When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (63 page)

She was seized on the street the next day, just after she'd met with foreign correspondents and recounted what had happened. Three uniformed policemen drove her back to her apartment; on her door, someone had pinned a drawing of three pigs under the words
Zionist swine.
Nudel sat in a chair and watched the KGB conduct a search. Her apartment was already a mess with the upturned furniture and shattered glass, and now they were dumping every piece of paper onto the living room floor. They charged her with malicious hooliganism and forbade her to leave the city.

The trials of Volodya Slepak and Ida Nudel took place three weeks later on the same day, June 21, and in the same courthouse. Both were accused of the same crime. Slepak chose to defend himself without the help of the court-appointed attorney. Nudel was surprised that her lawyer actually tried to defend her. But no witnesses were allowed to testify on behalf of either defendant. Both courtrooms were small and filled with unsympathetic audiences. Sakharov, Bonner, much of the refusenik community, and representatives from the American embassy were all kept out, as were reporters. They massed on the street instead. At one point the police turned a fire hose on the crowd when it got too close to the courthouse.

After a few hours of futile defense, Volodya Slepak was found guilty of public disorder and sentenced to five years of internal exile.

At Ida Nudel's trial, the evidence of her malicious hooliganism was laid out in front of the judge: a bottle of ink, a brush, a rolled-up piece of paper. The defense lawyer conceded that Nudel was a strange character (she "does not get along very well with our society") but still asked the court for an acquittal, an unusual move for a KGB-sanctioned attorney. This caught Nudel off-guard, and instead of remaining silent throughout the trial as she had planned, she decided to make a final statement before her sentencing. With her voice catching in her throat, she described her trial as an indictment of her activism:

I am being tried in fact for the last seven years, the most wonderful years of my life. If I should ever find myself obliged to deliver another final plea, I am absolutely convinced that I shall affirm once again that the seven years which are the cause of this trial were the most difficult but also the most wonderful of my life. During the seven years, I learned to walk with my head high, as a human being and as a Jew. The seven years have been full of daily struggle on behalf of myself and others. Every time that I was able to keep a victim alive, I experienced a rare and intense emotion comparable, perhaps, to the joy of a woman who has given birth. Even if the remainder of my life should turn out to be gray and uneventful, the memory of those seven years will warm my heart and reassure me that I have not lived my life in vain.

Ida Nudel received four years of internal exile.

Absent that day from Volodya Slepak's trial was his wife, Masha Slepak. She had eaten moldy black bread during her detention and was in the hospital suffering from extreme stomach ulcers. She heard the verdict on the radio. Just before her own trial, she went to visit Volodya in jail. Masha didn't know whether they would be exiled together or separately, since they were technically divorced. Looking at her husband through Plexiglas, she saw that his hair had grown even bushier than usual and she told him he needed a haircut. "No, it's all right; this way it's warmer," Volodya answered, smiling. They tried to strategize for her trial. They talked about their sons. And before they knew it, their time was up. On the next visit, the authorities informed her that Volodya was no longer there. He had been moved to a transit prison to begin his long journey east.

By the end of June 1978, the Jewish movement had had its heart ripped out. Volodya Slepak and Ida Nudel were preparing for their exile; Dina Beilin had suddenly been given an exit visa and rushed out of the country; and Anatoly Shcharansky's trial and possible execution was looming. Those who had worked the hardest to maintain political pressure on the Soviets, to publicize the situation of refuseniks and to remind the world of the prisoners then languishing in labor camps, were quickly disappearing. In the short history of the movement so far, new leaders had always taken the place of those who left. This fluidity and the lack of any rigid hierarchy meant that the movement could not readily be decapitated. Still, these now absent activists had spent almost a decade fighting. They had become widely known and trusted, both in the West and among other Soviet Jews. They could not easily be replaced. Their persecution also put the lie to one of the movement's central premises. Activist refuseniks had always argued that the more visible they made themselves in the West, the better chance they had of avoiding persecution. No one was more visible than Shcharansky, Slepak, and Nudel. But now, with the Soviets becoming ever more entrenched, no one was safe. What the Americans or anyone else thought didn't matter anymore.

