When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (70 page)

The growing network demanded a constant replenishing of materials, and this became Kosharovsky's preoccupation. He ran what was basically an underground publishing house, churning out copy after copy of mimeographed Hebrew-language books and cassette tapes that could then be sent out to Odessa or Tallinn. He had a bank of typewriters and a handful of secretaries to copy the books, but he couldn't invent new material. So Kosharovsky's contacts with the Lishka became critical. They backed his efforts completely and looked for any opportunity to sneak books into the country. The Soviets themselves inadvertently ended up providing one of the richest venues for smuggling books in: the hugely popular Moscow International Book Fair.

Beginning in 1977 and then continuing biennially, the trade fair was one of the very few remnants of détente and brought publishers from all over the world to the Soviet capital to display their wares. The bibliophilic Russian intelligentsia was thrilled by the chance to see Western books otherwise forbidden to them. Predictably, though, the Soviets tried to control what was on offer. At the 1979 fair, forty-five books, including George Orwell's novels and anything with the word
Jewish
in the title, were seized, and Robert Bernstein, the head of Random House and the founder of a new human rights group in New York set up to monitor adherence to the Helsinki Accords, was not given an entry visa. In 1981, the previous bad press had caused a slight liberalization. Many more books were permitted, including an anthology of Russian literature that included verse by Andrei Amalrik and Joseph Brodsky, but a handful were still banned. Among the censored were the children's book version of
The History of the Jews,
by Abba Eban (though, strangely, the adult version was left alone); the
1981 Jewish Yearbook;
and Shmuel Ettinger's
History of the Jewish People.
The reason given by the authorities was that these were "works by renegades who have made a profession of slandering our life." Still, the stand of the American Association of Jewish Publishers and the Israeli pavilion had hundreds of books with Jewish themes. People waited in line for hours to get into the convention halls so they could grab these books, which the publishers fully intended to let them steal. The Soviet authorities saw this frenzy and stopped the distribution of ten thousand plastic records of Hebrew and Yiddish songs being handed out at one booth.

Kosharovsky coordinated with the Israelis to make sure he could take advantage of this opportunity to gather precious material. An intricate operation was set up in which his people repeatedly exited with book-filled bags that they then stockpiled in various locations. Arrangements were made to "steal" books at night as well. In this way, Kosharovsky was able to get as many as a thousand books out of the closely watched convention center. At the 1983 fair, although security had been tightened and nearly fifty books banned, the Israeli delegation still managed to leave hundreds of volumes in the Soviet Union.

Though teaching Hebrew was, by default, legal (there were no laws
against
it), the war on Jewish culture found its way to Kosharovsky and his rapidly expanding circle. By 1982, he was being followed everywhere. House searches and confiscations of material had become routine. A few times, he had been picked up and questioned. And the language of the KGB had shifted. The people Kosharovsky dealt with now seemed less restrained, more willing to threaten physical violence. One agent told Kosharovsky that if he didn't stop teaching, the KGB would break his arms and legs. When students of his—often just eighteen-year-olds from the university who had yet to apply for exit visas—began being questioned as well, he decided to go quiet for a while. By this point he could afford to stop teaching—the network would multiply without his help. And it was enough work just supporting the teachers he had trained. When they in turn started to be harassed, it was Kosharovsky who made sure they got some kind of legal aid, that their wives were cared for, that their cases got attention in the West. In this new, threatening environment, his role had changed from stimulating Hebrew culture to managing one crisis after another.

Leonid Brezhnev's infirmity had long plagued the Kremlin. When he finally died, in November of 1982, after years of falling asleep at summits and mumbling his way through speeches, the West was so eager for a reliable partner that the danger his successor posed was not initially perceived. Yuri Andropov had run the KGB since 1967 and had quit just six months earlier so that he could join the Politburo. Now, for the first time, a chief of the secret police would command the entire country. Still, there was hope in the West that he represented change. Despite the fact that he had overseen the recent crackdown on dissent, Western observers noted that he was "a witty conversationalist, a bibliophile, a connoisseur of modern art," and possibly even a "closet liberal."
Time
magazine quoted a KGB defector who had visited Andropov's five-bedroom apartment and seen an extensive record collection that included Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee.

