Authors

Discussion

This paper looks at problems and prospects of institutionalization from the perspective of perestroika as a national process. It focuses on the revival of Jewish public life and public organizations, for which especially the VAAD (council) as the main roof organization for an independent confederation of Jewish communities and the VAAD congresses in 1989 and 1990 played a central role. On the basis of materials from the VAAD archive, the paper analyzes developments and discussions, displaying the potential of the perestroika period for a “defrosting” of the national question in the USSR, in particular after the difficult struggle of Soviet Jews for institutionalization before 1985, but at the same time revealing also the growth of grassroots anti-Semitism in the USSR during the same period. Institutionalizing Jewish public and cultural life and the search for forms of national politics in the late USSR (and then in the new Russia under Boris Yeltsin) was also accompanied by everyday problems of the Jewish community in the USSR and the fundamental question ‘to leave or to stay’, referred to as the Great Aliya.