When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (51 page)

The Soviets badly needed American technology. Eventually, they might have been convinced to swallow their pride and accept the demands of the Jackson amendment to boost their economy. But with the Stevenson amendment in place, even if Brezhnev stood by his "assurances" on emigration, he would not be able to get any more than a measly $300 million in credits. This would not buy them much. And now it seemed that every policy decision of the Soviet Union would become a matter of debate in the U.S. Congress. As Kissinger succinctly put it in a letter to the head of the National Conference, "When the Soviet Union looked at the totality of what it had to gain from the trading relationship we were able to offer, as against what it considered intrusions in its domestic affairs, it drew the balance sheet of which we have the result today."

Once the trade bill came before Ford, he had no choice but to sign it into law. Trying to appease the Soviets, he added, "I will, of course, abide by the terms of the act, but I must express my reservations about the wisdom of legislative language that can only be seen as objectionable and discriminatory by other sovereign states." A few days later in a letter to Kissinger, the Soviet Union's government declared it was pulling out of the 1972 trade agreement. Too much had changed since Nixon's first trip to Moscow. The Soviets saw little reason to comply with Congress's demands. Kissinger gave a press conference in which he made clear exactly what the Soviet repudiation would mean: "The 1972 Trade Agreement cannot be brought into force at this time and the President will therefore not take the steps required for this purpose by the Trade Act. The President does not plan at this time to exercise the waiver authority."

The drama that had lasted for more than two years was finally over. It was hard at first to see what had been gained. The Soviets would not be getting MFN status or credits. The White House's power over foreign policy had been seriously eroded. And though Jackson's law was on the books, he had lost any real leverage with the Soviets. They had told him he could keep his carrot.

But though it didn't feel like a clear, concrete win, a giant shift had nevertheless taken place. Jackson and his allies had effectively manipulated détente for their own purposes. With the amendment in place, the Soviets could not improve their trade relationship with the United States until they dealt with their Jewish problem. The two issues were now linked. For the first time, the direction of the Cold War and of American foreign policy hinged as much on ethical and human rights questions as it did on the arms race.

Even though American Jews had reacted to the Soviet rejection with "shock and consternation," as one Jewish leader put it in a letter to Ford, the process of the past two years had thoroughly transformed them. They had learned that they could change laws. Gone were the days of simply following policy. If the community cared deeply enough about an issue to exert its power, it could make the policy. A
New York Times Magazine
article published days after passage of the trade bill captured the magnitude of what had taken place: "For the rest of the decade at least, the state of U.S.-Soviet relations will be linked to the Russian Politburo's willingness to risk an open-door policy on emigration, particularly toward the dissident Soviet-Jewish minority. This is a linkage that Kissinger, the two U.S. Presidents he has served, and the entire ruling hierarchy of the Soviet Union had hoped mightily to avoid." Though exaggerating the amendment's instantaneous effects, the article noted, "What is extraordinary is that the moral position of an ethnic minority representing 3 per cent of the American population could eventually force another country to reverse its internal police policies—especially when the other country is the Soviet Union."

They had been led, often forcefully, by a non-Jewish senator, but the Jewish community had finally injected themselves into the middle of the Cold War—an intrusion that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. The implications of the amendment—the amount of real, immediate pressure it would exert—were impossible to determine. But whichever direction a future American president or Soviet premier might take, there was now no way to erase Jewish emigration from the agenda. American Jews had managed to direct foreign policy so that every administration would have to deal with their concerns. They had exercised power as never before. The result was unambiguous: after the Jackson-Vanik amendment, if the superpowers hoped to draw close to each other ever again, they first had to resolve the problem of Soviet Jewry.

L
IKE MOST REFUSENIKS
, Anatoly Shcharansky could no longer disentangle the political and personal forces that shaped his life. He had become a dissident because he could not accept being disrespected as a Jew and as a human being. He was also hopelessly in love, and the woman who filled most of his waking thoughts lived outside the closed borders of the Soviet Union. Emigration became his desperate cause; if he couldn't get an exit visa, he would never see her again. Many other refuseniks had similarly mixed motives—the political bled into the personal and vice versa. They gathered together on dark Moscow winter afternoons in small, dry apartments, more as friends than as the secret society the KGB imagined. Around folding tables, interiors illuminated by brass lamps inherited from long-dead grandparents, they drank tea or sometimes vodka and ate pickles and mushrooms. They listened to a record of one of the sad Russian bards, Vysotsky or Okud-zhava, or watched someone's child, a Sashenka, play with wooden blocks on a fake Persian rug. They discussed the letter received from a sister in Haifa; the cough of a sick daughter—a new Israeli—heard over the phone; or the state of friends in America or England, devoted supporters who had come to seem like separated family members. And Shcharansky talked to whoever would listen about his Natasha.

Known to everyone as Tolya, Shcharansky was just twenty-seven, part of a new generation that had no memories of life under Stalin. His age made him conspicuous among the Jewish activist leaders, especially in June of 1975, when he joined other refusenik representatives for a meeting with a delegation of fourteen U.S. senators visiting Moscow. Led by their respected elder Alexander Lerner, the Soviet Jews were a bedraggled contingent, the exhausted collective face of what had become over the past three years a successful resistance movement. Shcharansky had a prematurely balding head, but despite that, his ruddy cheeks, thick lips, and extreme shortness made him look like a cherub sitting unassumingly alongside these graying, middle-aged engineers, physicists, and chemists. His English was heavily accented and tinged with a slight lisp, but it was better by far than anyone else's in the room. It was this linguistic skill, along with his irrepressible charisma and energy, that had earned him his place and made him indispensable to the group, a one-man public relations bureau.

