Ulanovskaia, and Tsafrira Meromskaia all felt the same way—and so did the Soviet state. Along with the Soviet Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, who also had prosperous foreign cousins willing to pay their ransom, the Jews were the only Soviet citizens—and virtually the only members of the Soviet professional elite—who were allowed to emigrate from the USSR. The official reason for the privilege was the existence of Israel: the Jewish “historic homeland.” 208 After the Six-Day War, the number of emigration applications shot up. The regime retaliated by stepping up its “anti-Zionist” campaign and multiplying Jewish disabilities in education and employment. The Jews responded by applying to emigrate in even greater numbers; the regime retaliated by charging a higher education tax; and so it continued until Gorbachev opened the emigration floodgates (along with so many others) in the late 1980s. As an official from the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, L. Onikov, wrote to his superiors in a secret memo dated September 30, 1974, “almost all the Jews, including those (the overwhelming majority) who have never considered leaving this country, are in a state of psychological tension, uncertainty, and nervous anxiety: ‘What will happen to them tomorrow?’ ” 209 The Party leaders seemed baffled. On the one hand, any desire to emigrate from Heaven was an open challenge to the true faith, and thus both a temptation to the faithful and an embarrassment before Hell. As Onikov wrote in his memo, “the fact of the departure of some Jews from the USSR is widely used in anti- Soviet propaganda as a confirmation of the old slander about a flight from ‘Communist paradise.’ ” Moreover, he continued, “the emigration of some Jews to Israel has a negative effect on other nationalities, including some Germans, Balts, Crimean Tatars, and others, who ask: ‘Why are Jews allowed to go to foreign countries, and we aren’t?’ ” Finally, there was the much discussed question of the “brain drain” and the dynamics of great-power politics in the Middle East. As L. I. Brezhnev put it at a Politburo meeting on March 20, 1973, “not only academicians but even middle-level specialists shouldn’t be allowed to leave—I don’t want to upset the Arabs.” 210 On the other hand, why not get rid of the rotten apples? In March 1971, the KGB chief Yuri Andropov recommended that the screenwriter E. E. Sevela be allowed to leave the country on account of his “nationalist views” and his “low moral and professional level.” In Onikov’s words, the emigration of “Zionists and other nationalists,” “religious fanatics,” “adventurers,” “self-seekers dreaming of private enterprise,” and “losers hoping to get lucky,” was a good thing. “The sooner such elements get out, the better.” There was, of course, a disconcerting Brer-Rabbit-and-the-briar-patch element to this logic (Andropov,