When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (52 page)

As they worked together on these projects and others—including a two-week hunger strike in Lunts's apartment in 1973 and a failed attempt at an international scientific symposium in 1974—they bonded, first as friends and then as activists. They agreed to always stay within legal limits, to request that the Soviet authorities grant them the same rights as any other national minority in the empire: a bit of autonomy to express their culture. They had also come to the conclusion that emigration could not be their sole focus. Equal energy had to be spent on resuscitating Jewish consciousness in the Soviet Union. The seminars and the journal were attempts to create a sanctuary where they could remain intellectually engaged and use their time in refusal to explore their own Jewishness and perhaps encourage others to do the same. They were prioritizing self-analysis and the rebuilding of a small (and mostly cerebral) Jewish society.

Sasha Lunts was at the center of all this activity, but he was growing restless. He craved political action beyond editing journals and holding seminars. His break from his friends soon took a very militant form. In 1973, he joined a group of young men who were organizing regular public demonstrations. They jokingly called themselves the Hong Wei Bing, after the student Red Guards that terrorized the population during China's Cultural Revolution. They became a strike force, with an elder mentor in Lunts, who made sure their exploits were well covered by Western journalists. Protesting in the Soviet Union was, of course, practically impossible. A successful demonstration lasted no more than a minute and involved protesters unfurling a banner or lifting a sign in a prominent public place for a few seconds before being dragged away by police. So the Hong Wei Bing very quickly began living like fugitives, rotating in and out of jail as they served the standard fifteen-day detentions given for disturbing the peace. This could not have been more contradictory to the aims of Voronel's group. The Hong Wei Bing were purposefully confrontational and political.

Tolya Shcharansky, not even a refusenik yet, became one of these demonstrators. Lunts offered him purity of purpose. No respect for Soviet laws that the authorities themselves refused to uphold. No wasting energy on those hundreds of thousands of sleeping Jews who failed to see the reality of their situation. They would demonstrate relentlessly until their right to emigrate was granted. Along with a mentor and a cause, Shcharansky gained a group of friends, his fellow frontline soldiers in the Hong Wei Bing. It was not unlike the solidarity felt by the angry young Brooklyn boys in Kahane's JDL. Between the danger and passion of Lunts and the reasonable argumentation of Alexander Lerner—in whose apartment the young mathematician had become a frequent guest—Shcharansky had tapped into the political argument the refuseniks had been building for several years. He was seduced by its clear-cut morality, even apart from his desire to emigrate. And then, one freezing fall day in 1973, the personal intruded.

Shcharansky had never before seen the strikingly tall and beautiful young woman who approached him in front of the synagogue. Natalia Stieglitz, or Natasha, as she was known, was soft-spoken and painfully shy and had the innocent face of a little girl. Her brother, Misha, had recently been arrested at a demonstration and she had come to the synagogue to find someone who could help her figure out where he was. It was October, the waning days of the Yom Kippur War. The street in front of the giant white columns was filled with people chattering, gossiping, and trying to learn what was actually happening in the Sinai Desert—the Soviet newspapers were not exactly forthcoming on this matter. Someone thought Shcharansky might have information about Misha and had given Natasha his name. Shcharansky tried to comfort her, explaining how the fifteen-day detentions worked and suggesting that Misha might even be given an exit visa following his release, as was sometimes the case. She brightened, and he began talking to her about Hebrew, whether she was taking any classes, what her level was. He bragged that he knew a thousand words already. Despite their being physically mismatched—he gnomish and she a beauty—Natasha was immediately taken with Tolya, with his wit and confidence. She lied about her knowledge of Hebrew so she could join the weekly classes he was taking with Misha Chlenov, an ethnographer who spoke more than six languages and who, together with a few other underground teachers, was training a whole generation of refuseniks (once a week, a few of the groups would gather for a Hebrew-only evening). Within a month, the two were a couple, deeply in love. Natasha had moved into Tolya's small apartment.

