Refusenik authorities to significantly increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960 through 1970, only about 3,000 Soviet Jews had (legally) emigrated from the USSR; after the trial, in the period from 1971 to 1980 347,100 people received a visa to leave the USSR, 245,951 of them were Jews. Refuseniks included Jews who desired to emigrate on religious grounds, Jews seeking to immigrate to Israel for Zionist aspirations, and relatively secular Jews desiring to escape continuous state-sponsored antisemitism. A leading proponent and spokesman for the refusenik rights during the mid-1970s was Natan Sharansky. Sharansky's involvement with the Moscow Helsinki Group helped
Natan Sharansky becoming a refusenik, Sharansky became a human rights activist, working as a translator for dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, and spokesman for the Moscow Helsinki Group and a leader for the rights of refuseniks. On 15 March 1977 Sharansky was arrested on multiple charges including high treason and spying for Americans. The accusation stipulated that he passed to the West lists of over 1,300 "refuseniks", many of whom were denied exit visas because of their knowledge of state secrets, which resulted in a publication by Robert C. Toth, "Russ Indirectly Reveal 'State Secrets': Clues in Denials of Jewish Visas".