When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (41 page)

This deeply felt Russianness was a part of Volodya Slepak and most of the other refuseniks as well. And it created both tension and kinship. The dissident movement paid close attention to the persecution of Jewish activists. In 1969, the widely circulated dissident newsletter
Chronicle of Current Events,
or
Khronika,
described the arrest and trial of Boris Kochubievsky. From then on, at least one page was always reserved for news of the Jewish emigration movement.

A key link between the two movements was Andrei Sakharov and his Jewish wife and fellow activist, Elena Bonner. In the early 1970s, Sakharov was still considered untouchable. His criticism of the Soviet system was well known and his samizdat essays widely read, but his standing as an esteemed physicist made it hard for the regime to prosecute him openly. This special status turned him into an important anchor for the movement. His apartment was a gathering place for anyone who had problems with the authorities, including the growing community of Jewish activists. As the number of exit visa applications—and rejections—mounted in the early 1970s, Jews looked to Sakharov for help. The KGB noticed. In a memo from April 1971, KGB chief Yuri Andropov described the situation: "As a result of enemy propaganda, the name of Sakharov is gaining even greater popularity inside the country as an 'uncompromising fighter' against injustice. His apartment has become a place of pilgrimage for various kinds of 'victims' of 'arbitrary actions' by Soviet authorities. Some citizens come from remote regions of the country to Moscow specifically to meet with him." Referring to Jews, he added, "Many people who have been denied permission to leave the country ask Sakharov to help them obtain exit visas.... He advises people to make 'noise' each time an exit visa is denied, to publish relevant material in samizdat, and to resort to the services of the bourgeois press and Western radio stations."

In the fall of 1970, Sakharov joined with Valery Chalidze, a man with a sterling reputation in the dissident community, to form the Moscow Committee for Human Rights. Chalidze, who was married to the granddaughter of Maxim Litvinov, the prewar Jewish foreign minister of the Soviet Union, was a physicist turned legal expert. His ingenious strategy for challenging the regime was to remind it of its own laws. The way he saw it, the Soviet constitution granted all the rights the democrats were seeking. All the dissidents had to do was shame the state into abiding by its own governing document. The Committee for Human Rights was a small group set up to investigate and expose human and civil rights violations. It survived its initial months by claiming it wasn't an organization but simply "a creative association acting in accordance with the laws of the land." The KGB nevertheless began watching it closely. And so did ordinary citizens, who turned to the group as they might a legal aid society. Among the issues Chalidze took up was emigration. For him, it was not a matter of allowing Jews to go to Israel but of the Soviet Union respecting the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which allowed for freedom of movement. Sakharov himself often said that he saw freedom of movement as the most fundamental human right—if a citizen could freely leave his country, he could never be a slave. And there were also tactical reasons to fight for this right, as Chalidze made clear in his book
To Defend These Rights:
"Any mass restrictions of rights affecting Jews attracts the attention of 'world public opinion' since historically any form of restriction on the rights of Jews is a critical question for our civilization."

In 1971, the year that the Committee for Human Rights did its most groundbreaking work, Chalidze took up the specific cases of a number of Jews. People like Jonah Kolchinsky, a nineteen-year-old from Kharkov who had been called up for military service after he announced his intention to emigrate to Israel. Chalidze went so far as to ask the minister of defense to have Kolchinsky demobilized. When it became known that Yosef Mendelevich, then in a prison camp in Mordvinia, was not being allowed to wear a yarmulke, Chalidze wrote to the minister of internal affairs asking that a prisoner's right of religion be respected in the camps.

The democrats had developed a good model. The idea of writing protest letters and petitions came directly from them. They were the first to realize that a letter passed to the West and read aloud over the BBC or the Voice of America was a sort of insurance policy. The Jewish activists took this method and expanded it, and in June of 1970, seventy-five refuseniks—including, for the first time, Vladimir and Masha Slepak—signed a letter addressed to U Thant. The message to the secretary-general was dramatic: "We sign this open appeal to you fully aware of the fact that if the Rights of Man are not implemented, humanity has no future." By February of 1971, there was a petition with two hundred names, and this time the emphasis was on the legal basis for their demand: "The right of Jews to emigrate to Israel is based on recognized international judicial norms and must not be hindered in the Soviet Union."

