The issue: Repeal of old restrictions on trade would be a nice calling card for new ambassador

The Soviet Union was traditionally hostile toward emigration. If people left, it would belie the communists’ carefully constructed, if widely disbelieved image, as a paradise for workers and peasants. Besides, the people who did get out might describe the cruel, arbitrary and dysfunctional society they had left behind.

AFTER THE Six Day War in 1967, Soviet Jews especially began lobbying to emigrate to Israel. The Soviet authorities responded with a nearly impenetrable maze of bureaucratic roadblocks, including a ban on anyone departing who had ever had access to sensitive information, which in the Soviet Union covered nearly everything, including routine public statistics.

Israel and the Jewish lobby in the United States — almost every synagogue displayed a large sign, “Free Soviet Jewry” — mounted a campaign to force a change in the policy while diplomatic talks proceeded inconclusively.

Like every dictatorship, the Kremlin went a step too far and imposed a “diploma tax,” a requirement that emigrating Jews reimburse the Soviet state for the cost of their education. It was meant to discourage the most highly educated from leaving and, if they persisted in going, they departed penniless.

TWO INFLUENTIAL Democratic members of Congress, Scoop Jackson of Washington and Charles Vanik, responded with an amendment to a major trade law that denied the Soviet Union and its satellites the trade relations normally extended to other countries, and restricted loans, trade credits and guarantees.

The amendment put a great crimp in Soviet trade with both the U.S. and the West. Seismic changes were taking place in the Soviet Union, and the emigration restrictions gradually were lifted and became moot with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Any Jews who wanted to leave, could, and not surprisingly given Russia’s long history of anti-Semitism, most did.

The Jackson-Vanik amendment, however, continued as a matter of U.S. law and as a great irritant to the Russian government. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and no Cold War softie, recommended its repeal as long ago as 2003.

THE AMENDMENT has survived, however, with the support of some senior Republicans who want to keep it in reserve for future leverage against Russia on other issues. This, of course, infuriates the Russians. It bars them from permanent normal trade relations with the United States, what used to be called most favored nation status.

Mike McFaul, the senior director for Russia on the White House National Security Council, recently urged Congress to repeal Jackson-Vanik as both an antiquated law and an impediment to President Barack Obama’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia.

McFaul is to be our next ambassador to Moscow and it would be an impressive debut if he arrived in his new post armed with repeal of the law.

Comments

comments