When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (73 page)

F
OR KREMLIN WATCHERS
in the West, no public event was more revealing than a Red Square funeral. How were the members of the Politburo arranged? How big were the crowds? How much crying was permitted? As the goose-stepping honor guard made its way down the wide concrete expanse of the square, stopping to fire off a salute in front of Lenin's tomb, professors, think-tank analysts, and State Department workers pressed their faces close to their television screens so they could discern the slightest twitch in the monolithic Soviet face. The death of seventy-three-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, on March 10, 1985, the third Communist leader to expire in as many years, offered yet one more chance to dissect the ritual. Few signs, however, pointed to any deviation from the past. If one wanted to, one could make much of the fact that, unlike at the ceremony for Brezhnev or Andropov, the decorated generals of the Red Army were seated a rung below the civilian leaders. Otherwise, the same blank-faced delegations of farmers and factory workers marched past with the same kinds of placards, this time ones bearing Chernenko's equally impassive visage.

But the Kremlinologists' eyes were trained not on the rank and file but on the newly appointed general secretary of the Communist Party. Saving the day from farce was this new leader, a radical departure from the gerontocracy that had been ruling the empire. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was the Soviet Union's trump card. At fifty-three, he appeared more modern and pragmatic—and certainly more educated—than any Soviet leader before him. The stout man in a tailored blue suit with a prominent wine red birthmark on his bald head represented a huge generational shift, the portent of which was still unclear as he stood atop Lenin's tomb.

The American delegation present that day consisted of Vice President George Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz. They stood for two hours watching the ceremony. Shultz had decided they should place themselves right behind the Pakistani prime minister in order to express their joint opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As for what he thought of the new Soviet leader, Shultz was reserving judgment. The rest of the world seemed to be swept up in a wave of premature hopefulness based on the very little that was known about Gorbachev. He had come of age after Stalin—joining the Communist Party only in 1952—and had grown up as an average Soviet citizen in the rural Stavropol region of southern Russia. His first job was driving a tractor. One of his grandfathers had spent nine years in the Gulag. He had risen through the Party ranks by gaining the confidence of influential mentors who pulled him up—the most important being Yuri Andropov, who had designated him his heir. By the time power was bestowed on Gorbachev by a Politburo eager for a fresh face to present to the world and its own citizens, he knew the system from the bottom up. The hope was that he might also be clear-eyed about its shortcomings.

So far, though, the impression of modernity had been bolstered more by style than substance. On a trip to England the previous December, his wife, Raisa, had worn a fashionable outfit one evening—a white satin dress and a pair of gold lamé sandals—which suggested to those who wanted to believe it that the Soviet Union was headed in a completely new direction. Unlike the dry, pedantic Gromyko, Gorbachev seemed to intuitively understand how to engage Western leaders. He showed he could be self-deprecating and pensive. More than anything he actually said, these surface qualities were what prompted Margaret Thatcher to stamp him "a man with whom we can do business." After the funeral of Chernenko, the attending world leaders took turns meeting privately with Gorbachev, and they all came away with a similar feeling. As German chancellor Helmut Kohl put it succinctly after his tête-à-tête, unlike the past Soviet leaders, Gorbachev did not give you "the impression that you are listening to a Tibetan prayer wheel."

It was nearly ten o'clock in the evening when Shultz and Bush were ushered into the Kremlin for their meeting. The secretary of state, though cautious, had much riding on Gorbachev. In the newly re-elected Reagan administration, his was the voice of pragmatism, and he was advising the president to look for opportunities for contact with the Soviets. The more neoconservative elements, such as Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense, and William Casey, director of the CIA, had started seeing Shultz as the enemy. For the neocons, the Soviets simply weren't to be trusted. As far as they were concerned, there was still only one way to fight the Cold War: by continuing the policies of Reagan's first term, increasing America's defense spending to such an extent that the Russians would be buried. As Shultz's conciliatory approach began resonating with Reagan—now secure in a second term and thinking about his legacy—the neocons became even more oppositional. The president had in fact recently sent Shultz to Geneva to begin arms reduction talks with Gromyko, a breakthrough after four years of unadulterated enmity. And though these discussions had commenced only in January, there seemed to be enough goodwill to move toward a new détente. A fresh leader like Gorbachev could add new energy, bolstering Shultz's position, or he could prove Weinberger and Casey right.

