When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (45 page)

Yuli Kosharovsky, here with his wife and baby in 1981, kept alive a network of Hebrew teaching all over the Soviet Union, even during the darkest days of the early 1980s.

Photo © Bill Aron

The gatherings in the Ovrazhki forest outside Moscow created a small island of vibrant Jewish life. Popular song contests were held, including this one in 1978. Leonid Volvovsky, who was later imprisoned for his activities, is at the microphone.

Yona Schwarzman/Beit Hatfutsot Photo Archive

One of the first signs that Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization was affecting the refuseniks was this protest in March 1987. Instead of being suppressed, the small group of Leningrad Jews was invited to speak with the authorities. Third from the left, in the white Russian hat, is Misha Beizer. To his left are Aba and Ida Taratuta.

Beit Hatfutsot Photo Archive

On Freedom Sunday, December 6, 1987, a quarter of a million people gathered in Washington to protest Gorbachev's first visit to the United States. Vice President George Bush addressed the demonstration, demanding, "Mr. Gorbachev, let these people go!"

AP Images / Ira Schwarz

S
ENATOR HENRY JACKSON
had been called many things in his life. Scoop was the most common and the most affectionate, a childhood nickname. Those who were suspicious that his demands for increased defense spending had less to do with his convictions and more to do with the giant defense contractor in his home state of Washington dubbed him the Senator from Boeing. But in the summer of 1972, congresspeople began referring to him behind his back by another mocking sobriquet: Churchill. Jackson was seeing appeasement everywhere and railing against it loudly. America, he warned again and again, was surrendering to the Soviets. Opposing Nixon and Kissinger's détente became Jackson's mission. Through it he seemed to find his voice—self-righteous and stubborn though it often was.

The son of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in the Pacific Northwest, Jackson first ran for Congress in 1941 and then moved to the Senate in 1953. His politics had not changed much since then—a combination of New Deal social democratic principles and the idea, forged by Roosevelt and Truman, that America need not be afraid to use its strength to enforce its values. Partly because of these unmovable convictions, he gained a reputation as a man of principle. But as the 1960s progressed, he was increasingly out of step with his own party. He was a Cold Warrior at a time of national self-doubt. His run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 was disastrous. When most candidates were outdoing one another in their opposition to the Vietnam War, and Nixon was touting a record of cooperation with the Soviets and the Chinese, Jackson tried to convince Democrats to confront Communism, build a strong nuclear program, and believe in the inherent greatness of America (imploring, "This society is not a guilty, imperialistic and oppressive society. This is not a sick society"). The Democrats chose George McGovern, darling of the antiwar left, leaving Jackson behind in the early primaries.

The election further defined Jackson as an outsider, a maverick in his own party. He found himself largely alone in opposition to détente; the policy seemed to have triumphed. On June 1, 1972, half an hour after returning from his historic Moscow summit, Nixon made an appearance before both houses of Congress to announce the dawn of "a new relationship between the two most powerful nations on earth." An arms limitations treaty would soon be signed. A comprehensive trade deal was also forthcoming, one that would give the Soviets most-favored-nation trading status, lowering tariffs placed on Russian goods such as caviar and, more important, granting them credit to buy badly needed American technology and grain. The Soviets had long sought this lucrative concession, and the president had finally acquiesced. As he told Congress, "When the two largest economies in the world start trading with each other on a much larger scale, living standards in both nations will rise, and the stakes which both have in peace will be increased."

Jackson found détente offensive. To make peace and to work toward a secure world while leaving a powerful undemocratic empire in place seemed to him both a perversion and a strategic mistake. The Soviet Union, as he saw it, was still a totalitarian state with erratic and ideologically driven ambitions. Détente for them was simply a stalling tactic, he thought, a way to buy time for their long-term plan of hegemony. He believed that Nixon and Kissinger misunderstood Americans, that American citizens would be able to stomach a fight if the moral illegitimacy of the Soviets was made clear. He was of the opinion—not shared by Kissinger—that the Soviet Union was on its last legs, that its increasingly vulnerable economic state presented an opportunity. The United States' objective should not be a stalemate but the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jackson was also deeply motivated by the need to defend human rights. For him, the greatest sin of détente was that it let America turn a blind eye to the internal character of the Soviet Union while making an illusory peace. It was a frustration shared by the activists struggling to help Soviet Jews. They too were feeling overwhelmed by Nixon's well-produced spectacle of Cold War friendship, which made their objection, no matter how righteous, seem churlish.

