When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (79 page)

Anatoly Shcharansky's reception upon his arriving in Israel would have overwhelmed anyone, never mind someone who had just emerged from nine years of prison. It was a self-consciously historic moment, an international media event. After the Shcharanskys landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, Avital's brother, Mikhail Stieglitz, ran to the plane with a change of clothes—and a belt. Shcharansky soon emerged from the plane; he looked pale, his eyes were rubbed a raw red, and his hand clutched Avital's, but he seemed ready to face the massive audience that began changing "Tolya! Tolya!" The entire Israeli government was waiting on the tarmac to receive him. Shimon Peres, the prime minister, grabbed Shcharansky in a bear hug. Next came the open arms of Yitzhak Shamir, the right-wing vice premier, who was then in a power-sharing government with Peres. The rest of the cabinet waited patiently to shake his hand. The interior minister, a rabbi, lifted his hands over Shcharansky's head and started praying: "Blessed be thou, O Lord, who resurrects the dead."

After a phone call with Reagan, during which he thanked the president for his and the American people's commitment to his case and insisted, emphatically, that he had not been a spy, he was pulled along to the absorption hall of the airport. Hundreds of journalists and former refuseniks were in the crowd, and Shcharansky kept squinting into the bright lights and spotting people he knew. Robert Toth and David Shipler, two of his important Moscow journalist contacts, were there, beaming at him. So were Yosef Mendelevich and Hillel Butman, who had shared the cell adjoining his in the Chistopol prison. After the absorption minister handed him his Israeli ID card, and after Peres spoke—calling Avital a "lioness"—it was Shcharansky's turn. The entire world seemed to be watching to see if this longtime symbol—a touchstone for anti-Communism, for human rights, for Jewish pride—could live up to all the hopes that people had invested in him. Amazingly, Shcharansky had not lost any of the charisma or poise that had made him such an effective spokesman for the refuseniks before his arrest. When he got up to speak, he immediately commanded the room. He apologized for his stumbling Hebrew—which was nonetheless impressive given his years of isolation—and admitted that "there are some events in a person's life which are impossible to describe in any language."

Shcharansky talked of the shock of the past day. As he spoke, he held on to Avital's hand, and she laughed and wiped tears away. He tried to touch on the Jewish element of his fight, telling the enraptured room: "The very fact that this day has come is a strong indication of the justness of our cause. This successful struggle was possible because Jews everywhere in the world understood that the fate of Jews in any country is their fate, too." But he also emphasized that "compliments must go to those who struggle for human rights..." He searched for words, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. "You know, I dreamed many times while in prison of arriving in our land and there my Avital would be waiting for me. But in my dreams, whenever we began to embrace ... I would wake up in my cell. But I must add that in my dream I never saw as many people as I saw when it finally came true." He closed with words that Soviet Jewry and human rights activists were waiting to hear: "On this happiest day of our lives, I am not going to forget those whom I left in the camps, in the prisons, who are still in exile or who still continue their struggle for their right to emigrate, their human rights."

Even before Tolya and Avital arrived in Israel, the speculation about what would happen to them began. Her outward religiosity and now long affiliation with the hard-line greater Israel movement Gush Emunim seemed like a poor fit for a man who prided himself on being an intellectual and a defender of human rights, a follower of Sakharov. People wondered about their future as a couple. Shcharansky himself joked over the next days that "everyone is waiting either for me to put on a skullcap or her to take off her head-scarf." One of the people worried about them was the Leningrad hijacker Sylva Zalmanson, now living with her six-year-old daughter, Anat, and working as an engineer in Ashdod, an industrial town south of Tel Aviv. She listened to the news of Shcharansky's arrival on the radio and had flashbacks of her own reunion with Eduard Kuznetsov in 1979. She knew firsthand how hard it could be to rebuild a relationship after years of separation. She and Eduard had stayed together only long enough for her to become pregnant. Then he left. The years of prison had hardened the man she had met in Riga so long before, and he could not handle Sylva's love or her desire to settle down. In 1986 Kuznetsov was no longer living in Israel but working at the Munich station of Radio Liberty. She worried that Avital and Tolya might suffer the same fate. Watching them moments after they arrived, some observers focused on the way Avital pulled away from Tolya's public shows of affection.