Because Bush was taking the lead in the meeting, Shultz could sit back and observe. The first thing he noticed was that Gorbachev talked extemporaneously, without notes. This was already a departure. Gorbachev's mind seemed agile, and his tone was friendly. He presented, in direct language, the most far-ranging analysis of foreign policy Shultz had ever heard from a Soviet leader. But Gorbachev was not saying anything strikingly new. Only the packaging was different. When it came time for Bush to speak, the conversation hit its first snag. The vice president brought up the issues of Soviet Jews and human rights. He spoke about specific cases. He asked about Sakharov and Shcharansky—and also about the imprisoned Hebrew teachers. He mentioned Yosef Begun. "Understand," Bush told him, "this issue is extremely important to the president and the American people." For the first time, Gorbachev looked irritated. He mumbled something about maybe appointing rapporteurs to examine how the United States itself "brutally suppresses human rights." Then his defensiveness turned into the usual Soviet dismissal as he said that he "did not think this was an appropriate subject for discussion between our two states."

Shultz left the meeting impressed with the man but unsure about what it all might mean. As he told the press the following day, "Gorbachev is different from any Soviet leader I've met. But the U.S.-Soviet relationship is not just about personalities." Most observers agreed. The appointment of Yuri Andropov had raised similar hopes. Maybe his love of jazz would somehow translate into different policy? But he turned out to be just as obstinate as his predecessor. Writing in
Time
magazine days after the Chernenko funeral, Strobe Talbott, one of the more respected of the Kremlinologists, observed that Gorbachev might bring more "dynamism and pragmatism," but "he will put those qualities to work in the service primarily of competition, not conciliation." He might be someone with whom the West could do business. But, Talbott added, "it is the same tedious, difficult, sometimes dangerous business as before—the business of managing a rivalry with a country that is too powerful to fight but too inimical to appease and often too insecure to accommodate."

For the Soviet Jewry movement, there was nowhere to go but up. Over the past four years, emigration figures had plummeted to almost zero. In all of 1984, astonishingly, only 896 Jews had been given exit visas, the lowest number since 1969. Just five years earlier, in 1979, 51,000 Jews had left, a number that now seemed fantastical. It was generally agreed that there were about 10,000 to 20,000 long-term refuseniks and—according to the Lishka's figures—somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 Jews who had requested invitations from Israel and either had never received them or were too scared to apply. Because of the successes in the 1970s, American activists had come to expect that every year would bring better news and higher numbers. This optimism had been totally sapped. Not only was no one getting out, but reports for the last few years had pointed to an atmosphere of unremitting oppression. Hebrew classes had been shut down. Yosef Begun was at a labor camp in Perm. And half a dozen Hebrew teachers had been arrested in the past year alone. As Martin Gilbert, the historian and Soviet Jewry activist, told an audience in Cape Town in April of 1984: "There is no doubt that the situation is grim today, that expectations so sharply aroused in the past decade are now derided and abused and that Soviet Jews are given the explicit signal, 'You will never be allowed out of the Soviet Union. You will be buried next to your parents, here in Russia.'"

The White House, for its part, was continuing to be supportive of the movement. But with the words
evil empire
still fresh from Reagan's lips, it was hard to see where an opening could be found, how it would be possible to edge the relationship out of pure antagonism. If anyone was trying to change the dynamic, it was George Shultz. His appointment as secretary of state in the summer of 1982 introduced a strong counterbalance to the neoconservative worldview, which perceived even a cocktail conversation with the Soviets as a form of appeasement. American Jews worried about Shultz at first. They looked at his background and his coolness and wondered if he would prove to be as committed to their cause as the president was. The son of a Wall Street banker, he was born into affluent Manhattan society, became a football star at Princeton (he was so devoted to the school that he had its mascot, a tiger, tattooed onto his backside), and as a Marine saw action in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, Shultz received a doctorate in industrial economics from MIT and eventually became dean of the University of Chicago's business school. Nixon brought him into public life, first appointing him secretary of labor, then director of the budget office, and eventually secretary of the treasury (he had traveled to Moscow to negotiate trade agreements in the middle of the Jackson-Vanik fight). When Reagan offered him the secretary of state position, he was working for Bechtel, the giant global construction company, and teaching part-time at Stanford. A physically large man, Shultz was known as self-confident and generally easygoing.

