When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (53 page)

Once Sasha Lunts joined the
politiki,
he took on his own projects. In addition to organizing the Hong Wei Bing, he began to compile empirical evidence of Soviet misdeeds. It was his way of helping the Jackson-Vanik proponents in America make their case. His first report detailed the convoluted exit visa application process and illustrated the arbitrary nature of refusal—helpful material for Jackson and Perle. He smuggled it out of the Soviet Union through a contact at the U.S. embassy, and it ended up in Congress. When the amendment was later in trouble, Lunts sent activists out to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union to gather more information. He himself went to Derbent and Baku, followed by a bevy of KGB agents. The trips were often dangerous. A young man who went to Kishinev was physically assaulted and then detained for almost a month. But the resulting report offered a panoramic view of the Jewish problem and showed the depth of support for Jackson-Vanik, even in the distant Uzbek city of Samarqand. Lunts handed it over to the delegation of senators who visited in the summer of 1975.

The freedom of individual refuseniks to act as they saw fit in the name of the movement was generally useful, but it could backfire. One wrong move by a single person could jeopardize everyone. This is just what happened in the middle of 1975, and Sasha Lunts was the one responsible. The summer before, Lunts had come up with an unusual idea: What if he engaged with the KGB directly? Imagining that the combination of constant Hong Wei Bing demonstrations and the progress of the Jackson-Vanik amendment had sufficiently irritated the authorities, he thought he could sell them some calm and silence. The refuseniks would stop making noise if certain conditions were met. He wanted an exact time frame for approval of exit visas and a promise to release any imprisoned activists. It was, of course, a risky proposition. The KGB were experts at psychological manipulation. Once they knew there was something you wanted, they could turn you into an informer before you even realized it. But Lunts felt he could outsmart them. He asked the advice of Slepak, Lerner, and Alexander Voronel—the other leaders—and they agreed that it was dangerous but perhaps worth trying. So Lunts simply walked into KGB headquarters one day that summer and asked to speak to someone in charge of Jewish issues. He ended up having four meetings, but he grew more hopeless after each one. They were not taking him seriously. He met smalltime KGB agents who tried to play mind games with him, never anyone higher up the chain of command. So as suddenly as he'd begun the talks, he called them off.

Lunts thought this would be the end of his experiment. But a few days after he stopped the discussions, KGB agents started spreading rumors about him among the
kulturniki,
those who had once been his closest friends. They managed to convince various people in Voronel's circle that Lunts was actually an informer. In early 1975 KGB agents called in one of these activists, Pasha Abramovich, and gave him the distinct impression that Lunts was working with them, telling him that he would do well to follow in Lunts's footsteps and freely give them information. The accusations began to spread. Lunts was hoarding money intended for refusenik activities; he was a spy; he was going to put the entire movement at risk. The refuseniks were constantly and justifiably paranoid about KGB infiltration. Such stories threatened to turn Lunts into a pariah and ruin his reputation. He eventually called a meeting at Lerner's apartment to clear things up. After waiting a few hours, he realized that only his
politiki
friends were going to show up.

By June of 1975, the suspicions and resentments had been brewing for months, aggravating the underlying ideological differences. The
kulturniki
thought the
politiki
members were reckless and self-destructive, the aggressive Hong Wei Bings being a prime example. They also felt the
politiki
held an unfair monopoly on Western resources. The
politiki,
for their part, were comfortable with their preeminent position in the movement and saw the
kulturniki's
preoccupation with cultural rebirth as a waste of time and resources.

Any supporters in the West unaware of just how acrimonious it was getting between the two groups soon found out when the delegation of fourteen senators led by Humphrey and Scott came to visit. The
kulturniki,
sure that their concerns would be overshadowed and ignored, refused to attend. Only when Senator Jacob Javits intervened and offered an adjoining room in his suite so that two separate meetings could take place did they relent and eventually even agree to join the
politiki.
But by that point, anyone familiar with the refuseniks could see to what degree the animosity had built up. Robert Toth, the
Los Angeles Times
correspondent, had been aware of the growing rift and now took advantage of the incident to write an article headlined "Split Among Activist Soviet Jews Breaks into Open Over Talks with U.S. Senators." One of the embittered activists quoted accused the opposing group: "For us, the central problem was the concentration of power—money, information, contacts with Jewish organizations abroad—in very few hands ... No one else could get in." What should have been a moment of great publicity for the refuseniks turned into an embarrassing episode that made them look like bickering children and threatened their support in the West. It also gave the KGB a new wedge to exploit.

If there was a positive side to the
Los Angeles Times
article, it was the reconciliation it eventually forced on both groups. The divisiveness, they realized, could only benefit the Soviet authorities. For the sake of the movement, they had to maintain at least the illusion of solidarity. And they did, coming together to meet with an American Jewish activist from Philadelphia that summer to show they were making peace. But the two groups never managed to repair the breach entirely and in fact became even more invested in their divergent approaches to the movement. They kept their resentments to themselves now, but the feeling on each side that the other was taking the wrong tack never went away.

In this complex web of Soviet Jewry activism, Shcharansky played the role of translator, and not just in the literal sense. He explained the movement's objectives to the West better than anyone who had come before him, leading journalists to the most emotional, compelling, lede-worthy parts of the story. Increasingly, he also became a bridge between those fighting for emigration and those engaged in the greater democracy movement; this was partly because of his new job as an assistant to Andrei Sakharov, a man he had long admired.