It seemed everyone had a stake in Shcharansky's political and religious decisions. The anxiety underlined the singular position that Shcharansky—and the Soviet Jewry movement—had come to occupy in a Jewish world that was becoming increasingly fragmented ideologically. He was an important mascot for human rights advocates on the left who focused on his commitment to the Helsinki process. And he was a Jewish hero, the latest symbol of Jewish suffering, husband to a pious woman, herself redeemed, and possibly a recruit to the cause of messianic Zionism. He contained both. And until he opened his mouth he could represent everything to everyone. Yehuda Amichai, Israel's most beloved poet, watched the ecstasy of Shcharansky's arrival and worried. "I hope they don't ruin him," he said. "He's the last man who belongs to all of us."

This tension was evident from his first hours in Israel. After his address to journalists and friends, he walked outside to face a large public rally set up in front of the airport. The audience was made up of thousands of boisterous young yarmulke-clad men and long-skirted women from the West Bank settlements who were singing folk songs, like Shlomo Carlebach's "Am Yisrael Chai," and dancing a vigorous hora. In his speech to the crowd, Yosef Mendelevich, who had long ago joined this milieu, said that "only one community, the religious nationalist community," had come to greet Shcharansky. Swept up by the immense fervor, Shcharansky led them in the singing of a famous version of Psalm 133, "How good it is to be together, as brothers"
(Heene ma tov u ma'naim, shevet achim gam yachad).
They went wild, and Shcharansky could barely continue his speech. But the biggest applause came for Avital. She didn't hide her political alignment: "Just as Natan [his new Israeli name] has arrived, so will all Jews, from the Soviet Union, from America, from Europe, from everywhere. I call on the government to protect our entire country, not to give up one bit of it, so that all these Jews can build the country." The most climactic moment of the rally came at the end of Avital's speech when she slapped a large blue and white yarmulke on Shcharansky's head. A roar went up from the crowd. She and the screaming religious nationalists before her were staking their claim.

The big question for the Soviet Jewry movement as a whole—and those many refuseniks back in the Soviet Union—was whether this dramatic release augured a new era or was, as had happened in the past, just a small token meant to grease the wheels of diplomacy. This was impossible to tell. But whatever the Soviet Union intended and however complicated the path ahead for Shcharansky personally, the moment felt like a massive catharsis. People wept openly. Longtime activists who had become hardened by the immensity of what they were attempting and the dismal state of affairs were suddenly hopeful in spite of themselves. So much energy had been poured into the Shcharansky case, both in Moscow and among the American activists. His release came as one of the few moments of payback the movement had been afforded of late. Out of this small triumph it seemed possible that American Jews might just feel inspired again. They could see that their efforts—long years of pasting Shcharansky's face on posters, pacing in front of the Soviet mission, sending letters, and listening to synagogue lectures—could achieve a concrete, unequivocal victory. He was out.

Shcharansky seemed to understand, even in the daze of those first hours, that his freedom meant more than his just being able to hold Avital again. Once he left the airport, he and Avital were driven through the darkening Judean Hills to Jerusalem. They stopped on Mount Scopus, and he looked down at the lights of the Old City coming through the night mist. Little more than the golden Dome of the Rock was visible. He was taken down to the Western Wall. A large crowd was waiting for him, mostly yeshiva boys singing and dancing. He waded in and started to feel claustrophobic from the bodies massed around him. He resisted their outstretched arms until finally, unable to push them back, he gave in. Soon his body was hoisted up and he was being held aloft by what seemed like hundreds of hands. An ocean of Jews kept him afloat, moving him slowly closer and closer to the wall he had dreamed about so often and for so long.

