“So, these are the Refuseniks,” declared American television journalist Phil Donahue as he began filming a group of Moscow refuseniks in one of their apartments in January 1987. This book provides an in-depth answer to the question of who the refuseniks were—a numerically small but highly visible minority of Soviet Jews who fought for the right to leave the USSR from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. The account draws on memoirs and documentary sources, presenting the movement through the eyes of its participants, as well as those of their persecutors, disapproving fellow citizens, foreign allies, and other Jews who did not share the desire to emigrate. The history of the movement is not presented as a chronological sequence of events, but rather through a “cloud of tags”—a collection of themes and concepts central to the refuseniks and their contemporaries, such as the *shtetl* mentality versus the ethos of the intelligentsia, the concepts of “the people” and “the homeland,” the experience of suffocation versus human dignity. The struggle to emigrate to Israel is thus situated within a broader context of alternative life paths and varying ways of perceiving one’s own Jewish identity.

Galina Zelenina is a historian, an associate professor at Moscow State University (MSU) and the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH), and a senior research fellow at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). She is the author of several books, including *From the Scepter of Judah to the Jester’s Staff: Court Jews in Medieval Spain* (2008), *Judaica II: The Renaissance in Portraits* (2015), *The Fiery Enemy of the Marranos: Life and Death Under the Watch of the Inquisition* (2018), and *Outcasts of the Middle Ages* (2021).