When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (62 page)

In December of 1977, on the nine-month anniversary of his arrest, his detention was extended beyond the legal limit, and he soon understood why. A few weeks after the new year, Shcharansky was told that his case was complete and he would now be given a chance to examine the evidence against him, a customary Soviet practice. He was escorted into a room and presented with his file, which consisted of fifty-one volumes, each containing nearly three hundred pages of typed text. The authorities had expended an incredible amount of energy to justify his arrest and build the narrative of espionage on which it hung. All his phone calls to the West were neatly cataloged, as was every newspaper article that contained a reference to him; there were transcripts of conversations that could only have been overheard by the KGB's bugging the apartments of his friends, hundreds of pages from the
Congressional Record
noting every utterance of his name by a senator or congressman. The first fifteen volumes contained the records of at least a hundred interrogations of refuseniks from cities and towns all over the Soviet Union.

Shcharansky dove into the material, eager to get some sense of the government's case. He spent the spring of 1978 going through the file piece by piece and copying out any relevant information, filling three thousand pages of notes. His interrogators sat in the room with him, all pretending to read the recently released second volume of Brezhnev's memoirs, which covered his years as a political commissar during the war. Shcharansky discovered very little hard evidence in all this material. All those months of isolation had made him fear that the movement had been destroyed or that his friends had crumbled under the pressure and started pointing fingers at one another. The witness statements were encouraging. To varying degrees, everyone had behaved well, and his closest friends had given the KGB little more than their names.

Shcharansky got a sense of how aggressively the refusenik activists and his friends in the West were responding to his case. He found a confiscated roll of film that an American tourist had tried to smuggle out of the Soviet Union. The KGB had developed the prints, and they turned out to be photos of reports written in Dina Beilin's neat hand detailing the interrogations of refuseniks. Then he made his most rewarding find. In the file was a copy of the British documentary
A Calculated Risk,
the film made two years earlier that featured Shcharansky and Slepak giving a tour of refusenik Moscow. Along with it was another film by the same production company, this one made after his arrest:
The Man Who Went Too Far.
He demanded to see both documentaries. He said he needed to familiarize himself with the evidence. Cornered by their own rules, the KGB investigators agreed. It felt like a thousand years had passed since the man he saw in the first film drove through the city streets. But it was the second, more recent documentary that contained the real surprise: footage of a rally in London in front of the Soviet embassy demanding his freedom. And his Avital was leading it. Michael Sherbourne was there, and Ludmilla Alexeyeva. It went by so fast that he asked to see it again. And again. Shcharansky was mesmerized by the image of the crowd and of his wife, who for so long had lived only in his imagination. The agents soon became frustrated and turned it off. "That's enough!" the lead investigator yelled. "What do you think, that your fate is in the hands of those people and not ours? They're nothing but students and housewives."

Throughout the long months of waiting in Lefortovo, Shcharansky wondered what was happening in the world outside his prison walls. Was the Belgrade conference successful? Had Carter's election changed anything for Sakharov? For Orlov? The files, though they were voluminous, gave him only an inkling. But the world
had
changed in that year, both for better and for worse. Partly owing to the publicity over Shcharansky's case, the Soviet Union's human rights record was getting more attention than ever before. It was now a major Cold War concern, close to the top of the American president's agenda at every meeting with Soviet leaders. For the refuseniks, this was an enormous achievement.

At the same time, the focus on human rights was slowly destroying détente, leading to an environment in which the Soviets had little incentive to tolerate dissent. This was the paradox of the new era. The response to the Belgrade conference was a perfect example. Though it shone a light on the dissidents and refuseniks, it also greatly humiliated the Soviets. They returned from Yugoslavia in March of 1978 even more intransigent than before, determined to crush any kind of opposition. Shcharansky's arrest marked the arrival of the darkest days yet for the refusenik community, darker than Shcharansky could have guessed from behind Lefortovo's high walls.

