When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (65 page)

The Soviets were using their suppression of dissidents as a way to test Carter's resolve. And they were ready to declare victory. In a memo to Brezhnev and the Politburo written after the Shcharansky trial, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was reassuring: "Our expression of firmness in relation to the prosecution of renegades like Shcharansky played its own role. The Carter Administration, despite all its rhetoric, was forced to retreat and announce its intention to continue the Soviet American negotiations on SALT aimed at the achievement of concrete results, and to declare that the agreement meets the interests not only of the Soviet Union, but also the national interests of the USA. 'The Russians won this mini-confrontation,' such is the conclusion of the local political observers."

The Soviets could dismiss Carter's human rights rhetoric partly because the USSR seemed to be gaining the upper hand in the Cold War. For one thing, more and more countries in the so-called Third World were turning Communist red. Soviet arms had bolstered Communist forces in Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. Support for allies in the Middle East, such as Syria, Iraq, and—most detrimentally to American foreign policy—the PLO, was continuing unabated. In Southeast Asia, the Soviets' Vietnamese allies were conquering much of the region. And many of the pro-American regimes in Central America were beginning to look vulnerable. Then there was the Islamic revolution that had just broken out in Iran, the United States' most critical ally in the Persian Gulf region. In January 1979, the shah, who had helped secure American dominance, was forced to flee the country and replaced by the virulently anti-American Ayatollah Khomeini.

Meanwhile, Carter continued the post-Vietnam trend of military de-escalation that had been started by the Nixon and Ford administrations and that he saw as part of his political mandate. This gave him very little to leverage against his human rights demands.

The Soviets were motivated to continue with détente because they needed the grain sales (the 1979 wheat harvest was particularly poor) and the advanced technology that came with it. The extreme defense expenditures that had allowed them to outpace the United States by the end of the 1970s in almost every category of missile technology had also placed great strains on their economy. Their spending on arms rivaled or beat that of the United States, while their economy was half its size. Strategic arms limitations could only work to their advantage. On this circumscribed, overlapping ground, Carter and Brezhnev were able to move forward with détente, however slowly.

As talks over SALT II progressed and planning began for a summit, the Soviets had to confront what might be fierce opposition in the U.S. Congress to ratification of any agreement—and it was led by their familiar foe Jackson. But this did not turn them away. In fact, there were clear signs that the Jackson-Vanik amendment had taught the Soviets a lesson. They now seemed to understand how to buy themselves some goodwill from American senators and congresspeople: increase Jewish emigration. And so, in late 1978, even as the world was still reeling from the repressive measures taken against the dissidents and the widely publicized trial of Shcharansky, the number of exit visas started to rise.

Journalists first noticed the trend in late summer of that year when it became clear that the Soviets were letting out as many as 3,000 Jews a month. By the fall, it seemed that the total for the year would be somewhere around 30,000, matching the peak years of 1972 and 1973. The numbers had remained low since then, improving only slightly, from 13,222 in 1975 to 16,735 in 1977. It took a few months to detect the trend—the Soviets never announced when they were going to be more lenient—but with the arrival in Vienna of more and more Jews every day, it was obvious that something had changed. In the first months of 1979, with the Brezhnev-Carter summit slated for the summer, the numbers became even more dramatic. In March, a record was set when 4,418 Jews arrived in Vienna. This topped the previous highest month, October 1973, when 4,408 were let out. At this rate, with over 4,000 emigrating every month, it looked like an unprecedented 50,000 Jews were going to be granted visas in 1979.

These sudden high rates of emigration shocked everyone in the West. Most of those given visas were first-time applicants from the big urban centers like Kiev and Odessa, people who'd been motivated to apply by a widespread rumor that the Olympics, scheduled to take place in Moscow the following summer, was the reason for this sudden leniency. By this logic, the emigration would end when the games did. These were the thoroughly assimilated Jews, the group who'd been responsible for the increasing percentage of dropouts throughout the decade. Once news spread that people were not being rejected, OVIR offices all over the Soviet Union began seeing long lines, and Israel was inundated with more requests for invitations than they had seen since the Six-Day War—about fifteen thousand a month. The period of increased emigration did not, however, affect those long-term refuseniks, somewhere between ten and twenty thousand of them. A few were allowed to leave, but others—those who had protested their situation or made a little too much noise—quickly replaced them.