Also in 1970 there emerged a Moscow samizdat journal for the emigration movement that resembled
Khronika,
the democrats' successful endeavor. It wasn't the first. Yosef Mendelevich had managed to put together two issues of his journal
Iton
before he was arrested. But when all the Riga activists were locked up,
Iton
died. In Moscow, activist Victor Fedoseyev began assembling
Ishkod,
or
Exodus,
his own samizdat journal with a distinctly Moscow sensibility.
Iton
had tried to stimulate Jewish consciousness with articles about Israel and Jewish history;
Ishkod
was a documentary account of the movement itself. Like
Khronika,
it printed court transcripts and protest letters. In its third issue, released in the fall of 1970, there was an account of the June 15 search of Volodya Slepak's apartment. The fourth issue was devoted to the Leningrad trial and contained a reconstructed transcript of the proceedings. The shift in tone from
Iton
to
Ishkod
mirrored the change in the movement's character when its center moved to Moscow. The opening page of every issue contained the same two quotes. First, from the book of Psalms, were the words uttered by Sylva Zalmanson at the Leningrad trial: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither." Next to this religious exhortation were the words of Article 13 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own."

Ishkod
was interesting for another reason. Victor Fedoseyev, its organizer, was not a Jew. Only in Moscow, with its cross-pollination of democrats and Zionists, would such a thing have been possible. Fedoseyev had become immersed in the world of refuseniks after marrying a Jewish woman whose mother was trying to emigrate. Soon he was penning collective petitions and letters (though never signing his non-Jewish name to them).
Ishkod
was his lasting contribution to the Moscow activists, his attempt to organize their activities. Emulating what the democrats were doing with
Khronika
and the human rights committee, Fedoseyev understood that the movement needed to pinpoint cases of abuse and catalog them minutely. In all, only four issues were produced, the first appearing in April 1970 and the last in February 1971, when Fedoseyev and his wife were given exit visas. Shortly after arriving in Israel, he explained in an interview the role that
Ishkod
had played: "The movement continues to exist as it is reflected—when it is reported. It withers and dies in silence ... The KGB began to let people out, not because no one angered them, but because Jews shouted about their rights. To be silent—to fail to report everything—is to play the KGB's game. Not to reflect all the facts is to permit the movement to decline—to betray Jewish history."

On the morning of February 24, 1971, a group of two dozen refuseniks marched right into the reception room of the Presidium of the Soviet Union, an imposing gray building with an interior of plush red carpet, and a giant hammer-and-sickle flag hanging on the wall. They were demanding, unbelievably, to see a member of one of the most powerful government bodies in the empire. For decades, these Jews had been made to fear the state and given every reason to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Yet now they wanted to present a petition signed by thirty-two Jews asking for a clarification of the Soviet Union's emigration policy. When the receptionist denied them an audience, they sat down on the floor.

The refuseniks were fast eclipsing the democrats in their activism. The only real precedent for this type of sit-in (a distant echo of the American university takeovers of the late 1960s) was the infamously suppressed Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968—and that had ended seconds after it started, with all the protesters dragged away. But with the Twenty-fourth Communist Party Congress approaching, and the World Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry taking place at that very moment in Brussels, the Soviets wanted to avoid yet more bad press. So after a full nine hours of waiting, after the cleaners had started vacuuming the red carpets, the protesters were greeted by the administrator of the Presidium; he took their petition and promised an answer the following week.

That they were taken seriously, that no one was arrested, that a Soviet official spoke to them was extraordinary. News of the breakthrough spread among the refuseniks, who realized that there might be an even more effective form of protest than letter writing. When the group returned to the Presidium on March 1, the same official committed himself to investigating each of their complaints and taking another look at their applications. They were not naive. The Soviets might simply be play-acting for the sake of the Western media. But these Jews knew that once a precedent was set, it was hard to undo.

