When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (43 page)

The degradation came sooner than expected. The following week, he began one of his cybernetics lectures—he was also teaching at the Physico-Technological Institute—and was interrupted in the first few minutes by a school administrator who asked him to go. He would no longer be teaching this course. Lerner demanded official justification of his dismissal, and his loyal students refused to leave their seats. When the administrator threatened to expel them if they didn't exit the room within three minutes, they silently filed out. Lerner's years of teaching were over. A few days later, an order was posted at his institute announcing that his laboratory was being dismantled "in view of the fact that its research was not topical."

Out of work and exposed, he finally submitted his application. Almost immediately, he became a sort of father figure for the other activists, much like Sakharov was for the dissident movement. His spacious apartment served as a meeting place for both Soviet refuseniks and dignitaries from abroad. In December of 1971, just weeks after submitting his application and losing his job, Lerner had a visit from a U.S. congressman, James Scheuer, a representative from the Bronx. Lerner prepared for the day meticulously and invited a few other prominent activists. Volodya Slepak was there, along with his friend Victor Polsky. Lerner's wife had baked some pies. It was the first chance they had had to communicate with so prominent an American official. Scheuer soon arrived with his entourage. The refuseniks found the congressman friendly; he offered to help in whatever way he could. But not long after the meeting began, the doorbell rang and two police officers entered, claiming they were looking for a dangerous criminal disguised as a foreigner. They demanded to see Scheuer's papers. As the congressman described it in a phone call from Lerner's apartment later that evening, "I tried to identify myself by showing my New York driver's license, Diners' Club card, American Express card and finally my Congressional ID card but nothing helped. They evidently had orders to take me down to the station." Lerner demanded an explanation but got none. Scheuer was escorted to the local police headquarters; after about ten minutes he was released, and he eventually made his way back to Lerner's apartment.

Meanwhile, Lerner received one of the calls he often got from American Jews, this time from the Chicago branch of the women's group Hadassah. He told them what had just happened in his living room, and within half an hour, the news was all over American radio. Lerner never knew exactly what had led to the confusion. The KGB must have been given a faulty tip. In any event, the story of Scheuer's brief detention made all the U.S. papers the following day, and most of the articles mentioned Lerner. From then on, a visit to the professor's apartment became an almost obligatory part of any American lawmaker's junket in Moscow.

Shortly after Lerner submitted his exit visa application, an even more prominent scientist declared his intention to emigrate. In March 1972, Benjamin Levich, a fifty-five-year-old corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and the internationally known founder of the study of physiochemical hydrodynamics, submitted his request for an exit visa. Unsurprisingly, it was quickly denied by OVIR. This made him the highest-ranking Jew on the growing list of refuseniks—an Academy of Sciences member, like Sakharov.

Lerner and Levich opened up possibilities. They showed other, less prominent scientists that it was possible to make this dramatic move if they wished, that life continued even in refusal. It was a powerful example for people to see that these men, already past middle age, were willing to discard the social capital they had accrued over a lifetime. Neither of them was ideologically Zionist, but their desire to leave a country that made Jewishness a liability soon transformed into a wish to live in Israel. With these new refuseniks, the Soviet authorities had a complex public relations problem. The Kremlin's propagandists had always portrayed the Zionists as a group of mostly young and misguided hooligans, troublemakers, and hijackers. The distinguished, gray-haired Levich and Lerner put the lie to this characterization.

In the spring of 1972, Volodya Slepak had been a refusenik for two years. His leadership role in the community had certainly singled him out for extra abuse, but most refuseniks could tell stories similar to his. Slepak was now completely estranged from his father. He assumed the old man was secretly using his Party connections to prevent Volodya's emigration. Volodya and Masha had both lost their jobs; they earned about two hundred rubles a month from tutoring the children of other refuseniks in physics and mathematics. The struggle to maintain some form of steady occupation had become epic. His last boss had fired him after he'd signed the character reference for his visa application. Volodya then bounced from one job to another until September of the following year when he finally just accepted his status as unemployed. Masha, despite her having much-needed medical skills, was rejected by every hospital.

They found they could make ends meet with their tutoring. But there was one problem: it was illegal to be unemployed in the Soviet Union. Anyone not working was liable to be arrested for parasitism, especially a refusenik who had lost his job. In February of 1972, Volodya was charged and sent to work as a porter at Moscow Concrete Factory 23. He managed to appeal this assignment but continued to be dogged by the authorities, who demanded he take some kind of menial job. Eventually the former radio engineer found work as an elevator operator.

So absurd did the refuseniks find their new lives that it inspired a unique brand of gallows humor, a new kind of Jewish joke to help ease the pain. A typical one revolved around the Jew Rabinovich (the Soviet Jewish everyman): Rabinovich is filling out a job application when the Soviet official looks at him skeptically. "You say here you don't have any relatives abroad, but we know you have a brother in Israel," the official tells him. "Oh, but you're wrong," Rabinovich says. "He's not the one who's abroad. I am."

