When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (61 page)

When the private meetings began, on October 17, it was unclear how confrontational Goldberg was actually going to be. At the first session of the Basket III Working Group, to discuss the human rights component, he wasn't even present, and one of his deputies spoke vaguely about "some signatory states" refusing to let their citizens reunite with family abroad. The following day, however, Goldberg unexpectedly took the microphone. And now, having gently tiptoed up to the forbidden door, he suddenly kicked it open. Reading from an article in
L'Humanité,
the French Communist newspaper, he described the trial in Czechoslovakia of four members of Charter 77, the group founded to monitor implementation of the Helsinki Accords. In that instant, he broke the taboo. The entire chamber began murmuring. The delegate from Czechoslovakia objected loudly. The Soviet representative couldn't contain his shock. "I am surprised," he said, by the actions of "this distinguished representative of the United States of America." It "is nothing other than an attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of a state represented here ... This is not a forum for such statements."

Goldberg didn't stop there. He continued providing details of Helsinki violations in a manner that would have been unthinkable just two weeks earlier. He named names, though only in seven carefully considered instances. Shcharansky's case was described, as was Orlov's. And Goldberg made a specific point of talking about the problems of Soviet Jews. He mentioned Yosef Begun, one of the Hebrew teachers arrested for "parasitism" after he was fired from his job. As the
Washington Post
described it, "Whether the Russians like it or not, the happiness of the individual has become recognized as a legitimate subject for international negotiation." The Soviets did not like it. They shut down completely. As soon as the focus of the conference shifted to human rights—and specifically their violations—they did their best to bring Belgrade to a quick close.

Because consensus was necessary for any further amendments or revisions of the Helsinki Accords, it was clear that nothing concrete would be achieved. After a holiday recess, attention turned to formulating a concluding document. The Americans proposed more than one hundred additions to the accords—measures that would further protect individuals from persecution and promote emigration and reunification of families. None of them were approved by the Soviets. Goldberg wanted to include them anyway. But the Soviets insisted that the final document contain only those issues that had been agreed upon by all countries. There were only a few. And so the Soviet draft was simply a reaffirmation of the initial accords. After a few weeks of tug of war, this anodyne version was accepted. There was very little Goldberg could do to change their minds, especially since the Soviet delegation, deeply offended by the Judge and his allegations, was hardly speaking to him.

The only concrete piece of progress, as far as Goldberg was concerned, was the commitment to another follow-up conference, to take place in Madrid in 1980. The dissidents and activists would at least have this to look forward to, one more chance to publicly shame the regime.

In his closing remarks, Goldberg spoke out of frustration. He hoped that after the example he'd set, the Helsinki process might take a different path: "Efforts to squelch the truth at Belgrade or at home will not change the truth. And they will not deflect the United States from insisting that candor is as important to the healthy development of international confidence as is respect for sovereign equality and individuality." But not everyone thought his approach had been effective. And in the days following the end of the conference in March of 1978, many criticized his zealousness. Most notably the Communists, who couldn't believe that Goldberg had turned Belgrade into a trial. "The American tactics, or better said, the tactics of 'your judge' have poisoned the atmosphere," said the Polish ambassador. "Even if we want to do something we are reluctant to because it looks as though we are being forced." There was also criticism in the West from those who thought Goldberg too aggressive. In an analysis piece, the
Washington Post
's Michael Getler wondered what the point of the Helsinki process was if it only led to stalemate: "Can it help the real life situation of dissidents in Eastern Europe or families who want to emigrate? Would a different American strategy—one that was quieter and didn't hammer away at the Soviets on human rights in front of 34 other countries—work better, or did the Soviets come here prepared not to give an inch on human rights no matter what anybody said or how they said it?"

