When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (66 page)

News of the pardons broke just as Charles Vanik was visiting Moscow with a delegation of seventeen congresspeople. The releases were surely meant to shore up support for Vanik's campaign to waive his eponymous amendment and allow freer trade. A few other high-profile refuseniks were allowed to emigrate, including Volodya Slepak's son Leonid, who had been hiding from the authorities. Hearing all this good news, even Alexander Lerner, who had been visited by Vanik in his apartment in Moscow, was encouraged. The Soviets were on their way to fulfilling nearly all of the movement's demands.

The summit finally took place in June, in Vienna; the seventy-two-year-old Brezhnev was ailing and unable to make the trip to Washington. The meeting amounted to little more than theater—and bad theater at that. Brezhnev was in worse shape than anybody had expected. His speech was slurred, he wore a large hearing aid in his left ear, and Carter had to steady him when he tripped on the stairs leading out of the Soviet embassy. The Austrian authorities were concerned enough that they ordered several hospitals in the city to keep beds and life-support systems ready. The major achievement was the signing of SALT II, which had already been negotiated. Everything else was stagecraft, visits to the opera and toasts over vodka. The only departure from the script was a ninety-minute private meeting on the last day between the two leaders at the American embassy. According to news reports, they discussed "Soviet emigration policy and U.S. restrictions on Soviet goods." If something substantive emerged from this meeting, neither Carter nor Brezhnev saw fit to tell the world. In the last moments, they signed the treaty. Tellingly, the Russian version of the seventy-eight-page document had been produced by a manual typewriter on paper as thick as cardboard and copied by a machine from the 1950s. The Americans used a high-speed word processor for theirs.

The Soviets' best chance for a waiver of Jackson-Vanik would be after the ratification of SALT II as part of what would be a general warming of relations. But in the months following the Vienna summit, Jackson and his growing number of allies made it clear that the treaty was going nowhere. The senator argued that it left the Soviets capable of developing more complex missile systems while compromising the American arsenal. Other senators just didn't trust that the Russians would adhere to the limitations. Events that summer and fall further reinforced the notion that America was losing influence in the world, which bolstered Jackson's hard-line position. In September, the State Department revealed that a combat unit of two to five thousand Soviet soldiers with about forty tanks was stationed in Cuba. Carter insisted they be removed, but Brezhnev simply ignored him, and the president backed off. Then in November, fifty-two people were taken hostage at the American embassy in Tehran, a crisis that consumed the American public and dragged on day after day.

Also that fall, there were signs that Soviet Jewish emigration rates, which had seemed so promising just a year before, were starting to decline again. The first reports of mass refusals came from the big Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Odessa, where hundreds of families were denied exit visas in August and September. Natalia Khassina, the woman who took over Dina Beilin's job as the keeper of the refusenik lists, told a Western reporter in October that "positive answers are now an exception." There was no immediate drop in the monthly
numbers
of Jews emigrating. In September, it was still 4,400. But with thousands more families now applying, the stable number meant that many were being denied.

The question of why emigration increased at certain times and decreased at others was a constant preoccupation of activists and Sovi-etologists alike. But the numbers of visas granted in 1979 seemed to provide fairly strong evidence that to a large extent, the temperature of the Cold War determined emigration. Inside the Politburo, Jews were clearly seen as pawns. When Soviet leaders had something to gain, the number of Jews leaving went up. But with SALT II blocked by Congress and Carter publicly acknowledging that he wouldn't consider trade benefits until the following year—while most-favored-nation status for China was steadily making its way toward congressional approval—the Soviets saw they had little to benefit from continued leniency.

