A Soviet Israeli Alliance? Hmm..
From Time magazine April 7, 1986
L'Chaim, Comrade!
Beyond pogroms and persecution of the past. Soviet Jews, led by a young firebrand General Secretary, set a new course in Moscow.
An advisor to a 19th century Czar of Russia was quoted as saying, "The Jews. Russia can't live with them, but can't survive without them."
The Rodina has tried to live without them for centuries. Through the pogroms of the 19th century up to the Russian revolution, all the way through the the purges of Lenin and Stalin.
But still, Jews in Russia and later the USSR and throughout Europe continued to survive and thrive in the technical apparatus of their societies, even as they sought to return to what the people consider their ancestoral homeland in Palestine. A homeland granted in 1948.
Even with the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews in the Soviet Union built their own niche in the political and scientific machinery of the Soviet state. The ascent into power was accelerated by the sudden death of Joseph Stalin during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, which caused a power vaccuum in Soviet leadership. An untried Vycheslav Molotov took control, but he was surrounded by a group of heady technocrats and military specialists. Many of those technocrats built the modern industrial and scientific USSR. And most of them would have emigrated to Israel if the Soviet Union had stayed Stalinist.
Instead, through Bulganin, Kruschev, Kosygin, even during the ill-fated rule of Leonid Brezhnev,and through the uncertain periods of Andropov, and Chernenko, this proud, tough, technical inner circle ran the country. At the same time, openly celebrated their faith and radically changed Soviet socialism.
In 1985, one of their own rose to the seat of General Secretary of the Communist Party: Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky.
At age 37, Shcharansky is the youngest Soviet Premier in history and by many accounts the most learned man to take the reigns, and the most needed perhaps amid the situation the world.
With President Reagan calling for a serious push for peace in the Middle East, the Soviet Union could not sit on the sidelines, especially with a burgeoning, vocal lobby in the Soviet Union seeking closer relations with an Israel now seen as a sister nation. Also at hand is a project closest to the heart of the General Secretary, who began his adult life as a mathematician and computer engineer for the USSR's nuclear weapon programs. Shcharansky has said that his prime objective is what he called "A serious, rational, definitive reduce in nuclear arms in the world, and a real effort toward a lasting peace."