When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (67 page)

Détente had collapsed, the lodestar of the dissident movement had been banished from Moscow, Jewish emigration was slowly coming to a halt, and the remaining refusenik activists were more embattled than ever. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in Chistopol prison, Anatoly Shcharansky and Yosef Mendelevich were trying to exchange a few words by speaking into their toilets.

In October of 1978, all the political prisoners had been moved to Chistopol prison at the edge of the Urals, and Shcharansky realized that Mendelevich and Hillel Butman were in the next cell over. He would bang with his tin cup against the wall, and then they would prepare the toilets for a few minutes of talk. They had found that by draining the bowls, a painstaking process that involved absorbing the water with a rag and then wringing it out into a bucket, the toilets could be converted into listening and speaking devices. Sometimes the three men were taken out to exercise at the same time in neighboring courtyards, and if the guards weren't looking they could throw a note over the barbed wire that separated them. Shcharansky got a few days of solitary confinement in the spring after he was discovered inserting a minuscule letter into a bar of soap that he left for his fellow Zionists in the washroom.

It was exhilarating to find that he was in jail with some of his heroes. He had made his first contact just two weeks after the end of his trial. The first prison he was taken to was the large complex in Vladimir, a structure built by the czars in the eighteenth century as a place to house insurrectionists. One day, as Shcharansky reached into the slot in his cell door to receive a bowl of soup, the prisoner tasked with delivering the food tucked a note into his sleeve. It was from Hillel Butman, offering welcome. Shcharansky was familiar with the story of the Leningrad hijacking. For years, he had written numerous petitions and attended many hunger strikes and demonstrations on their behalf. And now he was beginning a correspondence with Hillel Butman. They wrote in Hebrew so their words could not be understood if discovered, and the food servers, easily bribed with knickknacks sent from home, delivered the messages. In these long and detailed notes, Shcharansky explained what had happened in the eight years since Butman had been locked up. He told him about the movement that had flourished after his imprisonment, the great attention they had received from the West, the hundreds of tourists and the contacts with journalists, the organizations like the Union of Councils and the National Conference that had not even existed when Butman was arrested, the tens of thousands who had received permission to leave. Shcharansky told him about who was active in Moscow, who had been arrested, who was in exile (including Ida Nudel, whose constant correspondence with the hijackers had mysteriously stopped in June).

Not long after the move to Chistopol, Butman was released—in April of 1979. He called out "Shalom!" as he walked passed the row of cells, still unaware that he was on his way to freedom. Shcharansky still had Mendelevich. Over the past eight years, the fierce Zionist from Riga had remained stubbornly religious. The reason he was transferred out of a labor camp and sent to this higher security prison was that he insisted on observing the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays. Even here, in Chistopol, he sat in his cell every Friday night, lit a piece of string dipped in oil that he had purchased from the prison store, and recited the prayer for the beginning of the Sabbath. When Shcharansky once tried to pass him a note on a Saturday, Mendelevich reprimanded him for writing on the rest day, which only made Mendelevich's devotion more endearing. The authorities at Chistopol tried to prevent any physical contact between their political prisoners, so although they were able to secretly communicate, they had never seen each other. But one day in the winter of 1979, with the prison courtyard covered in thick snow, Shcharansky suddenly found himself facing another prisoner, a man in his thirties, who he sensed immediately was Mendelevich. The two men stood in the snow and silently embraced for a few seconds until the guards realized their mistake and pulled them away.

Knowing Mendelevich was in the cell next to his, praying, gave Shcharansky much strength. It had not been easy to adjust to life in the Soviet prison system. In the first year, he had lost more than twenty pounds. His daily food ration consisted of seventy grams of fish, twenty grams of sugar, and four hundred and fifty grams of bread. No fresh vegetables, eggs, or meat. He began having extreme pain in his eyes, and headaches from the constant artificial light in his cell. This made it hard to read for more than ten minutes or concentrate long enough to compose the one letter per month that he was allowed. After much lobbying, he was permitted to wear dark glasses. This at least allowed him to write to his family and Avital.