Impervious to the fluctuation in emigration rates were Volodya and Masha Slepak and Ida Nudel, who by the fall of 1979 were feeling the effects of life in exile. All three were in the frozen steppes on the southeastern reaches of Siberia, thousands upon thousands of miles and at least five time zones away from Moscow. The Gulag memoirs of Stalin's era are filled with descriptions of the dreaded
etap,
the name given to the arduous train trip east toward captivity. Not much about its dreadfulness had changed over the years. Volodya Slepak spent weeks in transit, staying days at a time in prisons along the route. Most of the other prisoners traveling with him were on their way to a special camp for tuberculosis patients. He was forced to share drinking water with them, along with the daily ration of black bread, two lumps of sugar per person, and salted herring. It was a miserable journey. The conditions in the overcrowded, guarded train car and in each of the local prisons were horrendous. Often they were allowed to use the train's toilet only twice a day. By the time they arrived in Sverdlovsk, the first major stop, the whole group had dysentery. At one point, Volodya heard two female prisoners loaded onto a separate compartment and then repeatedly raped. Twice a day, water was delivered to the prisoners through a hose that was shoved through the chicken wire that covered the windows of each car.

Finally, after a little over a month, he arrived in the Siberian city of Chita. From there he was taken to the remote collective farm, or
kolkhoz,
of Tsokto-Khangil, not far from the Mongolian border and fifty kilometers from the birthplace of Genghis Khan. The village was inhabited entirely by Buryat farmers and shepherds. The land was parched and flat, devoid of trees, and the grass was green only one month a year, in June. His job was to unload harvested wheat from trucks and fill the collective's silos. Slepak, fifty-one and accustomed to urban life, was very far from home. In a few days, he received a phone call from Masha. She too had been convicted of hooliganism but was given a suspended sentence and was still in the capital, preparing to join him. She called to tell him that Solomon Slepak, Volodya's Communist father, had died of a heart attack upon hearing of his son's exile. Volodya was allowed to return for the funeral, and when he made his way back to Tsokto-Khangil, this time with Masha, the brutally cold winter had set in. He began his new job as a stoker. Working in shifts of twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off, Volodya, sweating and stripped to the waist, shoveled coal into a giant furnace in the boiler room of the
kolkhoz
's garage to keep the jeeps and trucks from freezing.

The first year was an exercise in extreme patience. Especially for Masha. Unlike Volodya, she was free to come and go, but if they wanted to keep their
propiska,
their residence permit, for their apartment on Gorky Street, she could not stay away from Moscow for more than three or four months. So she made the five-thousand-mile trip many times. In Tsokto-Khangil, they found a small room that they slowly fixed up and made livable. They fought the extreme isolation by listening to a shortwave radio and watching a small television Masha had brought back from Moscow. Above his desk, Volodya pasted photos of friends: Tolya Shcharansky, Andrei Sakharov, and Ida Nudel. He got very ill that year, suffering from pneumonia during the endless winter when temperatures dropped to fifty below and only horses traversed the frozen plains. When spring came, Masha started a little garden on a plot given to her by local Buryat farmers, and there she grew carrots, squash, and potatoes. On her windowsill, in a cardboard box, she planted spices like dill, oregano, and garlic. Her one consolation was that now both her sons were in the West—Leonid had received an exit visa in April 1979. She marked off the days on a calendar and dreamed of her grandchildren. "Our life here resembles science fiction," Masha wrote in a letter to some Western friends in the last months of 1979. "We two are so alien to the environment here ... Time slips away. Heat, dust, stuffy air, flies, foul smells..."

Ida Nudel had it even worse. She was a woman alone. After enduring her own difficult
etap,
she arrived at the Siberian village of Krivosheino, a small settlement of two thousand people built on drained swampland near the Ob River. Dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, her long gray hair held back and big glasses covering half her face, Nudel was not the typical political exile. Unable to find a job that didn't require physical labor in the village, she was sent to an even more rural area three miles away, the site of a land reclamation project where she could work as a draftsman. There she was forced to share a barrack with a group of former convicts who were draining swamps. "What kind of little birdie flew in here?" one of them said when he first saw her. Locked in her room behind a flimsy wooden door and terrified she would be attacked, Nudel was completely isolated, her only consolation being that she hadn't been sent to a psychiatric institution like some dissidents.