An atmosphere of terror swept through the refusenik community in the months following the Shcharansky arrest. Everyone was interrogated and treated like a potential suspect ("Today you are a witness, but soon you'll be a defendant," one was told). It seemed only a matter of time before the whole movement was dismantled—Slepak and Lerner, also mentioned in the Lipavsky denunciation, were sure their own arrests were imminent. In a collective appeal to the West, two hundred and fifty refuseniks warned that the accusation of espionage was "one of the most dramatic moments, perhaps one of the major turning-points in the history of Jews in Russia." They compared this new threat to the Dreyfus Affair, the Mendel Beilis trial, and the Doctors' Plot, all historic incidents when falsely accused Jews became scapegoats, an excuse for unleashing widespread anti-Semitism and even more persecution. "On the surface, only a small part of the erupting volcano can yet be seen. All the rest is inside, hidden, concealed from view. What is being cooked up down there in the depths is as yet unknown to us, but we shall no doubt very soon feel it, and experience the full effects of the depth of the anti-Jewish prejudice being stirred up to vomit forth from the mouth of the volcano."

Dina Beilin, Shcharansky's friend and the meticulous list keeper of the refuseniks, debriefed everyone who had been interrogated. She was trying to piece together a picture of the charges so she could refute them. It turned out that the questions all seemed to revolve around Shcharansky's role in an imagined organization the KGB had dubbed Aliyah. They weren't asking about connections to the CIA or spying techniques. They wanted to know about the most routine of their activities—how they contacted the West, why they supported the Jackson-Vanik amendment, how they reproduced samizdat. She was sure they were building a case against the Jewish movement as a whole. For Beilin, this was important information. It refuted what she was hearing from Nehemiah Levanon in Israel, that because of Shcharansky's dissident ties, he was a distraction, and his case should not be defended. A group of refuseniks wrote a letter to the West emphasizing that "interaction between the Jewish emigration and the general Human Rights movement has a versatile character," and "we cannot imagine the two movements to be absolutely separated."

The signs were not good for either refuseniks or democrats. In May of 1978, Yuri Orlov went on trial. After four days in which the actions of the Moscow Helsinki Watch were depicted as criminal, he received a seven-year prison sentence that was to be followed by five years of internal exile. The pressure was immense. And yet all the Moscow refuseniks could do was continue to try to bring attention to their cause. In fact, the logic of nonviolent demonstration demanded that they take advantage of this moment of great repression to further dramatize their situation.

It was this combination of dejection and determination that drove a group of refusenik women to involve their sons and daughters in a massive protest planned for June 1, the day the Soviet Union called International Children's Day. Originally the plan was to gather on five different balconies all over Moscow and at forty-five-minute intervals drape banners or hang signs protesting the government's emigration policies. But some of the women became frightened by the police cars surrounding their buildings the evening before and abandoned their protest. The rest decided to congregate in the apartment of Natasha Rosenshtein, where a year and a half earlier the remnants of the cultural symposium had taken place. There they spent the night on the floor in sleeping bags, preparing for the next day's battle.

In another apartment, alone that night, was Ida Nudel—chief advocate for the Jewish prisoners—a small, tough woman, now forty-seven and prematurely graying with a streak of silver shot through her long black hair. She had decided to join the protest, but alone, with a barricade of furniture pushed up against her apartment door. She wrote out her sign on a long piece of butcher paper:
KGB
—
GIVE ME A VISA TO ISRAEL
. On the morning of June 1, Nudel found a bulldozer parked in front of her building and four KGB agents sitting on the balcony next to her own. She prepared to defend herself against those whose job it would surely be to tear the banner out of her hands. She filled up a bucket of water to throw at them and lay pieces of nail-studded wood on the balcony floor. As evening approached and with it her appointed time to unfurl her sign, she became more anxious. A crowd of policemen was gathered below, all staring up at her apartment.