On January 21, 1980, the day after his thirty-second birthday and the day before Andrei Sakharov's arrest, Shcharansky received a telegram from his mother, Ida Milgrom. His father had died of a heart attack (Boris Shcharansky had been in Moscow and was on his way to a birthday party for his son at Alexander Lerner's apartment when he collapsed in a trolley car). Shcharansky lay down and wept out of helplessness and grief. When Mendelevich called out to him, he responded in Hebrew,
Avi met,
my father died. Mendelevich wanted to console his friend, and on a small piece of paper, he wrote the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourning. For the next two days, he tried to toss the crumpled note over the barbed wire into Shcharansky's courtyard. On the third day he was successful, and Shcharansky went back to his cell slowly repeating the words and thinking of his father—and the recklessly brave young Jew in the next cell.

Over the following weeks, Shcharansky began painstakingly reading a small book of Psalms that had recently been returned to him. The next time he wrote to his mother, he described how cathartic the process of translating the Psalms from Hebrew had proven to be:

The day after I received your telegram telling me of Papa's death I decided, in his memory, to read and study all hundred and fifty psalms of David. This is what I do morning till evening. I stop only to eat, take walks, do eye exercises, and glance at newspapers. What does this give me? First of all, it is quite tiring, it leaves me almost no energy for black thoughts and painful memories. Secondly, this study is very useful to me in several ways—learning the language is filling an enormous gap in my basic Jewish education. Thirdly—and this seems to be the main thing—as I read these verses, my thoughts return to Papa, to you, to Avital, to the past and the future, to the fate of our close and more distant family—but in a more general, more spiritual way. Gradually, my feeling of great loss and sorrow changes to one of bright hopes. I am denied the right to visit Papa's grave but when, in the future, I hear these wonderful verses, these lines that encompass the lives of all the Jews in Israel, and not only there, I shall remember Papa. It will be as if I had erected a memorial stone to him in my heart, and he will be with me all the days of my life.

Mendelevich and Shcharansky, the two martyrs, sat side by side but separated in their brightly lit cells, consoling themselves with Hebrew prayer—with the words of a tradition they had sacrificed almost everything to reclaim.

We feel like Lilliputians in the Swift novel.
The giants are playing with us.

ALEXANDER SLEPAK,
son of Vladimir Slepak,
October 13, 1986

T
O SURVIVE THE
mental strain of constant waiting, of existing as pariahs in the only society they had ever known, refuseniks built an archipelago. Mostly these islands were the small, private spaces of their cramped, book-lined apartments—though often with the faucets turned on or the radios blaring so that the bugs could not pick up their conversations. But no island was more important than the one in Ovrazhki. It was in this clearing in the middle of a forest thick with birch trees just thirty kilometers outside of Moscow that they could be themselves, Jews in the company of other Jews. They could almost forget, at least for a Sunday afternoon, how far they were from the country of their dreams. There was a strong outdoor culture in the Soviet Union. The vastness of the empire, from the shores of the Black Sea to the rivers of the Baltics and the mountains of the Caucasus, attracted Russian city dwellers whenever they were able to escape work. In 1976, this is what led a group of Moscow refuseniks to seek out their own piece of wilderness.

To get there they took the regional train in the direction of Kazan, got out at Ovrazhki station, and walked three kilometers. For the next couple of years, it was to Ovrazhki, as they came to call it, that they went every other weekend from May to October. This was where they would celebrate the holidays, building a bonfire for Lag b'Omer and a thatched hut on Succoth. They would come with bulging picnic baskets, lay out reams of white printout paper on which to place the food and sit, and eat. Someone always had a guitar and would play emotional Russian folk songs as well as Yiddish and Israeli music. They set up a badminton court between the trees. Boris Gulko, the chess grand master who had won the 1977 USSR Chess Championship and shortly after became a refusenik, sometimes showed up and challenged people to friendly chess matches. Mostly they danced, gossiped, laughed. On Jerusalem Day, the children hung handmade maps of Israel on the trees or dangled postcards of Jerusalem from the branches. Sometimes the events were organized, like a festival of Jewish songs that became an annual happening around Succoth. It was so popular that in 1980 more than a thousand people came to the amateur singing competition. For the children of refuseniks, Ovrazhki was a world unlike the one they knew in the city. There their parents seemed more at ease. They could practice their Hebrew without having to whisper. In 1980, a Torah exam was held under the trees for the children who had been attending a makeshift Sunday school. The boys wore yarmulkes too big for their heads and eagerly raised their hands to show the adults all they had learned.