By 1975, the esteemed physicist had been forced to give up any illusion that his status as a member of the Academy of Sciences protected him. Already the authorities had waged a nasty campaign against him in the press, and earlier that year he had fought to get permission for his wife, Elena Bonner, to go to Italy to receive medical treatment for a serious eye condition that was causing her to go blind. Her two children, his stepchildren, had continually been refused permission to go to the United States, where they had been invited to study and teach at MIT. Dozens of visitors arrived every day at his apartment to seek advice. Sakharov would sit calm and pensive in his chair, his shoulders stooped, looking out from behind his large glasses, quietly answering questions and carefully choosing the letters and statements to which he would affix his respected name. He was only fifty-four but had the air of a sage. Dealing with all the Western journalists required a good translator, and Shcharansky had been recommended as reliable and available. In March of 1975, the young refusenik began working for Sakharov, and it wasn't long before he found himself sucked into the dissident world that revolved around the physicist and his wife.

Shcharansky never found it jarring to jump between the democrats and the refuseniks. In fact, it was just the opposite. He saw no contradiction in committing fully to both causes; he believed they reinforced each other. The principles of human rights that Sakharov tirelessly espoused provided more justification for the refuseniks' argument. Shcharansky wasn't alone in this thinking—it was a logic that Eduard Kuznetsov had understood when he joined the Riga Zionists and that Muscovite refuseniks such as Slepak, people who were longtime friends of the democrats, instinctively accepted. But no one championed this idea like Shcharansky. The fight between the
politiki
and
kulturniki
had become so intense partly because—following the failure of Jackson-Vanik to improve the Soviet Jewish condition—the movement was now at a crossroads. Would it turn inward or outward? Shcharansky's answer was clear. Jews needed to put political pressure on the Soviet Union, and that pressure needed to be framed in the universal language of human rights. And in the summer of 1975, as he was becoming even more convinced of this strategy, an unexpected development in the international arena suddenly made it seem like the only way forward.

One August day in 1975, Soviet citizens opened up their copies of
Pravda
to find a thirty-thousand-word reprint of a treaty that their government had just signed: the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Anyone with the stamina or curiosity to actually read the document surely must have thought it a hoax. There, in black and white, the Soviet Union was reaffirming all the human rights contained in the 1948 UN declaration, a document the USSR had never ratified. This new agreement, signed by thirty-three European countries plus the United States and Canada, specifically called for the free flow of people and information across borders, upholding what it referred to as the "fundamental freedoms" of thought, culture, religion, and belief. Even more incredible, each signatory was obligated to participate in regular reviews—checkups, essentially—to determine whether these provisions were being upheld.

Why would Brezhnev sign such a document? Only a few months before, he had refused to exchange sixty thousand Jews a year for the economic aid the Soviets needed. This time, the terms must have been better. And on the face of it, they were. Since the end of World War II, Soviet leaders had been trying to convince Europe and the United States to validate the new postwar contours of their empire, including the Baltic States, and their dominance in Eastern Europe. In 1954, they proposed the idea of a conference that would take up this question. After the squashing of the 1956 insurrection in Hungary and then the Prague Spring twelve years later, Europe was not eager to reward Soviet rapaciousness. But in 1973, with the spirit of détente in full flower, the European powers agreed to the process, which culminated in an elaborate signing ceremony in the Finnish capital of Helsinki in August 1975. The Soviets had gotten exactly what they wanted: the document referred to the "inviolability of borders" and respect for "territorial integrity." To the many detractors of the Helsinki Final Act, as it became known, it looked like the West was formally validating the Brezhnev doctrine, the Soviet leader's post–Prague Spring declaration that he would enter and secure any Communist satellite state whose government was being undermined by capitalist forces.

The Helsinki Accords consisted of three interlocking sets of agreements that came to be known as baskets. The first two dealt with arms and trade, the most important elements for the Soviets. In return, the Europeans, with American acquiescence, insisted on a third basket filled with human rights provisions. This was the quid pro quo.

Hardly anyone thought it was a fair deal. On the eve of President Ford's trip to Helsinki, the lead editorial in the
Wall Street Journal
cried, "Jerry, Don't Go!" As a
New York Times
piece put it, "The Kremlin seems to have decided that it can afford to make such concessions abroad without risking any real liberalization at home." The human rights sections were composed "in a flurry of final compromises and it remains to be seen what effect they will have." Brezhnev, speaking at a press conference after the signing, made it clear that the Soviets were simply going to abide by certain parts of Helsinki and ignore the rest. "No one should try to dictate to other peoples ... the manner in which they ought to manage their internal affairs," he defiantly proclaimed.

Where Americans and Europeans saw another Cold War defeat, Andrei Sakharov perceived a unique opportunity. In a leaked copy of his essay "My Country and the World," which would be published the following month in the United States, he lamented that the West had yielded "one concession after another to its partner in détente" without asking for anything substantial in return. Jackson-Vanik had failed because of "divisiveness, disorganization, and lack of affirmation" in the West. The Soviet insistence on separating foreign and internal policy, Sakharov thought, was a dangerous diversionary tactic and had to be fought. Helsinki was a good first step. A country that abuses its own citizens
is
a threat to world peace. If the Soviets refused to accept this reality, it was the West's responsibility, through weighty levers like the Final Act, to force a change in their behavior.

In the months following the signing, Soviet citizens began referring to the new treaty in appeals to their government. But they were ignored. When inmates at a Mordvinian labor camp went on a hunger strike that summer and pointed to what Helsinki said about prisoner treatment, no one paid any attention. In fact, in the remaining months of 1975, the authorities seemed to harden their policies. Just a few weeks after the signing, Georgi Arbatov, the Soviets' chief expert on America, wrote a long article in
Izvestia
accusing the rest of the world of exploiting Helsinki as "an instrument for interfering in the internal affairs of the socialist countries." The third basket "appears to be the only point of interest" for the United States, Arbatov fumed in an op-ed. But the West, he angrily declared, should be under no illusions that the Soviet Union "owed" them anything.