When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (29 page)

Like Kuznetsov had been, Dymshits was a stranger to the movement. Forty-three in 1969, and a former major in the Soviet air force, Dymshits was both older and more thoroughly Russian than any of the other activists. Also like Kuznetsov's, his path to Zionism was a circuitous one, born more out of frustration with the regime than out of any self-realization. His father was killed in the German assault on Leningrad and he was evacuated with his elementary school to the Ural Mountains and separated from his mother. The army became his new family, and piloting airplanes his overwhelming passion. He attended a military prep school in the Caucasus and then trained as a fighter pilot. Only in 1949, when he received his first post—on a base in far eastern Siberia, near the Mongolian border—did he begin to understand what his Jewishness meant. This was the most undesirable place the air force could send a pilot, and all four Jews in his graduating class were stationed there. Twice in Dymshits's next decade of service, on vodka-laden nights, his superior officers drunkenly confessed that the slow pace of his advancement was the result of his nationality and nothing else.

In 1960, the Red Army reduced its numbers, and Dymshits's position was cut. By then, he was married, to a non-Jewish woman, and had two small daughters, so he needed extra work to supplement his pension. Even more than the work, he needed to keep flying. Dymshits loved being a pilot. Nothing made him as happy as manning a plane and cutting through sky and clouds. In a cockpit, he felt in control, powerful, free. Leaving the air force was like kicking a strong addiction, and he was in withdrawal. At first, he was able to fly small passenger planes in Uzbekistan for the national airline, but it kept him far away from his family, in Leningrad. He tried repeatedly to get transferred but was refused each time. Eventually he had to move back and consider another career. For a while, he worked in a factory that manufactured planes, and he took classes in electrical engineering in the evenings. Every few months he would go to the airport to ask about work as a pilot but the answer was always the same.

Then came the Six-Day War, and it awakened something in him. Dymshits couldn't stop thinking about the Spanish Civil War and how the Soviet Union had sent volunteer troops and arms to help a small, beleaguered popular front fight the Fascist forces backed by Mussolini. If Soviet radio was to be believed, Israel was on the verge of destruction. They would be the weak underdogs in this fight (a distortion that other Jews, like Mendelevich, listening to Kol Israel knew was not exactly true). Why wasn't any help sent to them? Dymshits suddenly felt willing to drop everything to go serve in the Israeli air force. The anti-Israel mood that followed the war heightened this feeling. The burden of having been discriminated against weighed even more heavily on him. And, being a military man, a man who thought in terms of objectives and the strategies needed to achieve them, he began planning his escape. He knew these thoughts were reckless, but he couldn't stop them. They were as intense as his desire to fly again. First came fantasy. He thought of building a hot-air balloon and guiding it over the border. Then he remembered an old plane graveyard in Uzbekistan. What if he could steal one of the old fighter jets and fix it up? Soon, he found himself tiptoeing around a dark but most promising thought: what if he hijacked a plane?

One afternoon in 1969 he went to Smolny Airport, a small airstrip about twenty kilometers outside Leningrad that handled local flights not served by the larger international Leningrad airport. He told a man working there that he was in the process of applying for a job and wondered if he might be able to look around. He walked into one of the AN-2s, the kind of small twelve-seater planes he used to fly in Uzbekistan, and even tested the doors of the cockpit and the outside hatches to see how they locked. With two or three people, he was sure he could hijack one of these planes. He started discussing the idea with the few Jews he knew and they looked at him as if he were suggesting a flight to the moon. The talk was so bizarre that no one even informed on him to the KGB.

Discouraged and alone, Dymshits realized that he had let himself get carried away. His own desperation to leave, to fly, had made him act carelessly. And so he decided to take a more sensible route: he would focus on learning more about Israel and Jews. He began going to the Oriental Languages section of the Lenin Library. And this is where one of Butman's neighbors spotted him: a middle-aged man with thick, slicked-back black hair and bushy dark eyebrows sitting perfectly straight and staring at the page of a notebook covered in scribbled, malformed Hebrew that he had copied out of a dictionary. Butman's neighbor walked over to Dymshits and told him that if he really wanted to learn Hebrew he should call this man. And he wrote down Hillel Butman's phone number in Dymshits's notebook.