The Jewish activists had no such illusions. They knew exactly what they were getting with this new leader. He had guided the institution that had harassed and interrogated and imprisoned them. It was at one of his first posts, as Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, that Andropov had learned how quickly revolution could flower from even the most innocuous beginnings. He vowed from then on to squash even the smallest disturbance, the tiniest instance of what he called "anti-social behavior." This was the same man who in 1975 had told the Politburo that it was "impossible at this time to renounce the criminal prosecution of people who oppose the Soviet system ... since these would inevitably lead to further unacceptable demands on us." In a speech in late December of 1982, a month after taking power, he laid out an ominous-sounding vision for how to solve the nationalities problem in the Soviet Union: "Our end goal is clear. It, to quote Lenin, 'is not only to bring the nations closer together but to fuse them.'" This fusion would not be voluntary.

Andropov was responding to more than just ideological pressure. The failure to transition to a postindustrial economy was beginning to take its toll—there was a strange irony in a state that produced more steel and cement than any other country but made its citizens wait in long lines for food and toilet paper. He could not afford any brain drain, and Jews still constituted the most elite class of technocrats in the country, despite quotas at universities and research institutes. Andropov hoped that if he built the wall even higher, stopping even the low level of emigration that existed, Jews might just accept their fate and work hard for Soviet society. To do this, he needed to persuade the vast majority of Jews who weren't in the movement that Zionism was evil. And he had to convince those refuseniks intent on making noise that they would pay for it.

Almost immediately a high-profile arrest was made. It was Yosef Begun, a tenacious man who had become a sort of mascot for the Hebrew teachers of Moscow. Begun was short and stocky with a high forehead and bushy eyebrows. He had a perpetually mischievous smile and appeared to his refusenik friends to be absolutely fearless. In refusal since 1971, he was aligned with the
kulturniki
but also acted fairly independently, teaching Hebrew and duplicating and distributing material on his own. His personal crusade—the act that got him arrested the first time—was his insistence that Hebrew teaching should be legally recognized. Since being fired from the research institute where he had worked as a radio engineer and received a doctorate, Begun had been supporting himself with Hebrew. And, like all other refuseniks teachers, he had taken manual-labor jobs so that he couldn't be accused of parasitism. Over the years, he had worked as a stoker, a porter, and a fireman. But in the mid-1970s, he began sending letters to the authorities demanding that his status as a teacher be officially recognized. He even wrote to the Finance Ministry asking to pay income tax on his earnings from private Hebrew classes. He was making a hundred rubles a month, a respectable living wage. However, every request was rebuffed. Without labeling the teaching itself as illegal, the bureaucracy spun him in circles. First, he was told he didn't have the proper papers. Then they said that since Hebrew wasn't taught on any curriculum in the entire country, he couldn't possibly be a tutor. Begun eventually made a bold move. He simply stopped working at any other job. It didn't take long; he was charged with parasitism in March of 1977, two weeks before Shcharansky's arrest. Eventually he was tried and sentenced to two years of exile in far-off Kolyma, the site of Stalin's most feared Siberian labor camp. But that was not the end of it. When he returned to Moscow, he was once again arrested and put on trial, this time for violating the strict residence restrictions for ex-convicts. Again the harrowing weeks of transport in a tightly packed Stolypin car with only bread and salty herring for food, a visit to the toilet once a day, and a crew of hardened criminals as companions. For three more years he lived in exile.

