When Michael Beizer first published a book about the Jews of St. Petersburg, he was a Leningrad refusenik writing samizdat. In 1982, he had begun leading walking tours about the city’s Jewish history, but the police were not keen on large groups of Jews parading around town to see the Jewish sights. After the inevitable raid, the tours grew smaller and less frequent, but Beizer continued his historical studies. In his 1986 samizidat, Evrei Peterburga, he gave Leningrad’s Jews a guidebook so that they could undertake self-guided heritage tours on their own. A 1987 review of the work (also samizdat) said of its readers, “the author gave them back their past…. This is the history we were deprived of” (197).

Now, Beizer has teamed up with Ann Komaromi, one of the foremost experts on Soviet samizdat, to study the enterprise that Evrei Peterburga and the walking tours participated in: the revival of Jewish communal life in late-Soviet Leningrad. Focusing on Jews whom the government had denied exit visas, A Time to Sow: Refusenik Life in Leningrad, 1979–1989 examines how they spent the long years waiting for the decision to be reversed and permission to emigrate granted. In short, they created a Jewish community.

Other studies of the refusenik movement lavish attention on Moscow, the capital and a hub of agitation for emigration rights. Other studies focus on the 1970s, when the pressures of détente prompted a radical policy change allowing tens of thousands of Jews to leave each year. But as Beizer and Komaromi explain, Leningrad was different. The 1980s were different. A new wave of repression reduced Jewish emigration to a trickle. The result was large numbers of Jews experiencing the precarity of refusenik life: job loss, economic discrimination, police harassment, and such. When so many people experience the same problem, they sometimes discover that it is better to face troubles together rather than alone. Far removed from the more repressive conditions in the capital, refuseniks in Leningrad forged a community.

This is the astute insight of Beizer’s and Komaromi’s work: There were unintended consequences to closing the gates. Thousands of refuseniks waiting for visas and unable to simply return to their old lives had to fill the time. What did they fill it with? Exploring together the Jewish identity for which they had sacrificed. The result: a burst of cultural vitality. Refuseniks did not just sit around waiting to emigrate; they spent the 1980s reviving Jewish life in Leningrad.

The book is organized around the main ways they did this. Chapters focus on Jewish political activity, mutual aid, cultural programming, religious engagement, and scholarship. Many activities cut across these dimensions, like Holocaust commemoration, Talmud lectures, and theatrical holiday satires.

I was especially taken with the treatment of how Leningrad’s refusenik community seeded the academic field of scholarship in Russian Jewish studies, a project that continues to bear fruit today. Profiles of the leading scholar-educator-activists reveal the social networks that united disparate activities—underground seminars, community libraries, samizdat journals—into a budding field. Beizer and Komaromi’s discussion of the primary sources (private papers, personal libraries) and research methods (surveys, interviews, ethnography) available to amateur scholars working in secret is brilliant.

A Time to Sow’s Leningrad Jewish case study is also helpful for thinking more broadly about the ways citizens resisted state demands in the late Soviet era. The authors reject the idea that refusenik life could be characterized as “merely a ‘deterritorialized’ milieu of like-minded people (svoi).” Unlike those who resisted passively, refuseniks were challenging authority by actively fighting to leave. In other words, “Refuseniks no longer accepted the tacit deal with the Soviet state that depended on performing the role of good citizen to enjoy a certain amount of freedom within the system” (205). This does not mean that the building of unofficial Jewish life in Leningrad should be seen solely as oppositional. Beizer and Komaromi make a subtler claim: “They came to understand their activity in terms of a positive commitment to constructing and maintaining Jewish identity in the context of freedom,” a freedom that refuseniks created for themselves in Leningrad (202).

Alone, Beizer and Komaromi could each have produced a good study, but by pooling their different forms of expertise they have accomplished something greater. A Time to Sow succeeds as a thorough documentation of an unrecorded history and as a convincing and well-situated analysis of late-Soviet era Jewish culture. It teaches very well about the case, about the context, and about the interplay between the two.