When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (18 page)

Two weeks later, Kazakov received a phone call asking him to appear at the Office of Visas and Registration with all his documents. When he got there, an official told him he was being given an exit visa and had two weeks to leave the country. He couldn't believe his luck. The OVIR official leaned in close and told him he'd better not engage in any anti-Soviet activity during his remaining days.

A few months later, Yasha Kazakov was starting his basic training in the Israeli army.

Meanwhile, Boris Kochubievsky thought he was going crazy. Even though the doctors didn't try to medicate him, he couldn't escape the contorted faces of men in straitjackets, the screams from the electroshock rooms, the monologues of the murderer who lived in his dormitory and described in detail how he had killed his whole family. But by the end of January 1969, Kochubievsky's story was making its way to the West, and the authorities had no choice but to transfer him to a prison cell and formally charge him under Article 187-1 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code. According to the official indictment, he was accused of "systematically disseminating by word of mouth slanderous fabrications, defaming state and social systems of the USSR, the slander being expressed in his disseminating fabrications alleging that the Soviet Union oppresses and keeps down Jews."

The trial began on May 13. In an ironic twist, it was held in the same courtroom in Kiev where Mendel Beilis had stood in 1913 in an infamously anti-Semitic blood libel case, accused of ritually murdering a young Russian boy—not a connection the Soviets should have been eager to make. As had been true for the recent trials of dissidents Daniel and Sinyavsky, the courtroom was filled with people handpicked by the local KGB. Kochubievsky was not allowed much of a defense. The prosecution's argument focused on what Kochubievsky had said at Babi Yar and at the OVIR offices. For more than three days, various Communist Party members with only tenuous connections to Kochubievsky were brought in as witnesses against him. Kochubievsky did not buckle. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and in fact he figured that now, with nothing to lose, he might as well be as audacious as possible. At one point he told the court that he did not begrudge the Ukrainian people their Communism. He sincerely wished them five hundred more glorious years of Communist rule. He, however, wanted out. (In response, the prosecutor said that Kochubievsky's real problem was not his desire to go to Israel but what he called his "mania of superiority.")

In his final statement, on the last day of the three-day trial, Kochubievsky sparred with one of the judges. He tried to talk about Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar," how it had expressed the sentiments for which he was being tried. The judge cut him off. "Accused, you have been given the chance to make a final statement in your defense, not to make excursions into history and literature." Kochubievsky stared straight at the judge and answered, "I ask that it be placed on record that I have been admonished for mentioning Yevtushenko's poem 'Babi Yar'...Very well, I omit this part of my final statement. All my statements at Babi Yar fully coincided with the sense and the spirit of this poem." Kochubievsky relentlessly attacked the court's procedure, pointing out inaccuracies and insufficient evidence. But his exhaustion was clear, and in the end he offered not much more than this exasperated rhetorical question: "You, citizen judges, have said that we have class justice. But does the wish to emigrate to Israel turn a person into a hostile element?"

After Kochubievsky was finished speaking, the court sentenced him to three years in a labor camp. Within a month, he was in the Urals, head shaved, in a prison uniform, and eating soup with rotten fish out of a wooden bowl. The Soviet Union had produced yet another political prisoner whose only stated crime was Zionism.

***

Between the Six-Day War in June of 1967 and early 1969 when, almost simultaneously, Kazakov was allowed to leave for Israel and Kochubievsky was sent to the Ural Mountains, an intellectual revolution took place inside the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring—Alexander Dub^ek's experiment in economic and social liberalization, what he called "socialism with a human face." It was an unabashed and militantly extreme reaction, and the Czech people greeted the Soviet army with jeers and curses. And it exposed the true character of the post-Khrushchev Soviet leadership: strong enough that it felt no compunction about using an iron fist to destroy any form of opposition, yet at the same time deeply insecure about any popular discontent.

