When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (16 page)

In Leningrad, the new Zionist organization debated the advantages and disadvantages of joining forces with the wider dissident movement. Both the Zionists and the dissidents thought the entire Soviet regime hopelessly corrupt and wanted it reformed. And the groups used similar tactics—Butman's letter-writing idea was straight from the dissidents' toolbox. But in the end, the Zionists decided that it was best to keep their distance. Their reasoning—worked out over long walks through the forest—had its roots in Jabotinsky. He was emphatic about not mixing the Zionist cause with any other humanist agenda. In Jabotinsky's essays, which Jews in Riga and Leningrad devoured in samizdat, Jews were advised not to waste their energy trying to improve the state of the world, which at the time meant joining the Communist or Socialist movements. They needed to focus on fighting for a Jewish state. To the Zionists of the 1960s, this made a lot of sense. They had seen what happened to the Jews who played a part in the Bolshevik Revolution. They were done with efforts to remake Russia. They wanted out of Russia. And by distancing themselves from any overtly anti-Soviet activity, they believed that the government might not see them as a threat to its existence—the way it perceived the dissidents—and therefore might eventually let them leave.

Mostly the new organization continued the work that its members had been carrying out for years, only now in a more coordinated manner. They met with small groups of young Jews, taught Hebrew from smudged mimeographed copies of
Elef Millim,
and listened to miniature vinyl albums of Israeli music passed to them surreptitiously by Israeli embassy workers. But throughout the winter of 1967, they were devising a plan to consolidate all this activity and make it more effective. They would start an
ulpan,
the Hebrew word meaning "gathering." They would run small educational seminars that would teach Jewish history and Hebrew and, at the same time, instill in Jewish youth a hunger for Israel. There would be no more than ten people in a class, and the hope was that the graduates would serve as the leaders and teachers of future classes. The
ulpan
would start in September, as the school year did, and meet weekly in different apartments, changing locations so that the KGB wouldn't catch on to what were, in effect, illegal gatherings. That winter, Shpilberg brought some small groups outside Leningrad and began teaching; come fall, the
ulpanim
would start in earnest.

As their work progressed, the need for teaching material increased. As if in response, one day in March of 1967, a stranger from Riga handed Shpilberg a note. He said he was an activist who had gotten Shpilberg's contact information from Mark Blum, who was then sitting in jail for his role in the Geula Gill riots. Shpilberg read the note and then convened a meeting of all eight members of the Zionist organization; they gathered in giant Komsomol Square, in the center of Leningrad (the group met only in public). He told them what the note said: if they could find a safe way to receive a suitcase full of Jewish samizdat, Riga would pass one along to them.

As it turned out, the abundance of samizdat came from Boris Slovin, one of the activists in Riga. Slovin had become friendly with a Jew who was the night watchman at a school that trained Soviet border patrol agents, and the watchman had access to a photocopy machine, an Era Duplicator. This rare piece of technology allowed Slovin—who up until then had been producing his samizdat painstakingly with typewriters and carbon paper—to increase his production by incredible leaps. Without any discussion, Slovin would hand the night watchman the material and then later receive hundreds of copies back. Soon he had a fortunate problem: how to get rid of suitcases full of photocopied books.

The Leningrad group wasn't sure if they trusted the message about the available samizdat. They decided to take the man up on the offer, but they sent someone to Riga who had no connection to the organization and who would be able to claim innocence if this was all a KGB provocation. Slovin, in Riga, also tried to protect himself; he spent the afternoon with the messenger and gave him a decoy suitcase containing a blanket, sausage, and wine—for a picnic—in case he happened to be an agent. Only as the messenger's train began chugging away did Slovin grab the fake suitcase and deliver the real one. Back in Leningrad, Butman devised an elaborate scheme to pass the heavy bag—filled with a hundred and fifty books—from hand to hand, going from the station and through a series of courtyards until it reached its destination, the apartment of one of Butman's unsuspecting friends.