Two weeks after the first sit-in, more than a hundred and fifty refuseniks, mostly Baltic Jews who had seen their friends and family get permission to leave while they were denied, crammed into the Presidium reception room. Mark Azbel, a renowned and charismatic physicist—a quirky, colorful man who usually wore a Hawaiian shirt and who had started to think about applying himself—joined the group of Moscow Jews who witnessed the scene. He later described this protest as having "changed the face of Soviet history—something so impossible that you would not have even dared to dream of it."

It started early in the day on March 10 when fifty-seven Jews from Riga walked into the reception room and presented a petition addressed to the Soviet president, Nikolai Podgorny, and the premier, Aleksei Kosygin. They would not leave, their spokesman announced, until they and their families received permission to emigrate. With that, they began a siege of the building. They were joined by a contingent of sixty-nine Lithuanian Jews and another twenty Muscovites. They sang songs, and one older man read loudly from a samizdat copy of Leon Uris's
Exodus.
That afternoon, Western reporters arrived and interviewed the refuseniks until KGB agents chased them away. Then, at five, when the lights were shut off, all 146 Jews began a hunger strike.

By seven that evening, the authorities had a problem, and with the Western press at a safe distance, more than four hundred and fifty policemen in riot gear and equipped with helmets and clubs rushed into the building and surrounded the group. The lieutenant general of the Moscow police, backed by this threat of extreme force, got them to acquiesce. They would leave. But they returned the following day, only to be greeted by the minister of the interior, surrounded by police officers: "Zionism is Fascism!" he yelled at them. "No one can try to prevent the Soviets from building Communism and go unpunished. You should not forget what we did with the Tatars!" Mark Azbel recorded what happened next: "The people from Riga, with their reinforcements, remained silent and obdurate. And with international attention focused upon these demonstrations, the authorities felt themselves prevented from using force. In the end, they had to back down. They finally offered to reconsider the entire list, as a unit, and only then did the refuseniks leave. The majority of them got out of the country within two weeks."

A few days later, Volodya Slepak stood with a group of almost a hundred Moscow refuseniks at the Presidium and presented a petition signed by 213 people. This time, they wanted more than a reexamination of their own cases. They asked that those Jews being held in connection with the Leningrad hijacking be either released or given retrials immediately (the second Leningrad trial and the trials in Riga and Kishinev had yet to take place). They were told that this issue was under the jurisdiction of the prosecutor general, Roman Rudenko, renowned as the chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. A smaller group of about fifty refuseniks, including Slepak, walked over to Rudenko's office on Pushkinskaya Street. There they waited, ignored, until a group of thirty policemen in riot gear stormed the reception room. They grabbed Slepak by the arm, lifted him up from where he was sitting on the ground, and escorted him and the rest of the group onto a bus parked outside.

The KGB liked to give fifteen-day detentions. It was a convenient weapon in their war against the dissidents, obviating the need for formal charges. Two weeks in a bare cell without decent food was uncomfortable enough to act as a deterrent for most people. Slepak was brought into a small interrogation room and questioned for twenty minutes. They wanted the names of leaders and any connections to the democrats. Slepak said nothing. He simply repeated his demands and then added that, if he was not released immediately, he would begin a hunger strike. The others said the same.

That night for the first time in his life, Volodya Slepak slept in a jail cell. It had two iron beds with no mattresses, a table and bench bolted to the floor. A small tin drum in the corner served as a toilet. His cellmate was Victor Polsky, a physicist and one of Volodya's closest friends. He was part of the group of Jews Slepak had met during his years working at the Scientific Institute for TV Research; his family was one of the ones the Slepaks camped with in the summers. Polsky had also lost his job. Redheaded and blue-eyed, he had an unusually forceful presence (his nickname was Commander), and from the moment he became a refusenik he was determined to sign every petition, be part of every protest. Old friends, he and Slepak tried to make the best of their situation.