The arrest and exile of Slepak and Nudel were challenging enough to Soviet-American relations, but Shcharansky's trial seemed to be the ultimate test of détente. Carter had gone out of his way to defend Shcharansky, still trying to meet the moral bar he had set for himself without damaging relations with the Soviets. It was a balancing act the Kremlin seemed to be trying to upset when it scheduled the trial for July 7, the same week that Secretary of State Vance was to meet Gromyko in Geneva to discuss SALT II. As David Shipler put it in the
New York Times:
"From Moscow's perspective, then, the trial's timing appears to be an effort to highlight the limits of détente, to dramatize what détente does and does not mean here: that its centerpiece is arms control, and that it does not imply acquiescence to American demands for internal social change."

The world waited to see the outcome of the trial, and Soviet leaders knew how they wanted to play their hand. In a meeting of the Politburo on June 22, 1978, the day after Slepak and Nudel were sentenced, Yuri Andropov announced to Brezhnev and the other members that the preparations for the Shcharansky trial had been completed: "The trial will take place in the same court as the Orlov case. This is a good place, a club, and the audience, properly prepared, will therefore be small ... I consider that it is not in our interest to allow any correspondents at the trial." All agreed. There was just one question left to discuss. "What will be Shcharansky's sentence?" Andropov asked. "Everything will depend on how he behaves himself. For example, the intention was to give Orlov three years in accordance with the articles of the Criminal Code, but he behaved so indecently at the trial, that the court was obliged to sentence him to seven years with a subsequent exile for five years. Of course, Shcharansky will not receive the death penalty, but the court will give him a severe sentence, say, for example, fifteen years."

Two weeks later, Shcharansky, after sixteen months in detention, entered the courthouse—a small three-story building on a secluded, tree-lined street called Serebrennicheski Pereulok, about a mile from the Kremlin. He walked into the courtroom and quickly scanned the audience for his mother, for Sakharov, for a journalist friend. There wasn't a single familiar face. Anyone sympathetic to him, including foreign correspondents, had been barred from the trial. They all stood outside, next to Shcharansky's mother, a frail, white-haired seventy-year-old who clutched a handkerchief. "Not to be allowed into the courtroom is a mockery of a mother; it is sadistic torture," she told one journalist. Before her son was arrested, Ida Milgrom and Shcharansky's older brother, Leonid, had had no involvement with the refusenik movement; they lived comfortably in the town of Istra, on the outskirts of Moscow. But after the ordeal of the past year, they too had been turned into dissidents.

When he was finally given permission to speak, Shcharansky demanded that his mother and brother, not just government sympathizers, be allowed to observe the trial. The judge resisted at first, but after a ten-minute recess, Shcharansky returned to the courtroom to see his brother, Leonid, or Lenya, as he called him, sitting a few feet away. He smiled. "You've gotten fat," Shcharansky called out. He was told to remain quiet, and Leonid steeled himself for the difficult task of trying to memorize as much of the trial's proceedings as possible. Shcharansky asked if he could serve as his own defense attorney, and the judge agreed. Familiar now with Soviet law, Shcharansky understood what all this meant: he would not face a firing squad. Otherwise, the judge would never have agreed to either demand. Shcharansky relaxed. Then he pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

The next five days were a farce, both inside and outside the courtroom. The Soviet leadership faced a dilemma. They wanted the appearance of an open trial, but they didn't want too much scrutiny of the evidence. Though no journalists were allowed to record the proceedings, press conferences were given twice a day—unprecedented for the Soviets. But the seventy reporters who assembled at the courthouse every afternoon and evening learned nothing from the court spokesman that they couldn't have gotten from reading
Pravda.
Inside, the trial quickly turned into a broad indictment of the entire Jewish movement. The prosecutor blamed Shcharansky for supporting the Jackson-Vanik amendment and therefore adversely affecting the Soviet economy. He referred to meetings with journalists, meetings with congressmen. But as Shcharansky repeated again and again, all these activities were open; for fear of implicating his friends, he didn't mention that there were at least a few dozen refuseniks who had acted no differently than he. The prosecutor presented no concrete link to the CIA beyond insinuating that Robert Toth was a spy and that Shcharansky had helped him gather information.