The August invasion disturbed the young city-dwelling generation who had grown up during the thaw. It offered conclusive proof that whatever part of Soviet society had opened up in the early sixties was closing again. And for the growing dissident movement, drawn mainly from the Muscovite intelligentsia, it reinforced the need for opposition while making clear how hard the struggle would be. There could be no more illusions about how the state would react if it felt threatened. Since the Daniel-Sinyavsky trial in early 1966, a loosely organized movement had taken shape, circulating samizdat literature and publicly protesting every heavy-handed government action. Some of the more prominent protesters were on trial by 1967, including Vladimir Bukovsky and Alexander Ginzburg, mostly for the crimes of holding what were called "disorderly demonstrations" or engaging in "malicious hooliganism." But trials of dissident leaders only begat more protests. Soon a highly competent group of activists had organized themselves in Moscow and begun refining a powerful tool of dissidence: recording, documenting, and bearing witness to the regime's injustice. When they could, they also publicly protested. Each December 5, Soviet Constitution Day, starting in 1965 after the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavsky, at least a hundred people would gather silently at Pushkin Square at six in the evening to bow their heads. Often they were outnumbered by the masses of KGB officers scribbling down names and descriptions in notebooks.

And young writers and college students were no longer the only ones trying to loosen Soviet society. A highly esteemed member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Andrei Sakharov, had entered the fray. His groundbreaking first essay, "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," was passed from hand to hand in that hopeful spring of 1968. A highly gifted physicist and the inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he had every luxury the Soviet Union could offer—special housing, bodyguards, and consumer goods unavailable to most other citizens. This made him an unusual recruit for the democracy movement—his character and prestige alone were an enormous threat to the regime. Sakharov's political evolution came in slow steps. He began moving into the political realm after becoming a critic of nuclear atmospheric testing in the early sixties. By 1966, he had signed his name to a letter to Brezhnev demanding Stalin not be rehabilitated and was meeting with underground intellectuals like the brothers Roy and Zhores Medvedev (Roy would write the massive samizdat indictment of Stalin titled "Let History Judge"). By the time Sakharov wrote his essay, he had developed a fully formed concept for the direction Russia should take. His idea was "convergence," which he described as "the rapprochement of the socialist and capitalist systems." This had to take place "accompanied by democratization, demilitarization, and social and technological progress." Sakharov believed it was "the only alternative to the ruin of mankind." He pointed out many of the ills of Soviet society, including one that no Russian had dared discuss so publicly: "In the highest bureaucratic elite of our government, the spirit of anti-Semitism was never fully dispelled after the nineteen-thirties."

The popularity of Sakharov's essay and its appearance in the West made it hard for the Soviet leadership to ignore. Following the Czech invasion in August 1968, he lost his job and was stripped of all his privileges. So began Sakharov's new career as the moral sun around which the dissident movement revolved.

The democracy activists were emboldened. In response to Czechoslovakia, a group of eight staged a daring protest in Red Square, sitting down and unfurling a banner that read
FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS
. In less than a minute, they were set upon by a group of police and KGB agents wielding clubs and shouting, "They're all Jews. Beat up the anti-Soviets!" One man's teeth were knocked out, another man was hit repeatedly in the head—within a month almost all the protesters were sentenced to years in labor camps or internal exile. One was injured so badly that he was not put on trial but placed in a mental institution—the new destination of choice for political "deviants."

The only one of the protesters who managed to escape prosecution was Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who arrived at the demonstration wheeling her three-month-old son in a stroller. She was the editor of the
Chronicle of Current Events,
known simply as the
Chronicle
(or
Khronika,
in Russian), a kind of human rights bulletin and one of the dissidents' most successful endeavors. Little noticed at first, by the end of 1968
Khronika
had become a source of information for thousands—documenting various abuses and trials taking place all over the Soviet Union—and a high-profile target of the KGB. It had a straightforward, dispassionate, almost legalistically accurate style and managed to appear regularly every two months (produced, of course, on typewriters and handed from person to person with no identifying address on its masthead). In its sixth issue, dated February 29, 1969,
Khronika
also began keeping track of the Zionist movement, starting with the story of Boris Kochubievsky. All through the rest of 1969, it relayed the details of his trial, including transcripts that had been sneaked out by
Khronika's
contact person in Kiev. From then on, the journal reported on Jewish activities and repression in the major cities, bringing the two movements together—at least for the moment.