She lived for letters from her friends and supporters. But she had decided—as a matter of principle—that she would not write back. She would not be complicit in "normalizing" her situation. Occasionally, she broke her own pledge, like when she contacted a friend in Moscow and asked him to bring her a puppy on an upcoming visit. She wanted some company (he brought her a collie). When the Leningrad hijackers were freed, they called her. She had spent years advocating for these men, sending food packages, taking care of their families, visiting them when she was allowed. Still she stubbornly kept the promise she'd made in an open letter written when she first arrived in Siberia, in September 1978: "I become silent, confident that you will not be silent. Don't turn to me but to my tormentors for information about me and then my suffering will have meaning and their victory over me will be uneasy and their revenge bitter."

On December 27, 1979, a Soviet ground force of about eighty thousand troops invaded Afghanistan. Though the Soviets insisted that this was meant to stabilize a chaotic political environment in which a weak Communist regime was facing a radical Muslim faction, it was perceived by the West as a unilateral move to gain control over the region's oil supply. Americans were reminded of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Afghanistan was a game changer for the Carter administration. Eager to appear tough in the face of Soviet aggression, Carter retaliated. He immediately instructed the Senate to put a hold on SALT II ratification. He would have to "assess Soviet actions and intentions" before allowing the arms treaty to move forward. Then he gave a speech to the nation in which he withdrew his offer of an extra seventeen million metric tons of grain that the Russians badly needed. There would be a halt to sales of high-technology products, such as advanced computers and oil-drilling equipment. No more cultural or economic exchanges (which effectively meant that a waiver for Jackson-Vanik was off the table). And Carter warned that the United States would boycott the 1980 summer Olympic Games if the Soviets continued their "aggressive actions."

The invasion was seen as a trust betrayed. Henry Jackson had railed against détente since its inception and wasted no time declaring its demise: "The theory that has animated American policy towards the Soviet Union over the last decade and under three administrations—that the Soviets, lured by a series of cooperative agreements, would match our concessions and reward our restraint—is dangerously and demonstrably false. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has shown that détente for us was an illusion, and the Soviet 'restraint' merely the absence of opportunity. And the political, economic and military policies developed to fit the theory that we have moved from confrontation with the Soviets to cooperation now lies in ruins." Jackson's vindication was tinged with sadness and a sense of failure. "What must they think of us in the Kremlin?" he wondered aloud.

If the Soviets
did
care about American public opinion, they were doing less and less to help their cause. Returning from his weekly Tuesday-afternoon seminar at the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences on January 22, Andrei Sakharov found his car commandeered by police officers and he himself driven to the state prosecutor's office. There, the Nobel Prize winner was read a decree from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, signed by Brezhnev, informing him that he was being officially stripped of all state honors, from his Hero of Socialist Labor awards to his many Lenin Prizes. He was being banished from Moscow and confined to Gorky, two hundred and fifty miles away, a closed military city off-limits to foreigners and journalists. Elena Bonner could join him. He was told to call her and tell her to be prepared to leave in two hours.

Sakharov had been untouchable. His status as a world-renowned physicist combined with his recent Nobel Prize made him seem immune to harsh treatment. But he had become increasingly vocal in the days following the Afghanistan invasion, calling for a withdrawal—"What is essential now is for the United Nations to convene and put pressure on the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan, not in any humiliating way, but as part of some arrangement whereby the strategic equilibrium in the region would be restored." This was too much, and in a meeting of the Politburo the following day, Brezhnev approved the exile. The animosity was palpable. Gromyko perhaps put it best, fuming, "The question of Sakharov has ceased to be a purely domestic question. He finds an enormous number of responses abroad. All the anti-Soviet scum, all this rabble revolves around Sakharov. It is impossible to ignore this situation much longer."