When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (42 page)

The next morning, ten of the refuseniks, the men of the group, were brought in front of a judge, a severe-looking woman in a dark jacket and skirt, and told that "because of your noncompliance with the demands of the representatives of the authorities, you are hereby sentenced to fifteen days of administrative imprisonment." Placed back in their cells, they decided they would begin their hunger strike and drink only water. Slepak and Polsky bided their time, playing chess on a board they had made out of scraps of paper and using morsels of torn-up bread for pieces. Days passed in boredom and eventually most of the refuseniks gave up the strike. By the thirteenth day, only Slepak and one other man were still fasting. When the guards made it clear that they would start force-feeding him, Slepak relented. The other man was Mikhail Zand; he was in his midforties, a professor of Oriental studies renowned for his work on Persian and Tajik literature. His ambition to go to Israel dated back to 1948 when he naively wrote to Stalin asking that Soviet Jews be given permission to fight in Israel's War of Independence. The only thing that saved him from a labor camp was that he'd used a pseudonym to sign the letter. In March of 1971, he wasn't so lucky. A day before the end of his detention, the last man still fasting, Zand was strapped down and force-fed bouillon through his nose. When he finally agreed to eat, he was served a meal of grits and pork and beef, which injured his liver and gallbladder. He left the prison in an ambulance and was driven straight to a hospital.

Slepak was able to come home and joke with Masha about losing his large paunch. But there was also acute fear. The life they had chosen was going to get more difficult. There would be extreme deprivation, and perhaps even physical pain. Slepak entered this new existence with a clear conscience, but not without trepidation.

The activists' new militancy, which bordered on recklessness, was wholly unexpected by both the Soviet authorities and, to some extent, the Jews themselves. At one point during the spring of 1971 an anonymous letter was sent to the minister of the interior that sounded as if it had been composed by Meir Kahane. It warned the minister to take action against threats and physical violence aimed at Jews. "We demand that effective measures be taken to stop such provocations no matter what their source is," the letter read. "Otherwise we will be compelled to defend our lives and human dignity ourselves. If the ministry you head cannot manage this problem, we will have to study the question of finding appropriate self-defense: The times of Czarist pogroms and assassinations, when our fathers would perish without defending themselves, are over." Sit-ins and hunger strikes continued throughout the summer, usually followed by the fifteen-day detentions. A familiar routine was established, a dance of demonstration and detention that only served to further radicalize the movement.

This willingness to engage in extreme and risky (and publicity-generating) protest was enhanced by another unanticipated and paradoxical development: a new crop of refuseniks hailing from the scientific establishment. This gave the Moscow movement even more legitimacy and respectability.

Jews made up a large percentage of the Soviet Union's scientific elite. At the beginning of the 1970s, one-fifth (18 percent) of all educated Jews fit in the category of scientific worker—compared with one-tenth of all educated Russians. For the generation that came of age during the last years of Stalin's reign, science provided an escape from the constraints of ideology. One could excel at science without being forced to make the moral compromises required in literature or history. Chemistry, physics, mathematics—all had laws over which Communism had no jurisdiction. When the regime tried to control these fields, it simply damaged itself. So Jews naturally gravitated to these meritocratic disciplines, where advancement wasn't simply a function of one's adherence to Party doctrine. The sciences often ignored the quotas sometimes placed on other fields. The authorities would generally not deny employment to an exceptional mind willing to work in the service of the state, regardless of that person's ethnicity.

Mark Azbel, the physicist who witnessed the protest at the Presidium, later wrote about how science was key to his "moral survival" in the Soviet Union. His physics theories were "independent of every external factor" and helped him cope with the daily self-deceptions needed to get along. Science meant more than a free conscience. At the highest level, scientists were given much privilege—big apartments, country homes, trips abroad, the right to shop at special stores that contained consumer goods from the West. To remain competitive in the arms race, the Soviets needed the scientists, so they did everything to keep them happy. Azbel wrote that physicists constituted "a privileged caste, an aristocracy. There were fewer controls on our freedom than on those of any other members of Soviet civilian society.... Relatively speaking we were free people."

