EMIGRATION FROM THE FORMER USSR - HISTORICAL REVIEW
Emigration from the USSR was restricted throughout the period of communist rule. Hesitant steps towards opening of the Soviet borders to those who desired to repatriate (mostly Jews and Germans) or reunite with families living abroad were taken in the 1970s.2 In recent decades, three waves of Jewish emigration from the USSR can be distinguished (Gitelman, 1997). The first wave (about 100,000 people) left the USSR between 1971-1974 and headed almost exclusively to Israel. These were immigrants from the Georgian Soviet Republic, where the Jews had preserved their ethnic and religious traditionalism, and from the Baltic republics and eastern Poland, the regions where Jews were less assimilated and more committed to Jewish memories, Yiddish culture and Zionism.



The second wave of emigration (between 1975 and 1989) originated mostly from the Slavic part of the USSR, where Jews were assimilated and acculturated and generally cut off from Jewish culture. During this period, Jewish emigration was characterized by a gradual decline in the importance of Zionist motivation (Salitan, 1997). According to Gitelman (1997), 68.6 percent of emigrants who possessed Israeli visas did not settle in Israel, but proceeded mostly to the United States. However, in October 1989 the United States announced a change in its policy, introducing a quota for Soviet immigrants. The effect of this was immediate and started the third wave of exodus of Soviet Jews. It is this most recent wave of migration that is at the center of the present study.



Between 1989 and 1995, over one million Jews left the FSU. It is estimated that two of every three Jewish emigrants reached Israel, although in the three-year period from January 1992 to December 1994, the number of immigrants to Israel and to other destinations was about equal (Dominitz, 1997). At this time, the USSR began granting exit permission not only to Jews, but to German ethnics, Armenians and Pentecostals as well. The major-ity of emigrants were pushed from their birthplace by economic deterioration and prolonged political crisis in most of the republics of the FSU, as well as growing ethnic cleavage and sporadic but more virulent displays of anti-Semitism. The emigration of Jews at this time was facilitated by contacts they had with relatives and friends already residing in Israel. Economic collapse, unemployment, poverty, crime, and the disastrous state of public health care and other support systems pushed Slavs and other nationals, who otherwise would not have considered emigration as an option, to the same response (Aron, 1991). They swelled the ranks of those leaving the FSU in the quest for better fortunes in North American and West European countries.



During the period from 1990 to 1994 (roughly corresponding to the period under study), Israel received an annual average of 121,900 immigrants, practically all of whom came from the FSU. The annual average intake in Canada was 211,900 immigrants (DellaPergola, 1998). Relatively few immigrants, however, were from the FSU, possibly as a result of the peculiarities of its immigration criteria and perhaps the scarcity or absence of social networks of Russian immigrants there. When the size of the absorbing population is taken into account, the annual rate of immigration was 23.7 per 1,000 population in Israel against 7.6 per 1,000 population in Canada. Indeed, the immigration ratio in Israel during these years was greater than that of any other immigrant receiving society.



Source: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3668/is_200307/ai_n9260151