For this, Goldberg had an answer: there was no other way. "We had to speak out honestly to maintain our credibility, because the Final Act of Helsinki provides for this," he told the press. He added, "Meanwhile, we have given hope to dissenters in Prague and the Soviet Union and others in Eastern Europe that they are not overlooked, that their right to organize into monitoring groups is not ignored because to do so would be a tremendous letdown. They're pretty realistic that we're not going to change the system, but it gives them heart."

For all his talk of having set a new precedent, Goldberg left Belgrade dejected that he hadn't done more, especially for Soviet Jews. But he kept insisting that a new era had arrived, that the time of ignoring human rights for the sake of diplomatic niceties was over. On the last day of the conference, Goldberg asked, "How long—after trying quiet diplomacy—could you sit here and not make a statement on a family reunification case in which the person loses his job because he asks for a visa and then is arrested as a parasite for not having a job?"

As Goldberg saw it, the dissonance in Belgrade, with the Soviets smarting at the open criticism, was a painful but necessary first step. Eventually, they would be shamed into change.

A
CCORDING TO SOVIET LAW
, nine months was the maximum period one could be detained without being formally charged with an offense. But on the nine-month anniversary of his arrest, Anatoly Shcharansky still sat in his cold concrete cell in Lefortovo Prison playing chess against himself. His closest friends and his young wife advocated for him in the world outside, but he spent those months in his own head. Shcharansky viewed the experience as an endurance test. Could he overcome fear? Could he outsmart the KGB agents who every day dragged him from the prison to their investigative wing for endless, numbing hours of interrogation? He approached each of these new challenges like a logic puzzle. Even in his first moments of captivity, standing naked in front of the prison officials and subjected to a full body search, his mouth and anus probed with gloved fingers, he came up with a mantra to preserve his dignity:
Nothing they do can humiliate me. I alone can humiliate myself.

Once he overcame the shock of his new existence—the iron cot, the bright light bulb that remained illuminated at night, the talkative informer who shared his cell—his biggest problem became the interrogation. The KGB's tactics had changed in recent decades. They seldom resorted to outright violence. There were no midnight executions in the basement of Lefortovo as there had been under Stalin. Instead, the torture was talk. To elicit free-flowing confessions, they used a mixture of psychological games and emotional manipulation. His interrogators constantly tried to make him believe they knew everything, that his most steadfast friends—reliable people like Slepak and Lerner—had all confessed, that other refuseniks had exposed him as a spy. They told him once that his father had died (though they could simply have told him the truth, which was that he was gravely ill and had suffered a heart attack after his son's arrest). And when they got particularly frustrated at his unwillingness to cooperate, they resorted to harsher methods. In July, after three and a half months in Lefortovo and on the third anniversary of his marriage to Natasha, he was sent to the prison's punishment block for almost two weeks, ostensibly for the crime of sharpening the end of his toothbrush. There he lived in a damp cell where the plaster peeled off the walls and his bed was a wooden plank. He was given only underwear, a T-shirt, thin socks, and boots for clothing. He spent all his energy trying to keep warm, pacing the cell's two-meter length and, for the first time in his life, singing out loud in his tone-deaf voice. He sang Hebrew songs that he had learned from the refuseniks. One in particular gave him strength, a Hasidic saying put to music:
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m'od, V'haiker lo I'fachhed klal
(The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid at all).

Five years earlier, Shcharansky had completed his doctoral thesis, "Simulating the Decision-Making Process in Conflict Situations Based on the Chess Endgame," in which he examined ways that computers could solve the kind of strategic challenges that a chess player confronted when looking at a board. It was a perfect topic for him. He was the ultimate analytical thinker. Now he invented an almost mathematical equation for dealing with his interrogators. He established three basic rules. First, he would avoid any kind of cooperation with them. Second, he would try to understand as much as possible about what kind of case they were building. And third, he would find a way to expose them, either by establishing some kind of contact with the West or by pushing for an open trial. He then subdivided these goals. How, specifically, would he be uncooperative? He drew a diagram on a piece of toilet paper, and under this first goal, he wrote that he would not help them paint a picture of the movement as secretive or subversive, and he would never implicate any other refuseniks. In this way he developed a kind of logic tree, which he wrote out and threw away so many times it became ingrained in his head. The meetings with the interrogators—men whose general stupidity astounded Shcharansky—became a sort of game. It was not easy, however, to stick to his equation. Sometimes he became talkative or too weak to resist their ploys, and he compromised himself. But he was nonetheless grateful to have a formula to follow.

