When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (39 page)

Violence eventually undermined the JDL's mission, but the attention Soviet Jewry received in 1971 undeniably made a difference. The Soviets began to approve exit visas at a faster pace. Whereas a little over a thousand Jews had gotten out in 1970, new records were now being broken every month. Fifty left in January 1971, 130 in February, 1,000 in March, 1,300 in April. And the numbers continued to climb so that by the end of the year, an unprecedented 13,000 Jews had emigrated—more than in the previous ten years combined.

On the first working day of 1972, an Aeroflot cargo plane left the Soviet Union heading for Israel; it carried eight tons of luggage and personal effects, as well as a coffin with a Jewish body bound for Israeli soil. Two hundred and ten exit visas were granted that day, breaking a record. That month, January 1972, also saw the biggest single group of Jews, three hundred and fifty, that had ever arrived in Israel on one plane. Most of them were from Georgia—poor, rural Jews who arrived in the Mediterranean nation wrapped in heavy coats and fur hats. And the West began to take notice. "Russ Let 25 Jews a Day Go to Israel" read a March 1971 headline in the
Los Angeles Times,
a wave of emigration "unprecedented in the 53-year history of the Soviet Union." The paper reported that its sources "could recall no instance since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 when the government permitted such a sizeable number of Russian citizens to leave the country through normal emigration channels." Something remarkable was taking place. The Soviet government seemed to be bending to the pressure and doing the unthinkable.

A
FEW HOURS
after Eduard Kuznetsov and Yosef Mendelevich were wrestled to the ground on the Smolny tarmac, the KGB carried out searches four hundred miles away in three Moscow apartments. Vladimir Slepak was home with his wife, Masha, and two sons when the doorbell rang. His bushy beard, streaked with gray and parted at his chin, kinky hair, and thick body, usually encased in a wool sweater, gave Slepak the appearance of a fairy-tale wolf. Six agents—one in military uniform and five in gray suits—announced that they would be conducting a search in connection with the arrests made that morning. Slepak stepped aside as the men entered and began rifling through drawers, throwing books off shelves, and piling in one corner all journals and scraps of paper.

The invasion of the small apartment lasted eighteen hours. Eighteen-year-old Sanya, the elder of the Slepak sons, watched with fascination and fear as these men—who insisted on accompanying him everywhere, even to the bathroom—ransacked his father's library. In the evening, two friends stopped by unannounced, a frequent occurrence at the Slepaks', and the agents detained them as well, fearing they might alert Western journalists. At two in the morning, the apartment now littered with paper and crowded with people, the unexpected sound of heavy snoring was heard from the living room. Volodya, as everyone called Vladimir, had fallen asleep in an armchair. In the early-morning hours, the agents woke him and asked him to sign a detailed inventory. They were confiscating four bags of material—tape recorders and cassettes, letters, and a typewriter. Slepak refused to sign. There was nothing anti-Soviet here, he told them. The agents made off with their booty anyway.

As the KGB men left, one of them was overheard saying that "sometimes they jump out the window or hang themselves in the toilet by their tie" but he'd never seen someone fall asleep during a search. But this was how Slepak greeted most things, with geniality, a sense of humor, and ease. His life as a dissident had, in fact, only just begun. A few days earlier, a bureaucratic voice had informed him over the phone that his application for an exit visa to Israel had been denied. The reason: "Secrecy."

It was a word uttered by OVIR officials hundreds of times a week in 1970 and 1971 to men and woman like Slepak—educated engineers who had worked most of their lives in research institutes and factories. Their supposed past access to state secrets, often insignificant or nonexistent, rendered them ineligible for emigration. After people had finally completed the arduous application process, these refusals were cruelly arbitrary. Secrecy was just one of a dozen excuses—they ranged from the bluntly evasive "departure inexpedient" to the maddeningly nonsensical "the reason itself is a state secret." Memos penned by Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, confirm that the decision to refuse or allow an exit visa was based on little more than whim or political vendetta. In one note, Andropov described the case of a translator identified as A. M. Smelianskaia who, he wrote, "sent a letter to the address of her relative in Israel in which she transcribed the song 'Erets-Israel.'" Because the song "glorifies Israel and contains appeals to Jews to unite and struggle against 'their enemies,'" Andropov wrote, the KGB "has decided to carry out preventive measures, calling them to account for their actions, and afterwards refusing them permission to leave the Soviet Union." In another memo, a screenwriter, Efim Sevela, was deemed suspicious because of his "nationalist convictions and his low moral and professional qualities" but was given permission anyway in order to get him out of the country.