As absurd as these precautions seem, they were necessary. The suitcase was full of illegal items: dozens of copies of Slovin's translation of
Exodus,
a few exemplars of Jabotinsky's feuilletons, and some collections of poetry, most by Chaim Nachman Bialik. Once the samizdat was secured, the group fell to arguing about how to distribute it. Shpilberg wanted to disseminate it as soon as possible. Butman was still attached to his idea of a grand gesture, a letter to the authorities, and he worried that getting arrested for samizdat wouldn't have quite the same publicity impact.

But in May of 1967, events far from Leningrad suddenly put an end to the bickering. Israel was in trouble. The news traveled fast over the staticky airwaves. Butman sat, as he had every evening for the last few years, with his radio tuned to Kol Israel. When the strains of the "Hatikvah," Israel's plaintive national anthem, suddenly filled the crackling air, he pressed his ear close to the speaker. On May 18, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had ordered the UN buffer force out of Sinai, and the United Nations complied. He then sent his troops and tanks into the peninsula up to the Israeli border. On May 23, he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. War seemed imminent. Israelis fled, convinced a massacre would follow. The sense of panic for Butman and his friends was compounded by the difficulty of getting solid information about what was really happening. Soviet radio said one thing and Kol Israel another. But all eight members of the Zionist organization knew that if there was ever a time to release pro-Israel material to young Jews in Leningrad, this was it. In one day, with their hearts beating frantically in their chests, they ran around Leningrad and dropped all the books off at Jewish homes, like letter bombs slipped into mailboxes.

***

The war that consumed the Middle East in June 1967, pitting Israel against four Arab enemies, led to a Jewish victory that felt delivered by God, miraculous in its magnitude. The Jewish State quadrupled its area in less than a week and took hold of the old city of Jerusalem. And the implications—for Israel's place in the world, for Jewish identity, for how Jews in the Diaspora were perceived—reverberated far and wide. It wasn't just the small band of committed Zionists in the Soviet Union who suddenly felt emboldened, their lonely cause now validated. The Six-Day War's impact was felt in the most unlikely of places, such as the military factory on the outskirts of Kiev where Boris Kochubievsky worked as a radio engineer.

On one of the war's last days, Kochubievsky, a thirty-year-old loner with a long gaunt face dominated by round, watery black eyes that rarely blinked, was sitting in a factorywide meeting listening to a lecture delivered by a local army officer. These types of propaganda meetings were taking place all over the Soviet Union in the first weeks of June. After predicting a humiliating defeat for the "imperialistic" Israelis, the Soviets now had to explain how their Arab client states had been so badly beaten, how Israel had managed to destroy almost the entire Egyptian air force—consisting of Soviet-made planes—in a single morning. The solution was to portray the Israelis as demonic aggressors. On June 15
Izvestia
described how Israeli "invaders are killing prisoners of war and defenseless peasants, driving the inhabitants from their homes and publicly executing men, women and children," crimes, the article claimed, that were "similar to those the Nazis perpetrated on the occupied countries during World War II." In early July, Brezhnev, addressing the graduates of a military academy, called Israelis "the worst of bandits" and said they "want to copy the crimes of the Hitler invaders."

The officer speaking at the Kiev military factory made similar allusions. As Kochubievsky listened to him denounce the Jewish State, something in him snapped. He stood and asked to speak. He wanted the record of the meeting to reflect that he was utterly opposed to what was being said. And then he went further. He asked how he was supposed to take these allegations against Israel. How could he continue to work in a factory that made arms to supply the enemies of the Jews when he himself, whether he wanted to be or not, was a Jew? How could he continue to be complicit? The realizations came to him as he spoke. He felt guilty but also angry. The state had put him in the terrible position of having to help kill his own people. The room fell silent. He directly addressed the other Jews present, who made up almost half the engineers in the factory. What were they to do with this irreconcilable difference? When the factory manager tried to quiet him, other people yelled that he should be allowed to finish. He went on to defend Israel—it had the right to attack preemptively against an enemy that was clearly preparing for war—offering an interpretation diametrically opposed to the Soviet one. When he was finished, he sat down.

