ABSTRACT
The most widely circulated view among Western scholars and analysts is that shifts in the USSR’s emigration policy during the 1970s and 1980s were linked to the ebb and flow of US-Soviet relations. 1 According to adherents of this position, when US-Soviet relations were good, or the Soviet Union desired improved political or economic relations, emigration increased. Conversely, emigration decreased when relations soured or the USSR saw no foreign policy advantage accruing from it. While such reasoning, which may be called the ‘barometer thesis’ * , offers a model for explaining and projecting trends in emigration, it is flawed because it seems contradicted by the surges in Jewish emigration during 1976–79, when US-Soviet relations were deteriorating rapidly, and after 1986, when the Jackson-Vanik Amendment still remained in force. 2
