The story of the struggle for Soviet Jewish emigration in the years between the establishment of the State of Israel and the June 1967 Six Day War not only sheds light on crucial aspects of Soviet domestic and foreign policy. It also elucidates the peculiar plight of Soviet Jewry, the solidarity of the Jewish people the world over and the Jews' role as a weathervane for general humanitarian values.

Perhaps the first lesson to be drawn from the trends and developments that I have sought to portray and analyze in this work is that the fate of Soviet Jewry is inextricably tied up with events in the Soviet socio-political scene. Thus, to understand the fluctuations in their situation it is essential to bear in mind the needs, aspirations and constraints under which the regime, or leadership, is operating at any given moment. This holds for all periods of Soviet history both prior to the years covered in this study and subsequent to them, down to and including that of Gorbachev's perestroika.

Indeed, Soviet Jewish national consciousness was aroused and strengthened by developments on three different planes: (1) the general tendency to emphasize national motifs among the USSR's many ethnic groupings, which resulted from forces as wide-ranging as a general disappointment with Marxist-Leninist theories and dogmas and their application by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — their sole interpreter in the USSR — and a latent nationalism among both the intelligentsia and the masses of many of these groupings;