Jane Fonda & Mikhail Gorbachev

09/05/2022

A. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Gorbachev was working as a bureaucrat, first at the Stavropol regional procurator’s office and then other low to mid-level local government positions. But in 1972, Gorbachev saw news coverage of Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, where she was famously photographed standing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the picture which earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” Gorbachev said in his autobiography that he was inspired by that photo, which made him begin to think about the Soviet government more critically. Said Gorbachev, “I thought about that photo when I struggled with the question of allowing our Jewish citizens to leave the Soviet Union. Jane Fonda criticized her country because she knew her country was wrong. And I knew that it was wrong for my country to not allow so many of our citizens to follow their own beliefs. So I opened the doors to more religious freedom, and I opened the doors of exit for those who wished to leave.”

B. Gorbachev visited Israel in 1996, a few years after his time as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and his term as President of the Soviet Union. Coincidentally Jane Fonda visited Israel at the same time, and both were invited to dinner with Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres. They began a relationship with ongoing correspondance and occasional visits that continued until Gorbachev’s death.

C. In 2009, Fonda was a signatory of a letter protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv, which she later apologized for, noting that while it was legitimate to criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, that letter was overly broad in attacking independent Israeli filmmakers. Said Fonda in an interview with Diane Sawyer, “I recently read Memoirs, the autobiography by Mikhail Gorbachev. He said that one of his proudest moments was when he visited Israel in 1992 and received a Peace Prize from the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. Just think–Gorbachev, who oversaw the jailing of hundreds of Jewish dissidents, later was honored for his freeing of Jews to go to Israel. It’s a reminder that everything is complex, and there is good and evil on all sides.”

D. Fonda was an advocate for Soviet Prisoners of Conscience, many of whom were Jews who simply wanted to practice their religion or emigrate to Israel, including Ida Nudel and Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky. Fonda even traveled to the Soviet Union and secretly met with Nudel, and then launched a public campaign on behalf of her cause. As a direct result of the efforts of Jane Fonda and others, Gorbachev granted Ida Nudel an exit visa in 1987, and she left the Soviet Union for Israel.

E. According to Natan Sharansky, the Jewish activist who spent nine years in a Soviet labor camp, the first sign that he saw of a loosening of restrictions by Gorbachev was when the prisoners were provided with a VCR for entertainment. Said Sharansky, “We had only been able to watch mind-numbing government propaganda on the television, but then, with the VCR, all of a sudden our world expanded. I remember all of the prisoners joining together to exercise to the Jane Fonda’s Workout video. That’s when we knew that Gorbachev was bringing about real change.”

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