I
DA NUDEL LIVED
in the small Moldovan village of Bendery, almost six hundred miles south of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. But she swore she could feel the effects of the radiation in the weeks after the catastrophic accident, which blasted fallout in such a wide radius it was found in Western Europe. One morning in early May of 1986, she woke up with a painful ache in her bones and difficulty breathing. Nausea and an unquenchable thirst followed. She soon learned what had happened on April 26 at the atomic reactor—only sixty miles outside Kiev. The Soviet media avoided reporting the full extent of the Chernobyl disaster for eighteen days, a period in which the panicked authorities sought mainly to minimize and obfuscate. That whole spring, Nudel, a pessimist at heart, saw contamination everywhere. The physical landscape of her exile seemed an expression of the despair and loneliness she felt. The leaves on the trees turned brown and fell off. Her collie, Pizer, was listless. The cherries that looked so temptingly red and bursting that year were a menacing sign of sickness and death.

The refuseniks didn't need to observe the handling of the Chernobyl incident to convince them that they were living under a deceitful regime. But for those who existed within the normal boundaries of Soviet society, the delay on reporting Chernobyl was shocking, the sign of a world in collapse. The big lie of this totalitarian system, which Soviet citizens had become so adept at living with, was slowly peeling away. And if Chernobyl was any guide, Gorbachev, for all his talk of openness, was turning out to be no different from the decrepit leaders before him. But this too was not surprising to the refuseniks.

In the spring of 1986, Volodya and Masha Slepak entered their sixteenth year of refusal. In March they had moved out of the rough-and-tumble Gorky Street apartment that had become so familiar to many Western visitors. Now they lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Vesnina Street, about a twenty-minute walk from the Kremlin. Volodya was working as an elevator operator in a large hospital. Alexander Lerner, now in his seventies, saw few visitors anymore. And sitting in the Chistopol prison in the Urals—where Shcharansky and Mendelevich were once inmates—was Yosef Begun, the Hebrew teacher, still serving the seven years of his third sentence. The other Hebrew teachers arrested on trumped-up charges in 1984, including Yuli Edelstein and Alexander Kholmiansky, were still in prison as well. The emigration numbers told an equally dismal story: in March 1986, a year after Gorbachev's ascension, only forty-seven Jews emigrated.

The refuseniks in Moscow and Leningrad continued to function as a community of internal exiles, but leaving no longer felt like a realizable goal. Instead, they focused increasingly on sustaining their own alternative world. They struggled to hold on to menial jobs as doormen and elevator operators. More than their activist supporters in the West, they were highly dubious that Gorbachev would bring change. They viewed his slick, friendly exterior as nothing more than a dangerous deception that would lull American Jews into forgetting about them.

The malaise of the refuseniks—not to mention the many Soviet Jews who wanted to apply but now saw no way out—was mirrored to some degree in Soviet society at large. The economy had been stagnating since Khrushchev's reign, the oil boom of the 1970s being the only exception. But the price of oil—on which nearly the entire economy hinged—was now in decline. From a one-time $40 dollars a barrel, the price had dropped to $15. The most basic consumer goods were in short supply. Standing for hours in long lines became a staple of Soviet life. When it came to the new computer technology rapidly advancing in the West, the Russians simply could not keep up. These economic difficulties, combined with the bungled handling of Chernobyl, helped dissipate the aura of Soviet authority and control that had for so long made the Kremlin seem invincible. You didn't need to be a member of the Politburo—in fact, it probably helped if you weren't—to understand that the vitality and dynamism that had characterized the Soviet world in the immediate post-World War II years was long gone.

Gorbachev had come into office believing that the key to resuscitating his dying empire was to ratchet down confrontation with the West. It was no longer affordable. Resources had to move to the domestic front. He began withdrawing from Afghanistan, and his push for a mutual reduction in arms—especially the elimination of Reagan's spooky Star Wars program—took on an increasingly desperate tone. In January of 1986, he announced his willingness to get rid of the SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles that had pushed Reagan to place dueling American Pershing missiles in Europe. Even more dramatic, Gorbachev wondered aloud about whether it was possible to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Behind these gestures—bold though they were—was a pervasive anxiety. The refuseniks and Jewish activists might have seen Gorbachev as another Soviet leader, but they couldn't hear his pleas to his Politburo comrades. He knew that something had to give. "If we don't back down on some specific, maybe even important issues, if we don't budge from the positions we've held for a long time, we will lose in the end," Gorbachev said at one meeting in 1986. "We will be drawn into an arms race that we cannot manage. We will lose because right now we are at the end of our tether."