So it came as the greatest shock when members of this caste began asking to leave. They had far more to lose than the average Soviet engineer. And since most scientists had worked for the government at some point in their lives, they were almost certain to be refused. Still, they persisted. In the last months of 1971, the news quickly circulated in the Moscow scientific community that fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Lerner, one of the most esteemed scientists in the country, had applied to leave.

Alexander Lerner was a small man with a large belly, a balding pate, and heavy jowls. He was internationally known in his field of cybernetics—a science founded in the 1940s that examined communication and control in both machines and living things—and had spent the previous summer working at a research institute in Naples, Italy. This was Lerner's world until the spring of 1971, honored and privileged—he had a large apartment in Moscow, a spacious dacha in the country, and, incredibly, two cars.

Lerner was born and grew up in Vinnytsya, a large town in the Ukraine not far from the shtetls where his parents had lived before the revolution. As a boy, he fiddled with radios for hours until he could hear the Gypsy music played on the Polish station, and he was fascinated by American movies, especially films with Douglas Fairbanks. In 1932, at the age of eighteen, he was urged by his mother to go to Moscow for his education. Arriving with little more than the address of a childhood friend and a suitcase with three shirts and two changes of underwear, he joined the throngs of young men from the provinces coming to the city to work in the factories and on the many building projects. The next few years of his life were a constant struggle to find a place to live as he moved through a dismal series of closets and kitchens and small rooms teeming with bedbugs.

But he soon made his mark. His first invention was conceived while he was working at a textile mill: it was a simple device that signaled when a thread tore on a loom. He spent the three-thousand-ruble reward to secure a stable living situation. He was initially refused entrance to Moscow's prestigious Power Engineering Institute because his father, the owner of a small drugstore before the revolution, was part of the "bourgeois," but he eventually found his way in. At the age of twenty-one, he was profiled in the magazine
Soviet Student
as a model Soviet youth, a man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Soon he married Judith Perelman, a girl from back home. He started graduate work at the Power Engineering Institute and was even given a small apartment. By the time he was an assistant professor, at the age of twenty-seven, he had already collaborated on a book and published several articles in international science journals.

The German attack on the Soviet Union in July of 1941 tore Lerner's life apart. His two young daughters were staying with his parents in the Ukraine over the summer. There was no way for Lerner and his wife to get to them before the Nazis arrived with their mobile killing units. Lerner was mobilized and sent all over the empire, first to a factory in Novosibirsk and then in 1943 back to Moscow to supervise a laboratory at the Iron and Steel Ministry. As soon as the Red Army liberated Vinnytsya, he rushed to find his family, only to discover that his two daughters and most of his relatives had been shot not long after the Germans entered their town. There was nothing to do but go back to the city and start a new life, build a new family.

Lerner and his wife went on to have two more children, and he continued to pursue his scientific interests. After the war, science remained one of the few fields open to Jews. The Cold War technology race trumped anti-Semitism. Lerner's field, automation, was especially valued, and this largely insulated him. For example, in the late forties, the government banned cybernetics, labeling it a "bourgeois pseudoscience," but Lerner simply began referring to his work as "the theory of optimal control." He was left alone.

Only Stalin's last delusional campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (that is, Jews) was able to puncture this safe existence. The purging of Jews from the sciences, fields where their contributions were critical, was testament to Stalin's madness. It didn't take much to be charged with "cosmopolitanism." Having one's name mentioned in a foreign publication was enough. For Lerner, it was guilt by association. He had an aunt who had emigrated from Vinnytsya to Mexico in the late twenties. Lerner was fired in an effort to "purify personnel" and contain the threat of foreign influence. He was blasphemed in newspapers as a suspicious character and reduced to knocking on doors all over Moscow looking for work; his friends and colleagues were afraid even to admit they knew him.