Informers were everywhere, so Butman approached Dymshits, as he did all new friends, with caution. But despite the fact that the former military man still carried his Communist Party membership card in his pocket, Butman instinctively trusted him. He immediately sent Dymshits to an ongoing
ulpan.
On their third meeting, in early December of 1969, Dymshits and Butman walked the streets outside Butman's apartment and talked about OVIR. Butman told Dymshits how often he dreamed of going to Israel. "You don't have to fantasize," Dymshits responded. "You can simply fly away."

Dymshits laid out for a dumbstruck Butman the hijacking plan that he had abandoned: They'd buy up all the tickets for one of the flights of a small AN-2 plane going from Leningrad to Yerevan, Armenia. Then in midair they would demand that the pilot fly to Turkey, just a short distance farther south. If the pilot refused, Dymshits said that he himself would simply take the controls.

Butman's first reaction was revulsion mixed with fear. He thought of his wife and daughter and the danger his merely having this conversation could cause them. But he couldn't bring himself to categorically reject the idea. He told Dymshits that he would think about it.

He did, that whole night. What if this was his only opportunity to leave? It was just the type of action he had been thinking about for years. A successful, dramatic escape could capture the sympathy of people everywhere and maybe even push the Kremlin to change the emigration policy. Butman imagined a planeload of Jews—men, women, and children—stepping out onto a tarmac in Sweden, a modern exodus. Once there they would hold a giant press conference where they would declare emphatically that they had suffered enough.

The plan would have to be different than the one Dymshits had suggested. They would need a large plane, the biggest possible, a whole plane full of desperate Jews. Yerevan was out of the question because there was no large group of Jews there. They would have to leave from Leningrad. And since Finland had an extradition treaty with the Soviet Union, the best nearest landing option was Sweden. By morning, Butman seemed to have forgotten his reservations. The hijacking became real to him.

He decided to keep it a secret, telling only Dreizner, his closest childhood friend, who then took Dymshits drinking in order to check him out and concluded that the pilot was sincere, not a KGB provocateur. Still, Dreizner told Butman he could not take part in the hijacking. One of the possible outcomes, which they discussed openly, was that the plane would be shot down. He had a pregnant wife at home and was his widowed mother's only son. He couldn't leave them. But he would help.

Throughout the rest of December, though they didn't give Dymshits a definite answer, Butman and Dreizner met with him almost every day. They began to work out more details. They would take hold of either a TU-124 or a TU-135 plane, both of which carried up to sixty passengers, as it flew from Leningrad to Murmansk, right along the Soviet-Finnish border. Once they had commandeered the plane, it would take about ten minutes to cross the border; not enough time, Dymshits thought, for Soviet fighter pilots to deploy. They would ask the pilots to fly to Sweden, and if they refused, Dymshits would fly it, dipping low enough to evade the radar but staying high enough to be safe. If ground control in Leningrad radioed, they would disguise their voices by placing cheesecloth over the receiver and say that two people had forced the plane to fly to Helsinki. The authorities would assume that the passengers were hostages, not accomplices, and would think twice before downing the plane. They decided to avoid flying over a large body of water like the Baltic, fearing that if they were shot down, their reasons for the hijacking would be lost forever.

Dymshits was eager to proceed but Butman felt he had to inform his fellow activists before going any further. In the Zionist organization they had built, each cell acted independently. Butman could have gone ahead with the approval of only his own group, but the hijacking was so serious and potentially destructive that he wanted everyone's opinion. He called a special meeting to be held at his father's apartment, which had been vacated for the occasion. Before the gathering he told each of the five committee members what was to be discussed. They were all as shocked as Butman had been upon first hearing the plan, and only Anatoly Goldfeld, the youngest member in the committee, who was representing the group of university students from Kishinev, gave his immediate support.

