Emigration Laws Under The Soviet Union
The departure of individual citizen of the USSR was conditioned on the approval of the KGB. Many who sought those approvals were denied. Those who tried to escape the USSR and did not succeed were considered traitors, were fired from their jobs, and became targets of hatred by the public. The civilians of the USSR who did receive approval to emigrate were forced to cede their Soviet nationality and to pay money. Under the Communist regime, real estate assets such as apartments usually belonged to the state, and emigrants had to cede those assets in the majority of cases. After the establishment of capitalism in Russia and other former Soviet republics, those laws were canceled. Emigrants who left after the fall of communism were able to keep their citizenship and assets.
Read more about this topic: Russian Jewish Immigration To Israel In The 1990s
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, laws, soviet and/or union:
“Today he plays jazz; tomorrow he betrays his country.”
—Stalinist slogan in the Soviet Union (1920s)
“Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.... The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“So they lived. They didn’t sleep together, but they had children.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)