The burst of emigration—and subsequent increase in drop-outs—had two immediate consequences. First, it made Israel frantic. Every month brought higher and higher rates of Jews arriving in Vienna with Israeli visas and then turning to the Joint and HIAS for help in getting to America. In January it was 60.6 percent, in February, 64.1 percent, and in March it jumped to 65.3 percent. There was very little the Israelis could do. American Jews had won the initial debate over whether to cut off funds for the dropouts. Even if Israel could convince Carter to stop accepting so many Jews, the Israelis still had the problem of the Netherlands and Austria. The Dutch, whose embassy represented Israel in Moscow, refused to discriminate based on ultimate destination when it handed out exit visas. And the Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, remained vocal about his commitment to securing freedom of choice for Soviet Jews who arrived in his country. It seemed that even the Soviets preferred their Jews to go to America rather than Israel. As Bruno Kreisky explained to a journalist in a moment of candor, "The Russians are ambivalent about it all. They let the Jews go on Israeli visas, but we have the impression Moscow is glad that so many actually do not go to Israel. That saves trouble with the Arabs."

The other major consequence of the emigration, one that became more pressing in the spring of 1979 as the summit neared, was the question of whether to waive the Jackson-Vanik amendment. With forty-five hundred Jews leaving every month, it was not impossible for the Kremlin to meet the target figure of sixty thousand a year agreed upon by Henry Jackson and Henry Kissinger. According to the letters exchanged between the two men, this would technically permit the president to waive the trade restrictions. As the prospects for improving relations with the Soviets increased, a small contingent of congressmen began to consider the possibility of rewarding the emigration increase with a waiver. In a strange twist, the man who led this thrust was Charles Vanik, the Ohio representative who had cosponsored the initial amendment in the House. Vanik was encouraged by the numbers, and he worried that the current push in Congress to give most-favored-nation trading status to China would derail relations with the Soviets, who would be offended if they were overlooked. At the beginning of March, in an open letter to Carter, Vanik made his opinion public. A debate ensued inside the administration, with the president generally favorable toward the idea of granting a waiver.

Vanik's idea and Carter's consideration of it was immediately and passionately attacked. The refuseniks in Moscow, now led by an increasingly isolated Alexander Lerner—who had recently lost some of his closest allies to prison and exile—wrote a letter to Vanik arguing that emigration figures were no way to judge the Soviets. More people might be getting out, but not in proportion to the number applying to leave. "It amounts to evaluating a change in a worker's salary without taking into account any changes in prices or the purchasing power of that salary," Lerner wrote. In a sign of their increasing convergence on policy issues, both the Union of Councils and the National Conference came out against the idea. Eugene Gold, then chairman of the National Conference and Brooklyn's district attorney (and, famously, the prosecutor of David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer), wrote in a letter to the
New York Times
that "human rights is not a game of numbers. While one Soviet hand has partially opened the emigration tap, the other hand continues to squeeze Jews who live in the U.S.S.R."

But the real obstacle to a waiver was Henry Jackson, still a powerhouse in the Senate even after two failed presidential bids and the most outspoken critic of Carter's foreign and defense policies. He was violently opposed to any change in law that would give the Soviet Union an advantage, and especially one that undermined the strength of his legislation. Jackson was even disparaging of Carter's approach to human rights; he felt it failed on several points. It did not distinguish between a country in which the abuses were deeply embedded in the system and were justified by an ideology and a country ruled by a petty dictator in which abuses of power were understood to be aberrations and not endemic to that nation's policies. Jackson felt Carter did not adequately balance idealism and realism. His rhetoric on human rights was too moralizing and could lead to unintended consequences. In the case of Iran, for example, Jackson thought it was the president who had weakened the shah by not working harder to prop him up when the revolution began. The president had failed to realize that the shah was less dangerous than the revolutionary Islamic regime that would replace him.

