ABSTRACT
Modern chronicles of Soviet-American trade, and the human rights disputes that often accompany it, are apt to begin sometime in the late 1960s. That was when Soviet Jews, exhilarated by Israel’s triumph in the Six Day War, began demanding the right to emigrate. It was when the Nixon administration began exploring the possibility of detente with Moscow, including the extension of most-favored nation tariff status to the Soviets. The two issues, emigration and trade, inextricably entwined themselves a couple of years later in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 1974 Trade Act.