Soon after Shcharansky met Natasha, his exit visa was denied, and he became a true refusenik, throwing himself more deeply into his activism. Natasha sometimes joined him, and once they were arrested together for protesting in front of the Lebanese embassy. By the spring of 1974 they were talking about marriage. She herself applied for an exit visa and began waiting. They were anxious to have the wedding. If she got permission and left for Israel, Shcharansky's case would be strengthened—he would need to be reunited with his wife. But when they approached the registry office that spring to apply for a marriage license, they were told that their request would take months to process. They decided to sidestep the bureaucracy altogether and have a traditional Jewish wedding. But here too they had difficulties. The elderly guardians of the synagogue were wary of the young troublemakers and feared the consequences of holding an event that would draw many refuseniks and attract the attention of the KGB.

When Nixon made his second visit to Moscow that summer, Shcharansky was one of the refuseniks detained. He was driven two hours outside the city and dumped in a prison cell. No sooner was he gone than Natasha got the call from OVIR. She had been given an exit visa that was valid for just one week. Her first thought was to turn it down, but there was an unspoken rule among refuseniks that no one ever declined an exit visa—every opportunity should be taken. Natasha found an elderly scholar at the synagogue who was willing to marry them, and Shcharansky was released from prison just a day and a half before Natasha's visa expired. The wedding was quickly planned, a chuppah was hastily assembled, and their apartment soon filled with guests, some of whom were dirty and unshaven, having just been re-leased from detention. The next morning, they took a taxi to the airport. Shcharansky had never seriously doubted his resolve, his decision to fight for emigration, until that moment. As he prepared to say good-bye to the woman he loved—they had met only nine months before and been married for just a few hours—he wondered if perhaps entering this struggle, which would now separate them, had been a mistake, if they should have just been content to have each other. He told her he would join her soon—in six months, he said—but they both knew this was impossible. "See you in Jerusalem," Shcharansky whispered to her before she boarded the plane. And then she was gone.

What had started as a desire to live in Israel was now a desire to be with Natasha. In the many letters he sent through tourists, his longing for her was overwhelming. In a telegram in December 1974, six months after she left and when he'd gone a few days without news from her, he wrote: "I'm writing to you from a telegraph office. Two curious characters in hats are circling around me like sharks before an attack. And although I'm not deprived of their company for a minute, I am alone now as never before. I haven't received anything from you; I am gradually losing not only the details, but the whole picture of your life; this is terrible and sad. I am counting very heavily on our conversation tomorrow."

With Natasha gone, Shcharansky immersed himself in work. He moved in with Sasha Lunts, sleeping on his couch, and joined his frenetic life of constant meetings with Western reporters and tourists. He continued protesting with the Hong Wei Bing. At the end of February 1975, two months after the passage of Jackson-Vanik, he and eight others marched to the Supreme Soviet carrying signs—his said
VISAS FOR ISRAEL INSTEAD OF PRISON
—and within thirty seconds they were set upon by men in civilian clothes who twisted their arms behind their backs and dragged them away. The group was detained for eight hours in a drunk tank at Moscow's central police station, familiar territory for the demonstrators. But when they were finally released, they discovered that two of the protesters, Mark Nashpits, a twenty-seven-year-old dentist, and Boris Tsitlionok, an electrician, were going to be charged with criminal offenses. At the trial the following month, the two were sentenced to five years of internal exile for violating Article 190 of the Russian Republic's Criminal Code, disturbing the public order. The harsh response took the Hong Wei Bing by surprise. They had never suffered anything worse than fifteen-day detentions or fines. Now that the trade agreement was off the table, the authorities no longer needed to maintain their light touch.

Just as Shcharansky's activities were becoming more risky, he began taking on more responsibility in the
politiki
circles. The departure of Alex Goldfarb, a young microbiologist who had acted as a translator and default spokesman for the refuseniks, opened up a space for someone with polished English and enough energy to escort the constant stream of Western visitors. Now out of work, without his wife, intelligent and driven, Shcharansky relished the opportunity, and soon his days were spent organizing press conferences and talking up journalists.

