committee of the CPU)↗
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Л.8-11. About the completion of the investigation on the charges against the crew members of the Soviet Danube Shipping Company (Izmail port) V.I. Henkin, M.N. Rubinstein, N.V. Henkina and P.M. Tsyganov, who were also KGB agents, for smuggling, violation of the rules of currency operations and speculation on a large scale in 1967-1973. On speculation in ‘things of foreign manufacture’

Control and surveillance file on the UMGB of Zakarpattia Oblast, 1946-1953↗
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On receipt of parcels from abroad, including: from the USA to the address of Rosalia Friedman, who lives in Mukachevo, in the parcel in her name were found ‘two silk capes with inscriptions in Hebrew with religious content and one blanket (tales) for the performance of religious ritual’, photos of the capes [tablecloths (mapot) for the holiday Pesach and for Shabbat challah] were attached; 127 parcels from ‘Joint’ (Tehran) with food and clothes for the Uzhgorod Jewish community, which were received by proxy of Ignat Morovich, the secretary of the community Bergida, 151 parcels for the Mukachevo Jewish community, which were received by proxy of the chairman of the community Dr. Maisels Vasiliy Samuovych. 120 parcels were sent to individuals in Uzhgorod, Mukachevo, Berehovo, Rakhovo (more than 20 addressees of the parcels with brief information about them were recorded);

The Shanghai Jews returning to the Soviet Union

In the second half of the 1930s, because of the Nazi persecution, a great number of Eastern European Jews had to seek a safe haven in China. The largest diaspora was in Shanghai: 20,000 strong. Most of the Diaspora were refugees from Germany, Austria, and Poland. According to various sources, the share of Jews coming from the Russian Empire was estimated at 25% to 33%. Part of China's Jewish Diaspora attempted to emigrate to North America, Australia, and Israel. By October 1949, more than a thousand people, mostly of Polish origin, emigrated to Israel. There is a special report↗ on the J-DOC website. It contains the text of a letter detailing the repatriation route from Tianjin to Haifa via Latin America.

Those who came to the USSR from China were placed under surveillance of the secret services.↗ Particular attention was directed at those who had any connections with American entities in China. Any attempts to reach out to embassies were dealt with violently. Here is an example on the J-DOC website↗ concerning the surveillance of a returnee from China, Ginzburg, or the intelligence file of the returnee, Zinovy Goldfield.↗ It should be pointed out that it was among such returnees that the Secret services also recruited agents to “work” their compatriots (see documents on the returnee Galenopolsky and others).↗

According to official statistics, as of June 1948, 6,067 persons had been repatriated to the USSR from China, and a large proportion of them were Jews.

There was no legal way to leave the USSR again. So, some re-emigrants had to find illegal ways to escape. For example, the J-DOC website provides information on Chinese repatriates Boris Shornik↗, his son Alexander Shornik↗, and Bernard Vitenson (Vitenzon)↗. Upon their return from Harbin to the USSR, they were deeply shocked by what they saw, resulting in their complete rejection of the Soviet regime. That is why Shornik Jr. and Vitenzon decided to join the OUN/UPA. However, their intentions were uncovered by the security organs, who set up a stunt simulating “recruitment into the UPA.” This resulted in Shornik and Vitenson's arrest and conviction as American spies. According to unconfirmed accounts, Bernard Vitenson survived and later settled in Be'er Sheva, Israel.

Grigory Semyonovich Golenpolsky and Tancred Grigorievich Golenpolsky

Tancred Golenpolsky, who was later to become a prominent journalist and translator of Arthur Miller's books, along with his father, also fell under the radar of Soviet security agencies when they were actively targeting re-emigrants from China. Even though his father was arrested, the case against them was dropped due to lack of evidence. Tancred was fortunate; he was not arrested, saved his life, and later became a prominent activist for democracy: he started the first Jewish newspaper in the USSR - “Vestnik of Jewish Soviet Culture” (VESK, later - “International Jewish Newspaper”).

Mikhel Berlyanschik and Ita Berlyanschik-Khorol

Mikhel Berlyanschik (his file on J-DOC)↗, a popular musician in Harbin and Shanghai, planned a brief visit to Odesa. However, he was detained along with his daughter Ita (born in China) and forced to accept Soviet citizenship. Convicted on a bogus charge of espionage for 25 years, he was released after a case review in 1956. Ita later married prominent jewish activist Iosif Khorol↗ and dedicated her life to fighting against the Soviet regime.
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Ita Khorol's movie↗

From Argentina to the Soviet Union

Re-emigration to the Soviet Union from Latin America was by no means massive. Before World War II, many of the returning immigrants were “expelled” back to their homeland for their support of communist ideas. But in the USSR, too, they often faced persecution, interrogation, and arrest.