Then, like a gift straight from the Politburo, came ukase 572. The news appeared on the front page of the
New York Times
just two and half months after Nixon's visit: "Jewish sources reported tonight that Soviet authorities are instituting a new system of heavy exit fees ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 for educated Jews who want to emigrate to Israel. The sources said they learned of the new measure, replacing the old general fee of about $1,000, while some Jews were applying for exit visas with a branch of the Interior Ministry today. No official confirmation was possible." It looked bad; it seemed to be no less than the ransoming of Soviet Jewry. As Benjamin Levich, the eminent chemist turned refusenik, told the
Times,
the new Soviet decree would make scientists "the slaves of the 20th century." The article contained only one government response: "The fees were necessary repayment to the government for the cost of state-financed education."

More details soon emerged. The new fees were tied to the level of education of the aspiring emigrant, with a steep sliding scale depending on the amount of schooling: 4,500 rubles ($5,400) for a graduate of a teachers' institute; 9,500 rubles ($10,800) for an applied arts degree; 11,000 rubles ($13,200) for a university degree; up to 22,000 rubles ($25,400) for the Soviet equivalent of a PhD. With a teacher making about 100 rubles a month, an engineer or doctor making 130 rubles, and a scientist earning 250 rubles, this was beyond the reach of almost any Soviet citizen. The required $600 fee for renunciation of Soviet citizenship and the $530 fee for an exit permit were already heavy burdens.

The Soviets had once again miscalculated. The imposition of the exit fees was proof that the Kremlin was panicking, frightened by a potential brain drain. Brezhnev's move might have been meant to intimidate, but it had the opposite effect. It immediately provided the refuseniks a new banner. The rest of the world responded angrily as well. George McGovern, not exactly known for harsh condemnations of the Kremlin, said the Soviet Union was "holding these people hostages of the state." Kahane, predictably, raised his voice from his now permanent home in Jerusalem and warned that the Soviets had one month to abandon the exit fees or the JDL would kidnap Soviet diplomats and hold them for ransom. And in one of the strangest protests thus far, six demonstrators led by the borough presidents of Manhattan and the Bronx occupied minuscule Belmont Island in the East River, renamed it the Soviet Jewry Freedom Island, and unfurled a banner with that name that could be seen from the United Nations building across Turtle Bay. After two and a half hours and much publicity, they got back in their dinghy and motored home. Then came the inevitable Holocaust analogies: An editorial cartoon in the
Los Angeles Times
showed a caricature of two almost identical prisoners; the first held out an arm tattooed with a number from a concentration camp and was captioned "Germany, 1936," and the second had the same tattooed arm and was captioned "Russia, 1972." The difference was that the number on the second arm had a dollar sign in front of it.

In this new "diploma tax," Jackson saw a convergence of all he was opposed to: it was a violation of human rights and a reminder of a brutal Communist system that had to be defeated, not coddled. Jackson had always been a strong defender of Israel and the Jews, a stance he traced back to the stacks of emaciated bodies he'd witnessed as a young congressman visiting the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. He wanted to take the opportunity to do something. But what? How to use this Soviet misstep to his advantage? The day the news of the tax broke, he called his legislative aide Richard Perle into his office and told him to prepare a strong response.

Perle, a thirty-year-old, dark-eyed, aggressive chain smoker in a sweater vest, shared Jackson's worldview completely and wasn't afraid to throw his elbows around in the service of his boss. In many ways, it was a fortuitous match for both men. Jackson provided the moral grounding, the mentoring, and his young protégé could aggressively pursue Jackson's policies while keeping the senator's hands clean. Perle's path toward Jackson began early, at Hollywood High School, where he dated the daughter of Albert Wohlstetter, the renowned nuclear strategist. The precocious Perle—he wore ties even as a teenager—was exposed to Wohlstetter's conservative critique of containment and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Wohlstetter thought that America should ratchet up the arms race as opposed to simply being satisfied with a world-threatening stalemate, because it was a race that the Soviets could never win. Perle was persuaded.

Years later, in 1969—after Perle had attended the London School of Economics and become known as a pipe-smoking Cold Warrior in a sea of pacifists—Wohlstetter invited him to come to Washington. He advised Perle to abandon his PhD and join the staff of a new ad hoc group, the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, which was chaired by former secretary of state Dean Acheson and composed of Democratic Cold Warriors (soon to be called neoconservatives) intent on getting congressional approval for a new missile defense system. Perle spent the summer with two other Wohlstetter proté- gés—one was Paul Wolfowitz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago—writing position papers, briefing senators, and serving as liaisons to the press. The campaign was successful, and the twenty-seven-year-old Perle emerged as an intelligent and tenacious striver. Before he could leave Washington and return to academia, he was offered a job working for Scoop Jackson.