The meeting that summer day in Senator Jacob Javits's suite at the Hotel Rossiya represented both a pinnacle and a nadir for the refuseniks. For the first time, they had the ear of some of the most powerful men in the world—Hubert Humphrey and Hugh Scott, the Senate's majority and minority leaders, led the U.S. delegation. The refuseniks expressed their hopes for the Jackson-Vanik amendment. But they also described a degradation in their situation since the bill's adoption. Emigration figures were dismal, down from thirty-five thousand in 1973 to twenty-one thousand in 1974, with the precipitous decline continuing in the first six months of 1975. They handed over a report proving that the harassment and pressure on exit visa applicants and refuseniks had only increased.

There were handshakes and expressions of sympathy, but the united front presented by the Soviet Jews to the senators that day was a lie. A serious divide had opened up between the refuseniks in Moscow. There were now two distinct factions, and they were so resentful of each other that the two groups had initially refused to sit in the same room. Much of what constituted this feud was petty, a matter of two different social circles—two bands of friends—that had fermented in refusal independently and resented the other's successes. But this bitterness and jealousy was heightened by a deep ideological argument. Ever since Soviet Jews had begun organizing themselves, two competing visions of their activism had shared an uneasy coexistence. The contours of the conflict had not changed much since the first Zionist activists in Riga and Leningrad had argued about whether to write protest letters or quietly teach Hebrew. Should the movement have a purely political character—aligning when it could with human rights and democracy activists—or should it be a uniquely Jewish struggle, motivated by Zionism and concerned primarily with reunifying Jews with their culture, history, and homeland? What had changed was the amount of attention the movement was receiving from the West. It was maturing and gaining notoriety, worthy of visits from senators and the inspiration for an important piece of legislation.

In an earlier era, the ideological combat between these two groups of refuseniks, dubbed the
politiki
and the
kulturniki,
would have been seen as inconsequential squabbling. Now, however, the direction of an international movement depended on the outcome of this argument. Many people were watching. Between these two poles, a clear objective had to emerge: What did the Soviet Jews want?

Shcharansky's side in this argument had been determined long before he became a refusenik. He was with the
politiki.
Though he was friendly with all the leaders and knew they shared a common experience—the alienation from Soviet society, the unique euphoria of being part of a Manichaean struggle, the paranoia of being watched—the instincts and principles that guided the
politiki
fit perfectly with his own. Above all else, he believed that asserting his rights as a human being only reinforced what he was claiming for himself as a Jew.

The politics had come first. Shcharansky had grown up in the Ukraine, a studious boy and chess prodigy—by fourteen, champion of the Donbas region—who had a penchant for subversive writers like Bulgakov and Dostoyevsky. He had arrived in Moscow in 1966 with the coveted gold medal, an award given to the highest-performing students. It allowed him to study at a prestigious mathematics institute and then to move on to graduate work in cybernetics, the field developed by Alexander Lerner; his dissertation examined how computers might be programmed to play chess. Affected by Sakharov's samizdat essays, the Six-Day War, and the Leningrad trials, in 1973 he saw no other solution but to emigrate. He was quickly made to endure the myriad indignities familiar to most refuseniks, including an open hearing organized by the Komsomol at which the chairman asked those assembled, "Does anyone have a question for Shcharansky, who has betrayed us all?" After Shcharansky applied for an exit visa, he began making contacts in the refusenik community. He started visiting Alexander Lerner's apartment. He attended one of the underground Hebrew classes and spent his Saturday mornings hanging out in front of the synagogue. But his real introduction to the activist life came when he met Sasha Lunts.

Lunts was a mathematician, tall, slim, and confident in his own ideas—a natural leader. He was a member of the
kulturniki,
which was made up mostly of unemployed refuseniks who had fallen from great heights and were looking for a way to channel their energy and intelligence while they waited for exit visas. They very quickly found themselves engaged in two activities—both led by Alexander Voronel, another formerly high-ranking scientist and their unofficial leader—that bonded them as friends and that influenced their thinking about the movement. Starting in 1972, the year they all became refuseniks, they began meeting every Sunday afternoon at Voronel's apartment for a scientific seminar. A blackboard was brought in, tea was served, and then they were treated to a two-hour lecture, usually by a physicist, mathematician, or computer engineer. This was a different kind of activism for the refuseniks. It was nonpolitical and concerned more with building their cultural infrastructure and combating boredom. Week after week, they gathered to discuss one another's fields and work on problems together, sometimes even producing papers that were then smuggled to the West and published in respected scientific journals. The seminars were so successful, growing from a core of eight or nine people to about twenty, that the model was duplicated by other refuseniks. Alexander Lerner even started a weekly talk about the problems of constructing an artificial heart.

Another initiative of the
kulturniki
begun in the fall of 1972 was a new samizdat journal,
Jews in the USSR.
This too was meant to fill a void. So much attention was being paid to political action, so much publicity given to those who were being denied exit, that hardly anyone was engaged with the more essential question of what it meant to be a Jew in the Soviet Union—why they should seek to leave; why they should go to Israel. Voronel, like most Muscovite intellectuals, was alienated from his own Jewish identity. He envisioned the samizdat journal as "a form of getting to know ourselves, as self-instruction and self-education." Each issue, carefully assembled by the group, explored the question of Soviet Jewish identity from as many different angles as possible: through scientific articles, personal essays, fiction, and poetry. The pieces ranged widely, from an examination of the origin of Yiddish to an article titled "Who Are the Marranos?"—the objective being to provide an education about the breadth of Jewish history and tradition. In his first editorial letter, Voronel even solicited writing from "those who are critical or even sharply negative to the role of Jews in the history of Russia." The back pages contained a recurring feature, a column titled "Who Am I?" in which writers dissected the meaning of their own conflicted Jewish identities.