When it came to SALT II, the most recent manifestation of détente, Jackson was especially harsh. In 1972, when the first SALT agreement passed 88 to 2, including Jackson's own reluctant vote for it, his was one of the few critical voices in Congress. But in 1979, following widespread disenchantment with détente and concern over Soviet defense spending, he was no longer alone. As Carter prepared to sign SALT II, it was far from clear that he would be able to get the two-thirds majority needed to ratify the treaty. Jackson fought on two fronts, Richard Perle still at his side. He opposed his former cosponsor Vanik, tamping down any talk of a waiver, and he warned that he would not support a new arms treaty that left America at a disadvantage or that didn't contain a mechanism for verifying Soviet adherence.

The summit was scheduled for early June. With a month remaining, the Soviets made one more attempt to win over a recalcitrant Congress. On the morning of April 25 at the Mordvinian Special Regime Labor Camp No. 1, three hundred miles south of Moscow, a KGB lieutenant colonel and a bevy of camp officials pushed open the door of Eduard Kuznetsov's cell. Nearly nine years had passed since Kuznetsov's commuted death sentence. He had spent them all in Mordvinia. Now he found himself put on a train to Moscow; after two days at Lefortovo Prison, he still didn't know whether he was being freed or put on trial again. His only hint was the glimpse he got as he left the labor camp of two other political prisoners who were also making the trip: Alexander Ginzburg, who had only recently joined him there, and Valentin Moroz, a Ukrainian nationalist who, like Kuznetsov, had been imprisoned since the early 1970s.

On the morning of the second day, Kuznetsov was brought into a room with a KGB captain and two Kremlin representatives and informed that he was being stripped of his Soviet citizenship and would be leaving the country that day. They gave him a suit that had been made in Czechoslovakia, and, guarded by two men, he was driven to the airport and placed on an Ilyushin jet. He saw other men put on the plane, and one of them was Mark Dymshits, the pilot of their failed hijacking plot. Only when they landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York did Kuznetsov figure out where he had been sent. Within minutes, two Russians, escorted by New York police officers, were hustled onto the plane, and Kuznetsov, Dymshits, and the others, all with shaved heads, gaunt faces, and cheap suits, descended onto the tarmac. A motorcade of seven bulletproof limousines was waiting for them. In the limo, a State Department official informed the former prisoners that they had just been exchanged for two Soviet spies.

The next few days were hallucinatory. Kuznetsov stood dumbfounded on the thirty-seventh floor of the United Nations Plaza Hotel staring out at the lights of Manhattan; he fell asleep in a room that seemed big enough to hold fifty people. Then Sylva was there, embracing him and unable to stop crying. Nehemiah Levanon showed up at the hotel and told him not to criticize the Soviets too harshly, but Kuznetsov just laughed in his face. There were press conferences and rallies. The arrival happened to coincide with Solidarity Sunday, the annual rally and march started in 1971 and organized by New York's Soviet Jewry umbrella organization. Eduard and Sylva, holding hands, smiled in front of a hundred thousand cheering people, and next to them stood a beaming Henry Jackson.

A year later, on the anniversary of his release, the normally cynical Kuznetsov described those days with wonder: "I have never rejected the idea of a miracle as such, but at the same time I also have not considered myself an important enough person (like a bon vivant or a cripple, for example) to have laid a claim on heaven's special blessing. But on April 27 I was tempted, if not to scream out, then at least to whisper that pretentious, comforting word: miracle. Out of darkness, I was cast into light; out of a stench into a garden; out of death into life."

With much less publicity, five other prisoners from the Leningrad trials were unexpectedly pardoned that same week. Anatoly Altman, Boris Penson, Areyeh Khnokh, and Sylva Zalmanson's older brother Vulf, all prospective passengers on the hijacked plane, were taken out of their prison camps in the Urals and put on trains bound for Riga. Hillel Butman, the last remaining prisoner from the Leningrad group, had been in Chistopol, a special camp set up the year before specifically to house political prisoners, five hundred miles east of Moscow in the Tatar province. He too was released. A few days later, they were all summoned to OVIR, given exit visas, and sent speeding through Vienna to Israel, where they were greeted like heroes. Only one person from the hijacking still remained in prison, in Chistopol, and that was Yosef Mendelevich.