By the beginning of 1969, reality had begun to sink in for Soviet Jews. Pulled by Israel's victory in the Six-Day War and pushed by the Czech invasion, they finally realized that the Soviet Union was not going to change for them. They needed to leave. As a result, the movement—still mostly small clusters of Zionist groups operating in the major cities—became bolder and more desperate.

As the contradictory treatment of Kazakov and Kochubievsky showed, the Soviet leadership had not come up with a coherent policy for dealing with troublesome Jews. Unlike the democracy movement, which the regime ruthlessly suppressed, Zionism seemed to provoke some debate about the best tack to take. On the one hand, officials felt a need to crush even vaguely anti-Soviet sentiments, as they had with Kochubievsky. Jews declaring that they wanted out of the socialist paradise seemed no less subversive than dissidents crying for reforms, and the solution—prosecuting and jailing them—was the same. On the other hand, the Soviets wondered, what if they were dealing with small pockets of troublemakers? If they let just a few of these people, like Kazakov, go, then perhaps the rest of the Jewish population would calm down. Andropov's November 1968 memo about the seditious young people singing and dancing in front of the synagogue on Simchat Torah suggested this was the prevailing thought: a few agitators were to blame for Zionism.

Andropov extended this line of reasoning in another memo on June 10, 1968, exactly one year after the Soviet Union severed its relations with Israel. Emigration had completely shut down since the war, and he was now proposing that it be renewed but limited to no more than fifteen hundred people. The reasons were clear. Andropov (along with Andrei Gromyko) wrote that the decision to stop emigration had been "perceived as a manifestation of anti-Semitism on the part of the Soviet authorities in response to the events that had arisen in the Middle East." So the two proposed that "in order to contain the slanderous assertions of Western propaganda concerning discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, it would seem expedient, along with other measures, to renew in the coming year departures of Soviet citizens for permanent residence in Israel." But this was not just about looking good in the eyes of the world. Letting out some Jews would also "permit the elimination of nationalistically inclined individuals and religious fanatics who exert harmful influence on their surroundings."

By the end of 1968, Riga's oldest and most seasoned activists were being asked to show up at OVIR to begin the process of receiving their exit visas. It was hard for many people to understand at first. The noisiest and most extreme Zionists were being allowed to leave, just like that: Mark Blum, who had been on trial and spent a year in jail for his role in the Geula Gill riot; Yosef Schneider, the one-time Gulag prisoner; Boris and Lydia Slovin, who just that year had been investigated by the KGB. Almost the entire old guard of the Baltic movement—those who had inspired Rumbuli, held hundreds of meetings in their apartments, taught Hebrew, and distributed samizdat—were gone by January of 1969.

But if the Soviet leadership thought they would be able to kill the movement by decapitating it, they had made a terrible miscalculation. The Slovins were invited to the Riga OVIR offices, and when they showed up early, they saw from a distance that almost two hundred Jewish acquaintances and strangers were waiting outside. These were not activists. They were just people who had somehow gotten word that the Slovins might get visas for Israel, and they wanted to see what would happen. The crowd was so thick that the OVIR officials and the Slovins could hardly make it to the door. When Boris and Lydia finally emerged with their papers, people began murmuring that they too were going to apply. Boris Slovin heard one man say, "Look, if they let Slovin leave, then for sure they'll let us too."

Rather than dampening people's Zionist impulse, seeing others off at the airport only increased the yearning. And the Soviets, inadvertently, had taught those activists who remained an important lesson. Clearly, the more noise one made, the better one's chance of getting out. The lesson of Kochubievsky—that noise could also land you in prison—was not forgotten. But it was evident to people like Mendelevich in Riga and Shpilberg in Leningrad that now was the time to at least apply for a visa, a step that many had previously thought futile and possibly even dangerous.