As it turned out, he was also a stronger supporter of human rights than the activists could have dreamed. But coming from a business background and being less ideological in outlook, Shultz approached the relationship with the Soviets very differently from his predecessors. Freedom was a rhetorical weapon for Reagan; for Shultz it was actually a goal to be achieved. He wanted to move beyond the public reprimands, which he thought did little other than humiliate the Soviets, and enter into more aggressive quiet diplomacy. Within a few months of taking office, he initiated the first meeting between Reagan and a Soviet official—an informal chat at the White House with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, in early 1983, the same month as the "evil empire" speech. Reagan talked for two hours, almost entirely about human rights, about the problems of refuseniks and prisoners of Zion. And the meeting had a tangible outcome. The president wanted to resolve the issue of the seven Pentecostal Christians (actually Russian Orthodox Old Believers) from Siberia who had been living in the basement of the American embassy in Moscow since 1978. The group had rushed past the guards, and the Americans felt compelled to give them asylum. Reagan asked that something be done for these families, and he promised in exchange not to take credit or brag if they were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. A few weeks after the impromptu meeting, all the Pentecostals left the embassy and their exit visas were approved.

This was the first sign for Shultz that Reagan wanted to move beyond rhetoric—to escape from the box his neoconservative staff had placed him in. Now, with a landslide reelection behind him, Reagan was intent on being remembered as a president who achieved peace. Having established during his first term of fierce words and little action that he would not easily abandon his bona fides as a Cold Warrior, he now wanted to find room to maneuver. He would engage from a position of strength if the right Soviet leader came around. Whether or not Gorbachev was that leader was still unclear.

Soviet Jewry activists were waiting as well. For them the questions were straightforward. Would Gorbachev play by the rules they had laid down in the 1970s and understand that the road to better relations went through emigration? The future of the movement, not to mention the fate of Soviet Jews, depended on the answer. And it couldn't come quick enough. The stagnation of the early 1980s had not served the movement well. For a cause to have momentum, success—even on a small scale—must seem attainable. The Soviets had cut off this oxygen. As a result, the fervor that had characterized the early years had dissipated.

At the same time, paradoxically, the plight of Soviet Jewry had finally become completely integrated into American Jewish life. The movement became an institution. Bracelets engraved with the names of "Prisoners of Zion" were popular accessories—even Reagan had one, with Begun's name, though he kept it on his desk instead of on his wrist. Solidarity Sunday was a regular fixture; every spring at least a hundred thousand people turned out to march in Manhattan. American politicians competed fiercely to be included on the list of speakers. No Passover Seder was complete without a "matzo of hope" and a special prayer for refuseniks. In 1985, an extremely successful national program paired up thousands of Jewish boys and girls approaching the bar or bat mitzvahs with a Soviet Jewish "twin" who was barred from participating in the rite of passage. Standing on the bema, the thirteen-year-old American Jew recited the name of the distant Russian teenager at every step in the ritual. The movement even found its way into pop culture. As early as 1976, it was the punch line of a joke on
Saturday Night Live.
Gilda Radner, in character as the elderly, hard-of-hearing Emily Litella, peered over her granny glasses and opined about issues she had misheard, such as the problems of "endangered feces" (species) and "violins on television" (violence). Litella began one rant,"What's all this fuss I hear about saving Soviet jewelry?" In order for the joke to work—and for the audience to laugh as hard as they did—people had to know the cause whose name she was mangling.