I don't remember if the request was granted, but I do remember he was criticized, I believe by GM Short, on the grounds that this was a self-serving interpretation of Jewish rules just to annoy his opponents (or something like that). Maybe it was GM Short on one of his "Short Stories" columns in New In Chess?

http://www.chessdraw.com/Religious_...

and here:

<It's a peculiar God that forbids you to work [on the Sabbath], but says it's OK to have someone else work for you.>

Let's start with Botvinnik's comment (Botvinnik got to travel to Sweden in 1926 with other Soviets for a team match - he obviously considered the option of not returning...)

<The trip also made a lasting impression: When Boris Gulko and his wife applied for exit visas nearly 55 years later, Botvinnik said he “told them that I, too, could have remained in Stockholm in 1926. But, Botvinnik added, “I didn't and it did not turn
out badly.”>

Soltis <Soviet Chess: 1917-1992> p65.

<But as the 1960s headed towards their end, the absence of the “missing generation” born during the War years seemed to have been obscured. The Soviet student team, with new faces such as Vladimir Tukmakov, Kuzmin and Boris Gulko, won the World Student Olympiad at Harrachov, Czechoslovakia in July 1967 by two points. There was no Soviet entrant for the 1967 World Junior because, for the first time in several years, politics overtly interfered. The Soviets and their Eastern Bloc allies boycotted the tournament, held in Jerusalem, to protest the Six-Day War.>

At least we now know that <CG>'s unattributed Harrachov games were part of a FIDE World Student Olympiad:

M Vukic vs Gulko, 1967
J Tomson vs Gulko, 1967
W Stork vs Gulko, 1967
Gulko vs M Schoeneberg, 1967

Tal wrote extensively about it in 64, and a translation can be found here:

https://www.chess.com/blog/Spektrow...

Gulko had a bad tournament, and Tal had this to say:

<The Moscow master Boris Gulko was out of practice for several months, and it affected his game. Gulko began the tournament very passively and lost to Korchnoi and Stein without much struggle. But then he managed to get in shape and gave a good fight to Tal in the third round.>

<Boris Gulko, only a candidate master in 1974, made an enormous leap forward. Gulko nearly won the 1975 Soviet Championship and then exceeded the grandmaster norm by a point and a half as he won then 13th Capablanca Memorial in Cienfuegos, Cuba.>

And his wife had a good year in 1976 herself, winning the USSR Women's Ch.

Soltis gives Gulko's emmigration application as made in Dec, 1978, after which Gulko's problems really began to mount:

<
Gulko was not even allowed to continue to play after five games in Buenos Aires [1978], perhaps because he was spotted by KGB agents attached to the team at a bookstore examining works of Solzhenitsyn and was followed to a movie theater where a film forbidden in the USSR was shown. After they applied for exit papers, the name of Gulko and Akhsharumov disappeared from the Soviet rating list and their financial resources dried up. Lev Khariton, who translated Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games for a Russian edition before himself emigrating, later said Gulko was the best known of the Soviet citizens denied the opportunity to emigrate. Or, as the joke went, Gulko was the best chessplayer among the “refuseniks” and the most experienced refusenik among the chessplayers.

...

Gulko did not play in another major tournament until June 1981, when he won the Moscow Championship, an open event, ahead of 12 grandmasters. The result went unnoticed in the Moscow press but appeared on the front page of the New York Times after Gulko made a brief but starding speech at the tournament prize-giving ceremony at the Central Chess Club. While embarrassed — as well as sympathetic — players listened, Gulko announced he had written a letter to FIDE demanding that it help Korchnoi’s family to emigrate. >