Aside from the policemen who sometimes lurked in the trees, often ostentatiously filming the get-togethers, Ovrazhki went largely unbothered. But in 1980, what had been regarded as innocent was now seen as malicious. On the day after the third song festival, Natan Shvartsman, the refusenik and itinerant hiker who had discovered Ovrazhki and who organized many of the gatherings, was called in to KGB offices and threatened with arrest if he didn't stop going to the forest. In May of 1981, as the refuseniks were preparing to begin a new season of summer socializing, the KGB flooded the Ovrazhki train station with police officers and sealed off the clearing. KGB chief Yuri Andropov himself wrote a memo to the Central Committee about the effective stanching of this nefarious activity: "Assuming the role of leaders of the nationalists, Abramovich, Shvartsman and Prestin have been attempting to unite individuals of Jewish nationality by drawing them into various spontaneous circles for the study of Hebrew, into religious and so-called 'scholarly' seminars and into groups for 'artistic' activity. In order to achieve these goals, they plan to organize on a regular basis, under the pretext of cultural recreation, mass gatherings of Jews in the forests outside Moscow, and carry out their pre-arranged religious-nationalistic program, setting each meeting to coincide with dates in the religious-nationalistic [Jewish] calendar."

Andropov then described what was to happen in the forest. "Abramovich, Shvartsman and other nationalists intended to organize one such gathering on May 3 in the forest near the village of Ovrazhki ... To conceal the anti-social character of the gathering they arranged it to coincide with the commemoration by nationalistically-minded Jews of so-called Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day (the killing of Jews in the Second World War). In accordance with a program developed well in advance, the gathering was planned to attract about 1500 people." But Andropov assured them that the "Committee for State Security, with the active participation of the Soviet public, carried out a series of prophylactic measures, as a result of which the anti-social action of the nationalists was thwarted."

Andropov and the KGB were effective. Ovrazhki was no longer safe. Emigration numbers were in a free fall—from the high of 51,000 in 1979, they had dipped to 21,471 in 1980, 9,447 in 1981, and 2,688 in 1982. And now it was clear that the tiny social sphere the refuseniks had worked so hard to create would also be sunk.

The hammer fell hard in the early 1980s, and it seemed to smash everything. Antagonism reigned. The old men in the Kremlin were waging a war in Afghanistan, completely deaf to the protests of the West. More than sixty countries had boycotted the Moscow Olympics in the summer of 1980, but it seemed to make no difference to Soviet leaders. Dissidents all over the empire were flushed out of their apartments and thrown into locked cells. In December of 1981, the Polish government imposed martial law, crushing the prodemocracy Solidarity movement and jailing thousands. The Soviet leaders looked on with approval. The hostility did not emanate from Moscow alone. In 1980, the United States elected Ronald Reagan as president, the aging actor turned unabashed Cold Warrior who had run on a promise of returning toughness to American foreign policy. As soon as he took office, in the beginning of 1981, a robust confrontational style not seen for at least two or three decades took hold. There would be no superpower summits. Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador, was told that he would no longer enjoy the special privilege granted him by Kissinger of clandestinely entering the White House through the underground garage. He would now have to use the front door like everyone else. Reagan stated his intention clearly. He was not interested in managing the Cold War. He wanted to win it. And the first step was to tear down the Soviets' self-confidence. He started increasing defense spending, making Moscow compete just as the drop in oil prices was forcing them to confront a stagnating economy. And, in his most dramatic move, Reagan introduced the idea of a defensive missile shield based in outer space. The Strategic Defense Initiative—or Star Wars, as it was known—was effective more as a psychological weapon than as a program with any chance of success. But it scared the Soviets into considering that they might have to enter a whole new arms race, one they absolutely couldn't afford.