Refusenik was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Soviet Bloc. The term refusenik is derived from the "refusal" handed down to a prospective emigrant from the Soviet authorities.
January 10, 1973. Soviet Jewish refusenik demonstration in front of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the right to emigrate to Israel, before being broken up by Soviet authorities.
A rare type 2 USSR exit visa. This type of visa was issued to those who received permission to leave the USSR permanently and lost their Soviet citizenship. Many people who wanted to emigrate were unable to receive this kind of exit visa.
Letter from the MVD to a 76-year-old man from Sverdlovsk saying he has been refused permission to move to Israel due to "knowledge of state secrets", May 1991.
Yuli Edelstein, one of the Soviet Union's most prominent refuseniks, who served as Speaker of the Knesset (Israel's parliament) from 2013 to 2020
History of the Jews in the Soviet Union
The history of the Jews in the Soviet Union is inextricably linked to much earlier expansionist policies of the Russian Empire conquering and ruling the eastern half of the European continent already before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. "For two centuries – wrote Zvi Gitelman – millions of Jews had lived under one entity, the Russian Empire and [its successor state] the USSR. They had now come under the jurisdiction of fifteen states, some of which had never existed and others that had passed out of existence in 1939." Before the revolutions of 1989 which resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, a number of these now sovereign countries constituted the component republics of the Soviet Union.
Mountain Jews in Quba rayon, Azerbaijan 1932
Jews in Minsk, German–occupied Belarus, 1941
Shechita, Shalom Koboshvili, 1940