More than half of the week was spent in closed sessions in which the prosecution's witnesses were questioned. The two informers, Leonid Tsypin and Sanya Lipavsky, spoke and repeated what they had written in their public denunciations. Shcharansky cross-examined them and easily tripped them up. They were confused about certain dates. Who met whom when? For example, Lipavsky described meetings in which American agents told Shcharansky how to help enforce the Helsinki Accords, but the dates of the meetings that Lipavsky reported were before the treaty had even been signed. In a normal courtroom, their credibility would have been thrown into question, but here their word was accepted as fact—their testimony was, after all, the linchpin of the State's case. A slew of character witnesses was introduced. One former neighbor of Shcharansky's said that he was "smart, intellectual, quiet"; pressured to provide some evidence of his "negative qualities," she offered that "he wasn't always neat."

The judge rejected almost all of Shcharansky's forty requests for documents and witnesses. When it was Shcharansky's turn to defend himself, four days into the proceedings, he told the court it was a "hopeless task." But he spoke anyway, figuring that at least Leonid could transmit his words to the outside world. Shcharansky explained the history of Zionism and Jewish persecution, from the Dreyfus Affair to the Doctors' Plot. He pointed out all the contradictions in his case, made some accusations of his own, and tried to express all the thoughts about the case's "absurdity," as he put it, that had been brewing in his mind for the past year. When he was returned to his cell in Lefortovo that night, he still felt he had more to say, and he began working on his final statement to the court. No one understood the opportunity of such a moment better than Shcharansky, who before his arrest had been Soviet Jewry's public relations man. He sat and wrote out the statement in one shot, trying to keep it short. This was his chance to help his advocates on the outside, especially Avital.

The next day, following his closing argument, the prosecutor said that although Shcharansky certainly deserved capital punishment, he would demand only fifteen years, the first three to be served in prison and the rest in a labor camp. Then it was Shcharansky's turn to speak. He got up and turned to Leonid, who was seated in the back of the room, and spoke slowly and deliberately, enunciating each word so his brother could capture it all. After another recess, Shcharansky was brought back into the courtroom, which was now full of television cameras and photographers. The judgment was read: thirteen years. The audience cried out, yelling that Shcharansky was a traitor and should be shot. He searched for Leonid in the crowd, and just before he was dragged away by the guards Shcharansky heard his brother call out, "Tolya! The whole world is with you!"

Outside on the street, journalists jostled one another to get closer to Leonid when he emerged from the courthouse. His voice choked with tears, he said only "Thirteen." Ida Milgrom started weeping and Sakharov put an arm around her. A light summer rain began falling and people opened up their umbrellas and huddled closer to the courthouse. The refuseniks in the crowd sang the "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem, as the police van carrying Shcharansky sped by. Then, in a strained voice, an exhausted Leonid shouted out his brother's closing statement as journalists and their translators jotted down the words in their notebooks:

In March and April, during interrogation, the chief investigator warned me that in the position I have taken during investigation and held to here in court, I would be threatened with execution by firing squad, or at least 15 years. If I would agree to cooperate with the investigation for the purpose of destroying the Jewish emigration movement, they promised me early freedom and a quick reunion with my wife.

Five years ago, I submitted my application for exit to Israel. Now I'm further than ever from my dream. It would seem to be cause for regret. But it is absolutely otherwise. I am happy. I am happy that I lived honestly, in peace with my conscience. I never compromised my soul, even under the threat of death.

I am happy that I helped people. I am proud that I knew and worked with such honest, brave and courageous people as Sakharov, Orlov, Ginzburg, who are carrying on the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. I am fortunate to have been witness to the process of the liberation of Jews of the U.S.S.R.

I hope that the absurd accusation against me and the entire emigration movement will not hinder the liberation of my people. My near ones and friends know how I wanted to exchange activity in the emigration movement for a life with my wife, Avital, in Israel.

For more than 2,000 years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed. But wherever they are, wherever Jews are found, every year they have repeated, "Next year in Jerusalem." Now, when I am further than ever from my people, from Avital, facing many arduous years of imprisonment, I say, turning to my people, my Avital: Next year in Jerusalem.

Now I turn to you, the court, who were required to confirm a predetermined sentence: to you I have nothing to say.