As he built up more confidence, he tried to gain the upper hand. At first, he was shocked and frightened by the severity of the charge—treason—which could easily lead to the firing squad. The only other Jewish activists who'd ever been accused under Article 64 of the criminal code were the Leningrad hijackers Kuznetsov and Dymshits, back in 1970. The interrogators used this mortal threat as a way of attaining information, dropping it crudely into conversation. In those first few months, he was plagued by a recurring daydream of his being led into a basement and then shot in the back of the head. But one day he decided to simply make light of the threat, grabbing this weapon from their arsenal. "What's the use of all these conversations when you're just going to shoot me anyway?" He laughed.

After almost three hundred interrogation sessions, he concluded that their case against him was very slight. It hung mostly on the testimony of Sanya Lipavsky and another young refusenik informer, Leonid Tsypin. The second denunciation, much like the first, painted innocuous activities as ominous. Tsypin wrote in
Viechernaya Moskva
that his mission, as dictated by forces abroad, was to "unite young people of Jewish nationality, that is what they wanted from us." For this goal he helped organize "so-called circles for the study of Hebrew." But, he confessed, "we did not teach Hebrew as much as we agitated for emigration to Israel and spoke about the 'life of paradise in the Promised Land' in accordance with what was written in the textbooks received illegally."

The most dangerous accusation against Shcharansky, that he was a CIA agent passing sensitive information to the West through foreign correspondents, was based on nothing. Their strongest piece of evidence, as far as he could tell, came in the form of a headline of an article in the
Los Angeles Times.
Written by Shcharansky's friend Robert Toth, the story told of refuseniks denied exit visas because of their work at Soviet institutions that demanded a high security clearance. Toth looked at the extensive lists of refuseniks, which included where they had been employed and why they were refused, and easily determined that many of the institutions they worked in were far from secret; in fact, some were even engaged in scientific or commercial exchange programs with the United States. But the headline Toth's editors decided to use had a much more nefarious tone: "Russia Indirectly Reveals 'State Secrets.'" It gave the impression that the refuseniks, who had simply shared with the reporter their well-circulated lists, were engaged in some subversive activity. Still, if this was all they had on him, it wasn't much.

When he wasn't playing his game with the KGB, he lived in his head. He used a relaxation technique Slepak had taught him to help conjure happy memories and avoid isolation. He would lie on his iron cot and relax each of the muscles in his body, one by one. Then he tried to remember every detail about his parents and Natasha, who had changed her name to Avital after arriving in Israel. He also practiced his Hebrew. Over a period of a few weeks, he attempted to write down every Hebrew word he knew, and it came to nearly two thousand. Then he started translating everything he heard and read into Hebrew using this basic lexicon. These types of exercises sustained him. He read the classics too. Lefortovo had an impressive library, mostly books confiscated from the Soviet elite during the purges of the 1930s. And Shcharansky had his prayer, the one routine under his control. He had made it up early on using his rudimentary Hebrew and said it twice before going into an interrogation, in his cell before he went to sleep, and out in the courtyard where he was allowed to exercise for an hour every day: "Blessed are you, Adonai, King of the Universe. Grant me the good fortune to live with my wife, my beloved Avital Sharon [the surname he imagined he would take], in the Land of Israel. Grant my parents, my wife, and my whole family the strength to endure all hardships until we meet. Grant me the strength, the power, the intelligence, the good fortune, and the patience to leave this jail and to reach the land of Israel in an honest and worthy way."