By allowing a handful of isolated, bothersome activists to leave in 1969, the Soviets had hoped to decapitate the growing Zionist movement. But they succeeded only in convincing others to apply—and to make noise when they were refused. A deluge of requests followed the first departures. In the wake of the Leningrad trial, an unprecedented number were allowed to leave—thirty-two thousand in 1972 alone. But a pattern was emerging. The Jews who were being granted exit visas were overwhelmingly from the periphery—either geographically, from the ancient communities of the Caucasus, or in terms of age or health. They were Jews the Soviet Union was happy to do without.

Those who were refused en masse were the cosmopolitan Jews of Moscow and other large urban centers—a highly skilled, highly educated, highly assimilated cohort. Over half a million Jews lived in Moscow alone (this was the population, coincidentally, of the entire state of Israel when it gained independence). For them, this new wave of emigration meant frustration. These doctors and scientists and engineers were not only being refused, they were suddenly thrust into a life of interminable waiting. As the refusals multiplied and the refused discovered one another, a new underclass was born, a community of people now living outside the norms of Soviet society: they were the
otkazniki
or, as it was translated into English, refuseniks.

The frontlines of the battle quickly shifted to the massive gray landscape of the Soviet capital, covered in communal apartment complexes and concrete public squares. The fighters were no longer the young, combative Jews of Riga with Yiddish-speaking parents. They were the grandchildren of Jews who had abandoned the tiny shtetls in the Pale of Settlement and sought opportunity in the city following the Bolshevik Revolution. And like the children of Jewish factory workers in New York, the descendants of the shtetl families were now professionals and academics. Soviet anti-Semitism, official and unofficial, had bred in them an intense work ethic, a realization that to succeed they would have to excel, they would have to make themselves indispensable.

Moscow's Jews had learned to live with unofficial quotas and daily slights. They knew which professions were prohibited, which universities would not take them, what kinds of conversations to avoid, and how to cover their ears when someone on the subway began preaching about the innate greediness of the
zhid.
These were survival tactics, and they worked. So well, in fact, that in this city of hundreds of thousands of Jews, it took time for a Zionist or Jewish emigration movement to emerge as it had in other parts of the empire. In the Baltics, the memory of Jewish life had never been erased, and in the Caucasus, Jews had been allowed to live a traditional existence for hundreds of years. But in Moscow and Leningrad, decades had passed without any sense of Jewish identity, and nothing but one crumbling synagogue on Arkhipova Street full of old people was left as a reminder of what once was.

For these Jews, becoming a refusenik—a de facto dissident—meant more than just opposing the regime. It was a personal transformation, an awakening. It required taking a hammer to the solid status quo of family and society in order to forge a whole new persona, and this always involved a private drama.

Solomon Slepak, Volodya's father, was a gruff, die-hard Bolshevik who'd named his only son after Lenin. He had made his way up the Party hierarchy early in his adventure-filled life. After leaving the small Belorussian town of his birth, Dubrovno, when he was only thirteen, Solomon Slepak joined the throngs headed for America. It was there that he first became radicalized, a true believer in Communism. When he had had enough of his life as a window washer in the squalid Lower East Side, he decided to answer the call of the revolution that was then taking place at home. He made his way back to the Russian mainland via the far eastern city of Vladivostok, where he fought off the White counterrevolutionaries occupying the city and amassed a ten-thousand-man partisan army. His return to the new Soviet Union was triumphant, earning him a respected place in the Party and plum jobs as a propagandist and an agent-ambassador for the Comintern, the body charged with fomenting Communist revolution all over the world. Solomon and his wife were on one of his missions, this one to China, when Volodya was born, in 1927.

