"There is no Jewish question in the Soviet Union," Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin told a press conference in Canada last month. "This question is from beginning to end an invented one."
That, to put it mildly, is something of an exaggeration. A talented Jew can rise to great eminence in Soviet society, as have Violinist David Oistrakh and Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, but the ordinary Jew is subject to rigid quotas that often bar him from universities and good jobs. Teaching Judaism and Hebrew is illegal; Yiddish culture is severely restricted. In the streets, Russia's traditional anti-Semitism has never really died....