ABSTRACT
Soviet Jewish emigration became a problem for US-Soviet relations at the end of the 1960s. Increasing numbers of Soviet Jews wanted to leave the Soviet Union. The swift and decisive Israeli victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War stirred pride in many Soviet Jews and probably inspired some to make the decision to emigrate to Israel. Extreme anti-Semitism certainly existed prior to the Brezhnev regime. The deeply-rooted Russian variant of anti-Semitism was based on bigotry inherited from the tsarist era and fed by Russian patriotism. During the Soviet era, with a diminishing proportion of ethnic Russians in the Soviet population and with Russian nationalism linked to Soviet nationalism, anti-Semitism intensified. President Richard Nixon had to cope with the problem of Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration in the early stages of his first administration when a small group of Soviets Jews desperate to leave the Soviet Union but denied exit visas planned to hijack a plane in Leningrad.