There were no rules for climbing the ranks in the decentralized world of the refuseniks. This added to the tension that often coursed through the community, but it also meant that if one had the nerve to take on a particular task, one could very quickly amass power and responsibility. Dina Beilin had done just this. An engineer who was refused an exit visa in 1972, Beilin gave herself one of the most important jobs: maintaining a written record of each refusenik's name, address, profession, and the reason given for refusal. With characteristic thoroughness, she went to great lengths to make sure the list was comprehensive. She organized regular stakeouts of the street in front of the synagogue and OVIR offices; anyone exiting with a dejected look on his face was a possible addition. Activists in other cities sent their names to Moscow, and Beilin appended her register constantly, typing out the names and details on an old typewriter. Individuals were added or stricken as circumstances changed.

The gregarious Volodya Slepak already had a well-defined role as the central contact for tourists who were looking to connect with Soviet Jewish activists. His apartment was easy to find, just a few steps from the Kremlin. All one had to do was walk down Gorky Street, look on the right for the equestrian statue of Yury Dolgoruky, and follow the direction of his outstretched arm. Once a visitor was inside, the Slepaks' was a place of warmth and chaos. Masha served hundreds of cups of tea every day for the constant stream of guests, and the Slepaks' shaggy sheepdog, Akhbar (Hebrew for "mouse"), stuck his nose into every corner. By 1975, the KGB had effectively cut off all telephone communication between the refuseniks and the West—Andropov boasted in a memo that "in 1973–74, more than 100 telephone lines were exposed and disconnected in the cities of the USSR, thereby inflicting a noticeable blow on foreign Zionist organizations." The refuseniks had found other ways to communicate, using public phones or abandoned lines in newly vacated apartments, but face-to-face contact was increasingly the only way to pass information. Much of this traffic went through the Slepaks' apartment, where Volodya would tell tourists—most briefed by the Lishka or Soviet Jewry groups in America—important news or needs.

Of all the information relayed to the West, nothing was more critical than the lists of names of refuseniks. Slepak came up with the most ingenious way of smuggling them out: he photographed the list of names and then pushed the rolled-up negatives through holes drilled into the smallest of the ubiquitous
matryushka
nesting dolls; conspiring tourists could transport these home without raising suspicion. The refuseniks saw the lists as their insurance policy. If their names were known in America or Israel, they were provided with a measure of protection. The Lishka used the lists to deliver financial help to unemployed refuseniks, a complex process that kept Dina Beilin and the other
politiki
busy. Typically, a check was sent through a Soviet bank and could be redeemed only as coupons for use in special Moscow shops known as Beryozki. These stores were intended mostly for Westerners and the families of the nomenklatura and were the only places where one could buy quality consumer goods. A refusenik would use the coupon to buy a pair of jeans or a radio, and then he would sell it on the black market; this would give him enough money to survive for a month or two. Occasionally, a family was in need of quick funds—a man whose ex-wife wouldn't let him emigrate unless he made all his alimony payments at once, or a mother who could not afford the plane fare to visit her son in a Mordvinian prison camp. The problem would be communicated to Western activists or the Israelis, and soon a friendly tourist would arrive with a "gift" of an expensive camera. Beilin and other leaders regularly appropriated the money and assets of those given permission to emigrate—there was a cap on how much one could take out of the Soviet Union—and then distribute them among the needy refuseniks. The emigrants would be reimbursed once they were in Israel.

The
politiki
divided up the many responsibilities of caring for a community. For example, the families of imprisoned refuseniks went to Ida Nudel. A tiny, bespectacled woman who had the solitary intensity and self-denial of a nun, Nudel was an economist who'd been refused an exit visa in 1971 because, as the official at OVIR put it, "You don't possess any specific secrets, but you might have overheard something." Nudel became the prisoners' families' self-appointed guardian angel. In her early forties, unmarried, and without children, she fanatically devoted herself to those who became known in the West as prisoners of Zion. One of her first contacts was Yosef Mendelevich's father. He visited Nudel in Moscow, and together they sat down and made a list of all those who, like his son, had been sent to prison camps in 1971. Nudel tracked down their places of detention, relatives, medical problems, and birthdays (this last detail so she could send them yearly postcards, often with pictures of their hometowns). Then she began the tortuous process of establishing contact with them and trying to improve their conditions. It was guilt as much as compassion that motivated her, she often said. These people had sacrificed their freedom so that others could find a way out.