"They Left Not for Sausage, but for Dignity": theConcept of Dignity in the Late Soviet Polemics onJewish Emigration

The Jewish national movement in the late Soviet decades declared its concern about the infringednational dignity of Soviet Jews; emigration to Israel was considered a way to restore it, while thevery struggle for the reight to leave the USSR was seen as a struggle for dignity. The article revealsvarious ways of gaining and defending one's dignity in the practices and texts of Jewish activists, orRefuseniks, and describes this concept within a number of binary oppositions: unconditional -conditioned, universal - categorized, individual - group, integral - subject to external influence.The rhetoric of refuseniks in this regard is examined in the context of Soviet Jewish ego documentsand of the Soviet press, including a vast corpus of anti-Zionist publications, and the concept ofdignity appears as one of the central categories in the polemics about Jewish emigration conductedon the pages of newspapers, open letters and Samizdat