Begun made his way back to Moscow in 1981. When he was refused a
propiska
for the capital, he didn't fight it; he registered to live in the town of Strunino, fifty kilometers away. But this didn't stop him from seeing his old students and making contact with the refuseniks. In the fall of 1982, the KGB struck again. After a five-hour search at his girlfriend's apartment (Begun, a notorious ladies' man, had already been married twice), more than a hundred books and audiotapes were collected: Hebrew dictionaries, copies of
Jews in the USSR,
pamphlets about Israel. Begun was arrested but released after hours of questioning. Three weeks later, on November 6, as he returned from a trip to Leningrad where he'd visited Aba Taratuta, Begun was stopped at the train station. His bags were searched, and a couple of Hebrew and Jewish history books were discovered. In a few days, he was taken to Vladimir Prison, the vast czarist-era complex, and charged with the much-feared Article 70. The authorities were building a case of anti-Soviet agitation or propaganda, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of seven years in prison, followed by five years in exile.

Arresting Begun was a quick way of terrorizing the refuseniks, but the members of Andropov's regime wanted more. They wanted to go on the offensive with a public campaign that would challenge Zionism on ideological grounds, branding it unappealing and dangerous. Usually the war was waged in interrogation rooms at KGB headquarters or, as with the Leningrad hijacking and Shcharansky, in closed show trials where the activities of the Zionists were linked to terrorism or espionage, not challenged on their face. That changed with the creation of the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee in the spring of 1983.

The news of the group came on March 31, two weeks after the close of the Third International Conference on Soviet Jewry in Jerusalem. An article by the wire service TASS reported that eight prominent Soviet Jews were appealing for the formation of a group to expose the malevolent underpinnings of Zionism. This was an old trick. A small handful of "official" Jews were always kept on hand to speak in the name of Soviet Jewry. Some of them had been playing this role since Stalin's time. At the head of this group was David Dragunsky, one of the last high-ranking Jewish army officers, a seventy-three-year-old former tank corps officer who had fought in World War II and been decorated twice with the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. During the Doctors' Plot of 1953, just as rumors circulated about Stalin's plans for a mass Jewish expulsion to the east, a group of prominent Jews, including Ilya Ehrenburg, signed an obsequious letter reaffirming loyalty to the state and vowing to struggle against "Jewish millionaires and billionaires and their Zionist agents." Dragunsky's name was one of the first signatures. Now he was the author of an article appearing in
Pravda
the day after the TASS announcement. It was an attack on Zionism so vicious that it obliterated the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Zionism, Dragunsky wrote, was "a concentration of extreme nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, justification of territorial seizures and annexation, armed adventurism, a cult of political arbitrariness and impunity, demagogy and ideological sabotage, sordid maneuvers and perfidy."

The new committee's goals were clear: to attack Zionism in the most violent terms and to insist that most Jews were normal, well-adjusted Soviet citizens with no interest in emigrating. This also served the purpose of justifying the end of emigration (fewer than five hundred people had received permission to leave in the first half of 1983) and dissuading any refusenik from so much as humming an Israeli song. "The Zionist ringleaders try to persuade world opinion that a Jewish question allegedly exists in the U.S.S.R.," Dragunsky's letter proclaimed. "We vigorously protest against such concoctions. The Jews, citizens of the U.S.S.R., are part and parcel of the Soviet people."

This was followed by a coordinated flurry of articles and television segments focused on the misery of Jews who had left for Israel and the contentedness of the Soviet Jewish population. A three-part series in
Pravda
highlighted the story of an elderly woman, Berta Moiseyevna, who had decided not to join her daughter in the West even though she too had received an exit visa. "For me, a mother, it's difficult to understand why all these emigrations have become possible," Moiseyevna was quoted as saying. "They say it's for the reunification of families. I don't understand why it's necessary to abandon parents to be reunified with some mythical uncles or aunts. This is not reunification, but separation." A polemic against the teaching of Hebrew, "Caution: Zionism!," ran in
Leningradskaya Pravda,
calling it a form of "extreme religious fanaticism, chauvinism, the striving to force on Jews the idea of exclusivity, their having been selected as the 'chosen people,' their superiority over other nations, and consequently, to force upon them racial intolerance toward 'inferior' nations."