In that instant, Kochubievsky's life changed. He knew little about what it meant to be a Jew, and even less about Israel—which he imagined to be a vast desert filled with camels. But his restive existence had suddenly found an objective: he would go there. In the span of that one factory meeting, he had felt the paradox viscerally, and now he wanted to solve it.

At that moment, Kochubievsky also became a marked man. A union meeting was called to put pressure on him to resign. He began desperately looking for relatives in Israel so that he could apply for an exit visa through family reunification—the only basis for emigration that the Soviets would even consider. Within a year of his factory speech, he had managed to get an invitation from a distant cousin, but his life only became more difficult. KGB informers seemed to be everywhere. People he hadn't seen in years and who shouldn't have known his address suddenly appeared at his door holding bottles of cognac. Kochubievsky felt that the authorities were looking for a way to trap him, trying to find some pretext for putting him away other than his political opposition.

Eventually his application for an exit visa was refused. He decided to take his new public stance to the next level, and he wrote a short essay, "Why I Am a Zionist," which was circulated in samizdat. "We are convinced that there is no more room for Jewish patience," he wrote, echoing the sentiment of the American Jewish activists. "Silence is equivalent to death. It was that kind of patience that created Hitler and the likes of him. If we remain silent today, tomorrow will be too late."

The endgame came in the fall of 1968, and in the most appropriate of places. For the past several years, on September 29, Kiev's Jews had gathered in very small numbers by the Babi Yar ravine, where the 1941 massacre of the Jews had occurred. By the mid-1960s, after the wide attention given to Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem, it had become a well-known site, though it still had no memorial. But that first September after the Six-Day War, more Jews gathered than ever had before. And in 1968 there was such a crowd that the local authorities had to organize an official commemoration. But true to form, the government speaker described only "victims of fascism," never mentioning that the overwhelming majority of those victims were Jews. Kochubievsky was at Babi Yar that September in 1968. Once he had taken the step of embracing his Jewish identity, he felt guilty about having ignored it for so long. And he had another reason for being at the commemoration. His father, a soldier in the Red Army, had died during the war, under mysterious circumstances. There were a few secondhand stories about his death, one that placed him in a hospital a hundred kilometers south of Kiev, both of his legs missing. But another story, the most compelling one for Kochubievsky, was that upon invading the city, the Nazis had shot all the Jewish soldiers in the Red Army, right there at Babi Yar.

After the official ceremony came to a close, the Jews milled around the edge of the ravine, in itself an act of bravery since everyone could see the KGB agents hovering nearby. Someone Kochubievsky knew came over to him and described a conversation he had just overheard in which a Ukrainian man lamented that the Nazis had not killed more Jews at Babi Yar. Kochubievsky, already annoyed by the official ceremony, became incensed. He pointed down the steep edge of the rocky ravine and said that "here lies part of the Jewish people." This was a massacre of Jews, he insisted. The crowd around him grew larger and his speech became more intense. The outburst at the factory had been impromptu, but this speech was not. Kochubievsky had found his voice. Look what they did to us here, he told the silent gathering. "In this country, I belong to no one. I want to go somewhere where I belong." He told them not to be afraid, that they should try to emigrate, that it was entirely legal, that his desire to go to Israel was in line with the minority rights outlined in the state constitution. When he finished talking, the Jews quickly dispersed. He was alone again.

The KGB eventually came knocking, throwing his apartment into disarray in a search meant to intimidate. He began to feel it was only a matter of time before he was arrested. He needed to take hold of his fate. He was growing impatient for the inevitable moment of his arrest to come. And while his indignation about the search was still fresh, he sat down and wrote an impassioned, audacious letter to Leonid Brezhnev, a furious confession that opened with words Kochubievsky would have been reluctant to utter just two years before: