Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Iron Curtain — and allowed Russian Jews to live openly again

Gorbachev allowed Soviet Jews to study Hebrew, go to synagogue and be openly Jewish for the first time in decades

I have a confession to make. For a long time, the Conference of European Rabbis knew without a doubt that we should give President Mikhail Gorbachev our most prestigious prize.

We have awarded European statesmen who support Jewish life in Europe with our HaRav Lord Jakobovits Prize, and the politician who most deserved this prize was, without question, the last Soviet leader.

It was President Mikhail Gorbachev who opened the gates of the Iron Curtain and allowed Jews to emigrate to Israel and to other countries. It was he who allowed Jews again to lead a Jewish life, study Hebrew, go to synagogue and be openly Jewish within the Soviet Union for the first time in decades.

So why didn’t we give Mikhail Gorbachev this most well-deserved award? We didn’t want to enrage the Kremlin, whose current leader has described the demise of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

It was under Gorbachev that my wife Dara and I arrived in the Soviet Union in 1989 to restart the Jewish community in Russia, which has subsequently been destroyed by the Soviet regime. We built kindergartens, schools and synagogues, starting during the Gorbachev years and later after the putsch (a failed coup in August 1991), when the Soviet Union fell apart and the new Russian state was born under President Boris Yeltsin.

The last time I went to visit Gorbachev was in 1996, before the presidential elections in Russia. He asked me: “Should I run?” I jokingly answered him: “Yes — in Israel. There, you are very popular!”

When I told the story weeks later to acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres (after the traumatic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin), he thought I was being serious. Facing a tough election of his own, he said, “We have enough candidates in Israel already!”

While Gorbachev remained very popular throughout the years among Soviet Jews and in Israel, he had very little public support within Russia itself. The horrendous economic difficulties which befell the greater part of the Soviet population during and after Soviet collapse, the withdrawal of the Soviet safety net, the product shortages, and the shame felt by many Soviet citizens about the disintegration of the system they have been made to believe in for so long, all contributed to this.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) talks to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (L) 21 December 2004 before a press conference of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Putin at Gottorf castle in Schleswig, Germany on December 21, 2004. Photo by JOCHEN LUEBKE/DDP/AFP via Getty Images

These are the very feelings that the current government has used as an excuse to launch its latest invasion into Ukraine in order to recreate the lost dream of the Soviet Empire. But the notion that these feelings are shared by the majority of Russian citizens today is totally false: they are mainly expressed by members of the elite organs which ruled the Soviet Union, such as the KGB.

If there were actual broad public support for this brutal invasion, there would have been no need for the draconian shutdown of all independent journalism and social media within Russia, not to mention the arrest and repression of tens of thousands who oppose the war.

It is only through censorship, repression and propaganda that the current regime maintains its power. Mikhail Gorbachev deserves honor and accolades from all people — not only the West, and not only Jews, but from every citizen of the former Soviet Union for bringing down one of the most repressive totalitarian and stupid regimes, which enslaved a big part of humanity.

It is bitterly ironic that his death comes at a time when the freedoms he sought to institute are being snatched away from the Russian people once again. May his memory be a blessing.

To contact the author, email [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.