When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (81 page)

Two days after the conference opened on November 4, Eduard Shevardnadze dropped a bombshell. In an incredibly bold move intended to complete the image overhaul, he gave a speech presenting the Soviet Union as one of the world's leading defenders of human rights. It was Moscow that attached "paramount significance" to Helsinki's human rights provisions. Furthermore, Shevardnadze said, the world community needed to revisit the "unjustly forgotten" Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which should be regarded as the touchstone, a "fundamental document," to guide them as they tried to build a more peaceful world. Then he delivered the coup de grâce. He proposed an international human rights conference to take place in Moscow. All the Helsinki signatories would be invited to the Soviet capital. There they would be free to discuss and scrutinize one another's records. Shevardnadze kept the details vague, but there was no doubt he intended this proposal to completely change the conversation. At a press conference following Shevardnadze's speech, Anatoly Kovalev, a first deputy foreign minister, pleaded, "I want to convince this audience, I want you to believe, that great efforts are being made on humanitarian contacts."

But this was still the realm of rhetoric, and newly emboldened critics of the Soviet Union were relentless in pointing out the disconnect between the regime's words and its deeds. These critics were not just Soviet Jewry activists. As the conference opened, Helsinki Watch in New York issued a condemning three-hundred-fifty-page report concluding that Gorbachev had made a number of recent "gestures ... that may have obscured the government's continued and systematic violation of international human rights." As if to drive the point home, in the beginning of December—on the eve of Human Rights Day, no less—Anatoly Marchenko died at the Chistopol prison after a five month hunger strike. Marchenko was the barely literate son of railroad workers who had become one of the most well-known dissidents in the Soviet Union. He was the author of
My Testimony,
a damning samizdat memoir about his time in the Gulag that was later published in the West. Mostly as a result of his stubborn activism, he had spent much of his adult life in and out of prison or exile. When he began his hunger strike, he was in the fifth year of a fifteen-year term for anti-Soviet propaganda and was demanding a visit with his wife as well as the arrest of the prison guards who had beaten him to bloody unconsciousness in 1983. His death resonated around the world, threatening to make a mockery of the Soviets' sudden embrace of human rights. It was one more prod to Gorbachev to move beyond empty gestures.

On the evening of December 15, two engineers showed up at Andrei Sakharov's apartment in Gorky and told him they had come to install a phone line. As they were leaving, they said he should expect a call the following day at ten in the morning. The life of exile that Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, had been living for the past six years had prepared them for anything. The indignities large and small that they had suffered, compounded by health problems and the constant psychological terror of the ever-present KGB, had worn them down. Not only had they not had a phone for years, but the public phones in their vicinity had been disconnected. Radio-jamming devices had been placed on their front door. When Bonner was finally given permission to travel to the United States to treat her heart condition, they received an anonymous letter in the mail with photographs of mutilated faces. The eminent physicist was forced to carry a thirty-pound shoulder bag with him at all times that contained drafts of his memoir and his shortwave radio. KGB agents followed him constantly trying to steal it. Twice they succeeded, and he was forced to begin again. To protest his wife's deteriorating health, he went on a hunger strike and was painfully force-fed through a tube. And all this time, he had not stopped writing letters and sending articles and missives to the West. Bonner carried them with her on trips to Moscow until she was charged with anti-Soviet activity in 1984 and confined to Gorky as well.

When the new phone rang—at three in the afternoon, not ten in the morning—Sakharov found Mikhail Gorbachev on the end of the line. The general secretary informed Sakharov that his exile was over. He could return to Moscow. Elena Bonner's sentence was also overturned. Gorbachev listened with annoyance as Sakharov, not missing a beat, began listing
his
demands. The Soviet leader might have expected gratitude, but instead Sakharov referred to a letter he had sent Gorbachev in February calling for a general amnesty for "prisoners of conscience," all of whom were locked up or in exile because of their political or religious beliefs. The unusual call lasted only a few minutes, and Gorbachev did little more than listen. But it indicated, for the first time, concrete change. The Soviet leader was inviting the country's most celebrated and respected critic back to the heart of the capital, letting him know that he would now be free to say whatever he pleased.