To come of age in Moscow in the late thirties as a child of the Bolshevik aristocracy was to experience a disorienting combination of privilege and unrelenting terror. Volodya witnessed tearful children in his class whose fathers had disappeared the night before; he saw his own father frantically ink out the face of Trotsky in history books on the Russian civil war; and one day he was told to never again utter the name of his favorite uncle, his mother's brother, who had been swept up in a purge and then lost to the Gulag. Volodya even woke up one night to find his father frozen with fear in the living room; he'd thought he'd heard someone pounding on the door, coming to take him away. Somehow, that knock on the door never came for Solomon Slepak. He managed to escape the extreme bloodletting of 1937 and 1938 that Stalin inflicted on almost all the Bolshevik leaders of his generation. Through it all, Solomon dutifully carried out his job, delivering a daily digest of the foreign press for Stalin and the Politburo. It took the Nazi invasion of Russia to break this rhythm. The family was forced to separate, with the children fleeing Moscow on their own, traveling until Volodya and his older sister, Rosa, reached a town in the Urals where they waited out the war.

Once life returned to normal and the family settled together in the capital again, Volodya began to focus on his career. He decided to study radio electronics at the Aviation Institute. With a father as well known as Solomon Slepak, Volodya felt his path was clear. If anyone had a question about the impeccable Communist bona fides of the Slepak family, that person had only to see where they lived. Their apartment, first granted to them in 1940, was on the eighth floor of a stately slate gray building on Gorky Street, the wide boulevard that radiated out from Red Square and was home to the Soviet Union's most extravagant hotels and shops, a street memorialized by Pushkin. Every year, a military parade rolled beneath the Slepaks' balcony displaying the empire's tanks and rocket launchers. After the war, the city installed an equestrian statue of Prince Yury Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow, in Sovetskaya Square across the boulevard. The extended arm of the Middle Ages warrior seemed to point directly at the entrance to Volodya's building.

Volodya graduated with a master's degree in 1950, an unfortunate time for a Jew born in China to be looking for work. Stalin was railing against "cosmopolitanism." If there was any check on his boundless possibility, it was from this, the dictator's whim. Every potential employer looked at him suspiciously and he was finally forced to take a job as a television repairman in a small shop. Very little came out of this work besides a chance meeting with the woman who later became his wife. Maria Rashkovsky, or Masha, as she was known, walked into the shop one day wearing glasses and a knitted sweater. She had grown up in Moscow but, unlike Volodya, had some awareness of her Jewish roots. As a girl, she would watch her grandmother light Sabbath candles and cook food for the Jewish holidays. When she met Volodya, she was studying to become a doctor at a medical school in Ryazan, on the outskirts of the capital. After less then a dozen dates, he proposed to her. A day after their wedding, she left to do a summer internship two hundred miles away. When it was over, she transferred to a Moscow medical school and moved into the family apartment on Gorky Street.

It was Stalin's last act of paranoid anti-Semitism that prompted the initial rift between Volodya and his father. In the fall of 1952, the aging leader had arrested a number of Jewish doctors for allegedly plotting to poison the Kremlin leadership. Masha was in her last year of medical school, and she knew a few of the accused personally. The charges, she told Volodya, had to be false. She told Solomon about this and he responded with an old Russian proverb: "Whenever you cut down trees, chips will fly in all directions." The authorities were engaged in a class struggle, rooting out capitalist enemies. "Isn't it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch one spy than to let the spy go free?" the old Bolshevik asked.

Volodya found this logic revolting, the twisted reasoning of a man who needed to justify the cause he had devoted his life to. And there, in the small living room of their Gorky Street apartment—the same one that would be searched eighteen years later—Volodya Slepak replied that he could "never accept such a philosophy." The more they talked, the angrier his father's defense of Stalin made him. Volodya accused Solomon of having blood on his hands, of supporting a corrupt system, of joining a political party that demanded total faith but gave nothing in return.