David Gendler

David Yakovlevich Gendler (1924-1951) was born in the shtetl of Berezno, Volyn, Ukraine (then Poland). Having received six years of formal education, he became a master of hosiery manufacturing. In 1935, the Gendler family emigrated to Argentina, where his father, Yakov, had been living since 1926. In Argentina, David became a member of the Komsomol in 1936, and from 1945 to 1947, he was a member of the Communist Party of Argentina. In 1947, David received a three-month Belgian transit visa in Uruguay and went to Brussels, where he was detained and spent eight months in prison for violating visa regulations. In March 1949, he arrived in the USSR, and from August of the same year, he settled in Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk), where he worked at a knitwear factory according to his specialization.

However, Soviet intelligence services suspected him of espionage. As early as May 12, 1949, the Volyn branch of the KGB received a secret report stating that Gendler had indicated different places of birth in his documents and might be a spy engaged in subversive activities in Western Ukraine. A subsequent report from June 9, 1949, claimed that a certain David Gendler might be an agent of the U.S. State Department’s intelligence division. The KGB placed him under surveillance, intercepted all his letters, and agents followed him closely, documenting his every move. Agents were also planted in the factory where he worked.

On September 29, 1950, David Gendler tried to quit his job, but his request was denied. On October 1, 1950, Gendler did not show up for work. Later, he was found hanged in his locked dormitory room where he lived. In the documents, it was classified as suicide.

Moishe Pinchevsky

Many of the re-emigrants who had escaped repression upon their return had to face it afterward: in the years of the Great Terror and the post-war period. One such person was the Jewish writer and poet Moishe Pinchevsky. He emigrated to Argentina in 1913, working as a laborer and a teacher. There, he also began publishing poetry in Yiddish. In 1921, Pinchevsky returned to Bessarabia, and in 1926, he moved to the USSR. He lived in Moscow and Kharkiv. Twelve years later, in 1938, he was arrested on espionage charges. Then, Pinsky got lucky, and he was soon released. But in 1951, he was re-arrested “for nationalistic motives” in his work and sentenced to 10 years in camps. Pinchevsky died shortly after his amnesty in 1955.

Hirsch Blostein

Upon their return, many re-emigrants became KGB agents, voluntarily or by force. Writer Hirsch Blostein, who came from a poor family in Lithuania, spent eight years in Argentina, editing left-wing periodicals. Because of his pro-Soviet views, he had to leave the country and moved to the USSR. From 1938 on, he collaborated with the NKVD under the pseudonym “Kant.” Blostein is known not only for his works - his songs are popular even today - but also for his ambivalent role in the fate of Soviet Jewish literature. At his initiative, as well as executing the tasks assigned to him, he assisted in the repression of many prominent Jewish Soviet writers. Dismissed from the agent network in 1954, he lived in Chernivtsi and published prolifically until his death.

Neshira and Yerida

The "Ruslan" ship, believed to be the first ship to arrive from Russia to Palestine after the end of World War I

"Anti-Zionist press conference of Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality in the House of Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries in Moscow."

Soviet anti-Zionist caricatures

In 1960-1970, the Soviet Union's aggressive propaganda policies aimed at “demonizing” Israel, a country where, as the Soviet media claimed, Jews from the USSR were the worst off, resulted in a situation where Soviet Jews did not give up their desire to leave the Soviet Union, but once granted an Israeli visa, they went for other countries, primarily the United States. This phenomenon in Israel was called “neshirah” (Hebrew נשירה-literally “fallout” or “dropout”).

Classified reports by Israeli authorities in the late 1970s expressed concern about the upsurge of neshira, i.e., the emigration to the West of Soviet Jews traveling on Israeli visas. Neshira went hand in hand with another alarming phenomenon - yerida (yordim) (Hebrew ירידה - lit. “descent” or “ lowering”) - the leaving of the newly repatriated Soviet Jews from Israel. Although there are no exact statistics, an estimate is that in the late 1970s, about 5-6% of the new repatriates left Israel. They left for Europe, the United States, and West Germany; some were eager to return to the USSR.