They met on January 3, making their way to the apartment through a thick blanket of snow, and gathered around a table. More than four years had passed since they'd first sat huddled together in the rain in Pushkin and formed their Zionist organization. But now, the mood was different. Butman had introduced a terrifying new possibility and he was bombarded with questions. They wanted to know, among other things, the chances of success. Butman gave them Dymshits's estimate, 80 to 90 percent, but this only held, of course, if the KGB didn't discover the plot. The point though, he reiterated, was not the mission's success. Their own personal escape would be secondary. There was a bigger goal to keep in mind: opening the gates for
all
Soviet Jews. They were going to draw the world's attention whether they succeeded or failed. It was exactly what Butman had been telling the group they needed for years.

The strongest opposition came from David Chernoglaz, the treasurer of the organization, an agronomist who had taken control of the cell once dominated by Aron Shpilberg after he left for Riga. Chernoglaz argued that the hijacking would give the KGB a perfect opportunity to paint Jews as terrorists. The group would hand them an ideal excuse to shut the organization down completely. Chernoglaz was angry. This was not the type of action they should pursue. It should be undertaken, if at all, by another, more secretive group. They should not mix their minor offenses, like teaching Hebrew and Jewish history, activities the KGB had never bothered them about, with something that threatened to destroy everything and put them in jail for decades. Chernoglaz also didn't quite trust Butman's motives. Over the past year, Butman's authority had started to wane. Unlike most of the others in the organization, he had yet to take the risk of applying for an exit visa, and this made him suspect in the eyes of some. To Chernoglaz, the hijacking was Butman's way of regaining some power. Butman had always looked at the
ulpanim
as second in importance to finding a way out, and now, if given the chance, he would bring them all down with him.

Butman called for a vote on the operation. Chernoglaz refused to even take part. Two others, Dreizner and Vladik Mogilever, after reiterating that they would not be able to join the hijacking, formally abstained. Only Goldfeld joined Butman in voting for the plan. The only thing the group members could agree on was that they'd provide Butman with one hundred rubles from the organization's coffers, drawn from membership dues, so that he and Dymshits could fly the route and research the idea's feasibility. Chernoglaz handed over the money. On their way home, Dreizner and Butman each added twenty-five rubles to the pot.

Butman was shaken by the committee's response and decided not to mention the idea again until it was more concrete. He gave Dymshits half the hundred and fifty rubles and told him they could move forward. Dymshits was thrilled. They would draw up a detailed plan. Dymshits would be responsible for the operational details, and Butman would recruit passengers. The committee had not given Butman its approval, but he decided that under the cover of researching the plan, he would begin to put it into action.

Between January and March of 1970, Butman began collecting names for his operation. This was a delicate matter. The wider the circle got, the more chances that someone's girlfriend or mother or brother would tell the KGB. For this reason he didn't provide many details to those he talked to. Butman also purposely downplayed the plan's danger. He didn't want people to buckle under the psychological stress of involving themselves in what could well be a suicide mission. A few trusted potential participants were given a broad outline of what would occur. Everyone else was told only this: There is a possibility of escaping to Israel illegally. It is highly risky and must be kept a secret. Are you interested? If the answer was yes, the person was added to the list.

The names began to accumulate. Butman wrote out the list on a small strip of paper, then rolled the paper up and placed it in a tube. He tied a long piece of string to the tube and pushed it through the ventilator grate in his bathroom so that it dropped down into the air shaft but could be fished out when he wanted to add a name. He could not afford to compromise any of his people.

Throughout these first months of 1970, Dymshits worked closely with Butman and another member of the organization, Misha Korenblit, a young oral surgeon who was Butman's most steadfast supporter. Korenblit even traveled to Kishinev in early February to collect more passengers. Dymshits flew to Moscow, sitting in a cockpit with pilots he knew from his days in Uzbekistan. He took note of how the space was laid out, the number of crew members and where they sat. Once in the capital he went out to dinner with the pilots and even asked what kinds of weapons they normally carried. The pistols, they told him, were usually kept in the navigator's case. The plan began to take shape. The hijackers would have to deal with the five crew members who normally flew the large plane, and they would need to surprise them before they could reach for their weapons. In order to find out if the two doors leading to the cockpit were normally locked, Butman decided to take a plane trip to Riga. He had been planning to go anyway, to see if he could add some of the city's activists to his growing list.