Sakharov wasted no time. As soon as he stepped off train number 37 at Yaroslavl station in Moscow the following week, he launched into a tirade against the regime. Dressed in a gray parka and a large brown fur hat, and not a little overwhelmed by the crowd of more than two hundred journalists and friends who had massed there to welcome him after his eight-hour train ride, Sakharov got his bearings and then began criticizing the continued Soviet presence in Afghanistan, which he called "the most painful point in our foreign policy"—this was the same issue that had gotten him exiled in the first place. In the following days, he settled back into his old apartment and his office at the Academy of Sciences, and although protesting that he was too old and sickly to lead the dwindling army of dissidents, Sakharov managed to express himself on a wide range of topics. He had respect for Gorbachev and what he was attempting, he said. But he didn't think the Soviets should let arms negotiations hinge on the dismantling of the American Star Wars program. As a physicist who knew something about defense technology, he didn't think it would work anyway.

But what was most remarkable about Sakharov's return was how much Moscow had changed in the years he had been gone. In many ways, the argument for convergence between East and West that was at the center of his famous 1968 samizdat essay could be found in the language Gorbachev was now using. Sakharov understood immediately. "I think that the word 'dissident' may be losing some of its resonance," he told one reporter during his first days of freedom. "People are now expressing their opinion more freely and this brings benefit to our society. The sort of articles that are now appearing read like some of the declarations from dissidents that were issued in the 1970's and for which many of my friends were jailed."

The refuseniks and activists of Moscow had always regarded Sakharov as a kind of godfather to their cause, a protector. The authorities, ironically, had fantasized that it was the other way around—that what they called international Zionism was controlling Sakharov through his Jewish wife. There was a lot at stake in Sakharov's release, for the Soviet Jews especially. Almost immediately, they wanted to test whether this dramatic sign of change was indicative of a greater force at work. Before Sakharov's train arrived in Moscow, a small group of activist refuseniks gathered for a demonstration outside the main Moscow post office. They told the press that they shouldn't be taken in by what was just a "gesture of good will" and nothing more. But to the demonstrators' surprise, they weren't dispersed after a few seconds as usually happened. Instead, the plainclothes policemen kindly asked them to keep their demonstration on the sidewalk.

For months, Ida Nudel had been trying to contact Sakharov and Bonner, her old friends. But the call never went through. Then suddenly, once Sakharov's exile ended, she was allowed to speak with them both on the phone for ten minutes without interruption. Sakharov asked if she would come to Moscow to greet them on their return. Nudel wanted to, but she fully expected to be stopped and sent back to her village. Before she left, she sent telegrams to the interior ministers and prosecutors of the Soviet Union and Moldova reminding them of the Soviet constitution's assurance of the right of free movement. Once on her way, she couldn't believe there was no one following her or ordering her back. At the bus station, she looked around and was shocked to see not a single policeman. When she arrived at the airport, she went through her regular precautions, informing her friends in Moscow that she was about to board a plane and that if they didn't hear from her by three, that meant she was being detained. But soon she was sitting in her seat and the plane was on its way, cutting through the clouds. She realized how complicated the simplest of tasks had become, how easy it should be to just buy a ticket, board a plane, and fly somewhere. For so long now, each of these steps had been a small nightmare. At the Sakharovs' apartment, she drank tea with them and they talked about all their mutual friends, about her exile and theirs. But she couldn't get over how Sakharov had been transformed in such a brief time into a very old man. The lines on his face, the crooked back and large glasses, his voice just above a whisper. If change was indeed coming—and Nudel was beginning to believe it might be—she cursed all those shortsighted, ignorant leaders for waiting so long, for the wasted years that this decent man had been made to suffer for simply being honest.