In the first months of 1972, despite the miserable situation of individual refuseniks, the movement's members were finding reasons to be hopeful. The number of people receiving exit visas was rising; some were even from Moscow, and it looked like the total might surpass the level of 1971 (thirteen thousand). Contact with the West had proliferated, and prominent refuseniks like Slepak and Lerner sometimes received a dozen phone calls a day from American Jews in Ohio, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington. They were developing clear lines of communications, passing on information about the status of various refuseniks and becoming more sophisticated about what was happening on their behalf in the wider world.

The announcement that Richard Nixon would visit Moscow at the end of May was greeted with great expectation by the refuseniks. They assumed that Jewish emigration, the problem they represented, would be dealt with at length. The presence of an American president in the Russian capital for the first time in history would surely compel the Soviets to eliminate any possible points of friction between the two superpowers. Leaders like Slepak and Lerner were so sure they would be able to meet with the visiting Americans and air their grievances that a month before Nixon's trip they issued a group letter providing their addresses: "In order to facilitate contacts with the president or members of his delegation, we, Jews, signing this letter, scientists and specialists living in Moscow and long unsuccessful in obtaining permission to emigrate to Israel, have formed an information committee for the occasion of the president's visit. We are ready to apprise him objectively concerning the situation of the Jews mentioned above so that the representation to the president on this question may be based on facts and correct data."

Hundreds of refuseniks signed letters requesting that Nixon meet with them—a group of ninety-three from Riga; fifty friends appealing on behalf of the defendants in the Leningrad and Riga trials. So many petitions were produced that one group of refuseniks in Moscow organized what they called a "White Book of Exodus," which assembled all the various material generated by Nixon's historic trip. There was an optimistic feeling that their cause would soon be catapulted to international attention. In one of many letters to Mrs. Nixon, the wife of Lassal Kaminsky and the sister-in-law of David Chernoglaz—two of the Leningrad activists recently sentenced to long terms in labor camps—begged her to grant them an audience. "We would be very grateful to you if you would consider seeing us and personally speaking with us," they wrote, naively and hopefully.

The Soviet authorities, who in preparation for the visit had meticulously water-blasted the sidewalks, repainted government buildings, and locked up the prostitutes, had other ideas. A dozen young activists, including Alexander Lerner's twenty-eight-year-old son, were sent cards informing them that they were being drafted into the army, effective immediately. All the phones in refusenik apartments were disconnected. Radio stations from the West, the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, were all jammed.

Then, a day before Nixon's plane touched down, police officers arrived at the Slepaks' apartment and took Volodya to a holding pen a few miles outside of Moscow. There he was joined by a handful of other refuseniks. Other activists were stopped on the street and arbitrarily arrested for made-up crimes, such as harassing a woman or blocking traffic. Non-Jewish dissidents all over Moscow had the same experience, all detained as a preventive measure. Alexander Lerner was in the hospital at the time; he suffered from chronic cholecystitis and needed an operation to remove his gallbladder. To his surprise, he was placed in a special ward usually reserved for Party leaders; his doctor at first advised that he wait a few days before undergoing the procedure, but then Lerner was told that he would be operated on immediately. The KGB, Lerner later discovered, had pressured the surgeon to rush the operation so that Lerner would be recovering when Nixon arrived and therefore unable to receive visitors.

As the American president and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, made the diplomatic rounds, toasting Brezhnev over numerous glasses of vodka and praising a new age of peace and cooperation, Slepak and his friends sat in cells. During the ten days that the group was sequestered, the wives and mothers—including Masha Slepak, who was worried about her husband and her son, both of whom had been taken without explanation—petitioned the Soviet prosecutor general. They received no response. It wasn't until days after Nixon's departure that Volodya returned to the Gorky Street apartment.

The detentions may have prevented the refuseniks from participating in Nixon's visit, but they had an unanticipated benefit: they helped expose the superficial nature of détente. "Soviets Said to Seize Jews as Nixon Visit Approaches" read a front page of the
New York Times.
While the American president and the First Lady toured an elementary school and watched a display of traditional Russian folk dancing, men who wanted nothing more than permission to emigrate were locked up with criminals and drunks. The Soviets clearly believed that granting an unprecedented number of exit visas, in itself a concession of sorts, would be enough to quiet the growing criticism in the West. In 1972, thirty-one thousand Soviet Jews were allowed to leave, more than twice the amount allowed in 1971. But this ignored the equal number that had applied and been refused. If the warming in relations between the two Cold War enemies was to continue, there was no way to avoid the fundamental contradiction of a diplomacy that talked peace but ignored basic human rights. Many people other than the refuseniks were starting to wonder: Was détente reserved for national security, arms control, and the showy "scientific and cultural exchanges," or was it also about how human beings lived in these two countries and the universal rights they deserved? Henry Kissinger had his answer to this question. But so too did the growing number of Soviet Jewry activists in America.

A ceremony at the Rumbuli memorial in April 1963 marking the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. On the black obelisk is a reproduction of Yosef Kuzkovsky's painting
The Last Way—Babi Yar.

Beit Hatfutsot Photo Archive, Tel Aviv