That same day, Masha Slepak was trying to decide whether to take part in the demonstration. The Slepaks had remained at the center of the Jewish movement. Volodya was now known all over the world—his apartment was still the first stop for Jewish tourists visiting Moscow. He never tired of telling his story, amusing them with his quirky appearance (the large beard and lumbering body) and good nature. The door to the apartment on Gorky Street, only a few yards from the Kremlin, was always open. But now, in the eighth year of refusal, the struggle had taken a toll on his family. For one thing, the Slepaks were technically divorced. They had always tried to keep their children from suffering for their stand, but their high profiles made this impossible. They divorced so that Masha might emigrate separately with their younger child. But this didn't work. OVIR was not fooled. The big worry had always been that their son Leonid would reach the age of conscription and be drafted into the army. And that's exactly what happened. Leonid responded to the draft notice in a letter that explained that he considered himself an Israeli citizen in absentia and so could not serve in the Soviet army. He then went underground. He traveled the country by train, first to Yerevan, Armenia, and then back to Leningrad and Moscow, where he hid in various apartments. Masha and Volodya constantly worried that he would be thrown into jail. Their elder boy, Sanya, had actually managed to get an exit visa in the fall of 1977, after years of being denied work or placement in any university. As the Belgrade conference was beginning, the KGB had offered to let him go if he would call foreign correspondents in Yugoslavia and announce that he had received permission. Sanya refused to help them in their publicity stunt, but they let him leave anyway, giving him a week to pack.

Deprived of her two children and far more fatalistic than her husband, Masha Slepak was increasingly despairing in her life of endless waiting. On the morning of the Children's Day protest, she tried to open the door to her apartment to walk their dog and found that it had been fastened shut, tied with rope to the stairway. Since Masha was part of the women's group, the KGB assumed the Slepaks had helped plan the protest. Masha had had it. She told Volodya that she couldn't stand to be humiliated anymore. She made up her mind to join the demonstration. Together they took a sheet and painted on it these words:
LET US GO TO OUR SON IN ISRAEL
. Volodya locked the door to their apartment and then the door to their bedroom. They stepped outside onto the balcony and draped the sheet over the balcony's edge so that all of Gorky Street, one of Moscow's busiest and grandest boulevards, could see the words hanging off the eighth floor.

After about half an hour a huge crowd began forming below, straining to see what was written. Traffic nearly stopped, and the passage of the trolleys that went up and down the street was blocked. A few people started screaming anti-Semitic slurs. Police officers on the adjacent upstairs balcony used a stick to try to knock the banner away. At one point Volodya got hold of the stick, snapped it in half, and threw it down to the street below. "They should use a pistol!" someone in the crowd shouted up at the police. It was a warm day and people were enjoying the cat-and-mouse spectacle. Soon almost a thousand people were clogging Gorky Street to get a look. The Slepaks gripped their sheet and, though astounded by the giant, jeering crowd, told each other they would not budge. Volodya suddenly felt a burning on his head and realized that boiling hot water was being poured on him from the ninth-floor balcony, the one above theirs. They stepped away from the edge, still clutching the sign, and then they heard the sound of their apartment door being hacked apart with axes. Masha didn't want to give the spectators the satisfaction of seeing them arrested. Just as KGB agents were destroying their locked bedroom door, the two reentered their apartment. The sheet was yanked from their hands and they were led downstairs and placed in a prison van.

This scene was repeated in the Rosenshtein apartment, where eleven women and their thirteen children had gathered. They tried to hold out, blocking their door with a sofa and desks, and chanting. But after twenty minutes, the KGB broke through and detained all of them.

At six in the evening Ida Nudel was ready to go out on her balcony, unaware of all the earlier arrests. Her apartment too had been sealed off. She attached her banner to the ends of two skis and carried it out to the balcony as the day's light was fading. Almost immediately, from the window of an adjoining apartment, the KGB reached in with hooked metal rods, caught the banner, and pulled it until it tore off the skis in two pieces and floated down to the street. Nudel was undeterred. She went back inside, wrote up another sign, returned, and fastened it to the skis again. This time when the agents tried to attack her banner, she threw water at them. They switched to a new strategy, going to the balcony above hers and swinging a wrench tied to the end of a rope until it eventually smashed her window. At the sound of breaking glass, the gathering crowd cheered as if at a football game. Frightened and assaulted from all sides, she moved back into her apartment, which was now covered in shards of glass. As day turned into night, the police stopped pounding on her barricaded doors, and Nudel lay down on her couch, fully dressed, and fell asleep.