Soviet Jews and their American supporters, from George Shultz to the Student Struggle activists, wanted more than just Sakharov's re-lease. They questioned whether Gorbachev would make the systemic changes that would almost certainly anger the hard-liners who dominated the elite ranks of the Communist Party, the KGB, and the military. How much was he willing to risk? Would he make the real concessions that the Soviet Jewry movement had been demanding for so long?

An initial answer came with the announcement that for the first time in its history, the Soviet Union was going to issue a legal code for emigration in the form of a decree from the Supreme Soviet. There would now be a formal process codified by Soviet law, which would go into effect January 1, 1987. This was, at the very least, a major ideological concession, a tacit admission that there were people who would choose
not
to live in the Communist paradise. But it also did away with a powerful psychological weapon of intimidation, used effectively for decades against Soviet Jews: arbitrariness. For this reason, the announcement, which came on the same day that Shevardnadze unveiled his country's surprising new commitment to human rights in Vienna, could not be seen as an empty gesture. It made the Soviet authorities accountable.

Nonetheless, the new rules did not exactly portend an exodus. The Soviet Council of Ministers, who formulated and adopted the decree in August, had basically codified the practices of OVIR, which refuseniks already knew well, and they'd even added a few more barriers. Emigration could be granted for the purpose of "reunification with members of one's family." But
family
was defined explicitly as direct relatives only—husband, wife, son, daughter, father, mother, brother, sister. Decisions on emigration would be made within a month, and no longer than six months for extenuating circumstances. Applicants would be informed why they were rejected. The decree listed nine pos sible reasons. But these were very broad. They ranged from the commonly used "state secrets" excuse to this vague explanation: "in the interest of insuring the protection of social order, health or the morals of the population." The new law was equivocal in many respects. Could someone be denied emigration indefinitely? Was there any way to challenge a rejection? How long could secrecy be used as a reason? The Soviet state still had ultimate power over the lives of its citizens. And though the new rules made Soviet practice explicit, they didn't change the central problem: a person did not have a right to emigrate simply because he wanted to leave. The only indication that the Soviets might be more flexible came in a small-print provision at the bottom of the decree allowing that emigration "may also be regulated by bilateral agreements between the USSR and other states."

To those who wanted to see Gorbachev as a different kind of Soviet leader, a real reformer, the emigration law offered a significant piece of evidence that this was the case. The man was willing to do more than change just the aesthetics of the Soviet Union. But to the increasingly vocal group of activists who would never trust any Soviet leader, it provided more reason to panic. The most vocal elements of this highly skeptical opposition were the recent Soviet Jewish emigrants to Israel. Yosef Mendelevich had already effectively organized a group of former refuseniks and prisoners into a powerful Jerusalem lobby that was pushing the Israeli government to take an uncompromising position in any dealings with the Soviets. But this hard-nosed approach got its strongest boost from Natan Shcharansky (his first name had been officially Hebraized). If Mendelevich had become the long-bearded holy prophet, willing to do or say anything to bear witness, Shcharansky had emerged as a much more politic and pragmatic figure, still the chess player, measuring his moves and angling for the most dramatic impact.

From the moment of his release, Shcharansky confidently established himself as the ultimate voice of authority on Soviet Jewry, a man with a large store of moral capital. His transition from political symbol to political activist was seamless. He was very conscious of remaining as independent as possible, refusing to be co-opted by one or another side of the movement. Israeli political parties and American Jewish groups wanted to sponsor his every move. But he did not want to be beholden to anyone. "Sometimes I have nightmares," he laughingly told a reporter. "Some of them are about the Soviet guards outside the punishment cell, but nowadays, I chuckle because some of them are about the heads of those Jewish organizations." If he had an proclivity it was for the grass roots, the Union of Councils and Student Struggle activists. He still remembered that during his activist days in Moscow, it was these American Jews who seemed to care most. Avital insisted that they were his true base.