Then Stalin died, and Lerner's troubles evaporated. Those who had maligned him now embraced him. He began working again at the Iron and Steel Ministry and in 1956 was made laboratory chief at the Automation Institute. But the anti-Semitic campaign scarred Lerner, as it did many Jews of his generation. It made him aware as never before of the fundamental insecurity of his position in Soviet society, no matter how many awards he won.

Lerner's evolution began slowly. On the one hand, he was gaining more and more notoriety in the Soviet Union and abroad. He earned the degree of doctor of science, the highest level awarded, and was allowed to take trips to Paris, Beijing, and many other places, occasionally guest lecturing for a month at a time. His fiftieth birthday was spent in Florence. His book on cybernetics became a seminal text on the subject. On the other hand, as the sixties progressed, he felt more alienated, more attuned to the hypocrisy and the compromises he felt he had to make in order to maintain his privileges. And he worried for his children's future. He was in his fifties and had accomplished much in his life, but what about Vladimir and Sonia, his son and daughter? Their Jewishness was already impeding their progress. His daughter, despite having exemplary grades, was denied entrance into the university, and his son was the only student not allowed to go on a class trip to London.

Lerner had very little awareness of his Jewishness beyond the memory of his grandfather's teaching him the traditional Passover phrase "Next year in Jerusalem!" But he found himself increasingly drawn to the idea of immigrating to Israel, especially after the Six-Day War. He'd begun following the exploits of the dissidents, admiring the Red Square protesters in 1968 and reading Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago
in samizdat. Then the Riga Jews began emigrating in 1969, and finally a few Moscow Jews were let out in early 1971. Lerner agonized about what to do but he knew this might be his chance to give his children the gift of a better life. He also knew what this would cost him. As he later wrote in his memoirs: "Anyone who took the first step toward getting permission to leave was breaking away from Soviet society, condemning himself to isolation and persecution until he managed to leave or perished in the attempt."

On an evening in May 1971, he gathered his family together, drew the shades, disconnected the phone, and then told them in a whisper that he had decided to apply for an exit visa. His wife was worried, but his children embraced the idea. In that instant, after a lifetime of accumulated compromises, Lerner felt his conscience finally clear. He described the moment this way: "When we had made our decision, we were able to breath more easily. We had no illusion about the fight that lay ahead and how hard it would be to achieve our goal, but we were filled with the joy of certainty. Away with uncertainty, doubt, misgivings! We had chosen, so let the storm rage. I suppose a defendant in court feels something similar when a terrifying period of interrogations, cross-examinations, and hearings is over. The sentence is finally pronounced, and everything falls into place. It may even be worse than he had hoped, but at any rate, it's definite. In our case we had pronounced our own sentence."

Lerner found someone to deliver his request for an invitation to Israel and then waited anxiously all summer for a response. It didn't come until September, but the KGB, which controlled the post office, intercepted the invitation and informed Lerner's bosses at the Institute of Control Problems of the Academy of Sciences. It was not a mistake, Lerner told them, not the Zionist provocation they had assumed, but a request he himself had made. His bosses couldn't believe it. They cajoled and threatened, afraid that his actions would jeopardize the entire institute (Stalin's purges had ingrained in Soviet citizens the fear of guilt by association). The reputation of the institute would be tarnished in the eyes of the Academy of Sciences and in the district and central committees of the Party. They would lose funding. One colleague at the institute was recruited to dissuade Lerner, and he told him pointedly, "Stop to think what you're giving up by following this risky path. You're guaranteed comfort till the end of your life as a prominent Soviet scientist. You have a fine apartment, a splendid country house, you get high pay and extra income. And what are you exchanging it for? A poor, backward Asian country surrounded by enemies who have dedicated themselves to destroying it. You'll be going to a land of religious fanaticism with never a hope of economic, political or social progress. You'll be dooming yourself to degradation, both as a man and a scientist."