Crossword clues for refusenik
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context Soviet Union slang English) One of the Jewish citizens of the former Soviet Union who were refused permission to emigrate. 2 (context colloquial English) A person characterized by a particular refusal (especially one related to human rights.)
Wikipedia
Refusenik originally referred to (mostly Jewish) citizens of the former Soviet Union who were refused permission to emigrate.
Refusenik or refusnik may also refer to:
- An Israeli conscientious objector, see Refusal to serve in the Israeli military
- Refusenik (film)
- Those that refuse to use certain things, or do certain things, such as a technological refusnik.
Refusenik (, otkaznik, from "отказ", otkaz "refusal") was an unofficial term for individuals, typically but not exclusively Soviet Jews, who were denied permission to emigrate by the authorities of the former Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc. The term refusenik is derived from the "refusal" handed down to a prospective emigrant from the Soviet authorities.
In addition to the Jews, broader categories included:
- Other ethnicities, such as Volga Germans attempting to leave for Germany, Armenians wanting to join their diaspora, and Greeks forcibly removed by Stalin from Crimea and other southern lands to Siberia.
- Members of persecuted religious groups, such as the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Baptists and other Protestant groups, Russian Mennonites, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
A typical pretext to deny emigration was the real and alleged association with state secrets.
Applying for an exit visa was a step noted by the KGB, so that future career prospects, always uncertain for Soviet Jews, could be impaired. As a rule, Soviet dissidents and refuseniks were fired from their workplaces and denied employment according to their major specialty. As a result, they had to find a menial job, such as a street sweeper, or face imprisonment on charges of social parasitism.
The ban on Jewish immigration to Israel was lifted in 1971 leading to the 1970s Soviet Union aliyah. The coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika, as well as a desire for better relations with the West, led to major changes, and most refuseniks were allowed to emigrate.
Over time, "refusenik" has entered colloquial English for a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest.
Refusenik is a 2007 documentary film by Laura Bialis that chronicles the struggle of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. A former refusenik Natan Sharansky appears in the film.
Usage examples of "refusenik".
Like every other refusenik on the farm, Chester had been deluding himself.
Now she is eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front.
Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front.
Robeson is David Duke in blackface: This Stalin Peace Prize winner turned his back on Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union.
As a child, he'd seen his father and his father's two brothers, all prominent refuseniks, shot execution style in his parents' living room.
But don't try to explain that to the refuseniks and the dissidents who every day make the world more aware of the dark corners of Kremlin policy.
Those Jewish refuseniks being hammered right in front of the whole Western media on a Moscow street.
PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors.