When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (17 page)

I am a Jew. I want to live in the Jewish state. That is my right, just as it is the right of a Ukrainian to live in the Ukraine, the right of a Russian to live in Russia, the right of a Georgian to live in Georgia.

I want to live in Israel. That is my dream, that is the goal not only of my life but also of the lives of hundreds of generations that preceded me, of my ancestors who were expelled from their land.

I want my children to study in the Hebrew language. I want to read Jewish papers, I want to attend a Jewish theater. What's wrong with that? What is my crime...?

***

I am not asking for mercy. Listen to the voice of reason: Let me out!

As long as I live, as long as I am capable of feeling, I will do all I can to leave for Israel. And if you find it possible to sentence me for it, all the same, if I live till my release, I will be prepared to go to the homeland of my ancestors, even if it means going on foot.

Less than a week after he posted the letter to the Kremlin, on December 4, Kochubievsky was summoned to the local KGB bureau. It wasn't his first visit. In the weeks since the Babi Yar incident, he had been questioned many times and asked, sometimes politely, other times more firmly, to desist from his provocations. But this time, there was no conversation. Almost as soon as he arrived, Kochubievsky was put into a black Volga and driven to Kiev's local mental institution.

The Six-Day War affected Jews all over the Soviet Union. Very few went to the lengths that Kochubievsky did or suffered his fate. But, to varying degrees, the war instilled in thousands a new and unfamiliar sense of pride. They felt a subversive joy in the fact that their own people, derided and ridiculed as they often were in Soviet society, had triumphed over this vainglorious power and its allies. Some of them felt for the first time that there was value in belonging to the Jewish people, that it didn't have to be only a line in a passport that weighed one down. The victory upended Soviet propaganda, which had painted Zionism as sinister and Jewish defeat as imminent. In a matter of a month, the weak colony in a hostile desert became a muscular and powerful nation.

The war also changed the political relationship between Israel and the Soviet Union. On the morning of June 10, the day of Kochubievsky's factory speech in Kiev, a note addressed to the Israeli ambassador was delivered to Israel's embassy in Moscow: "The Soviet government declares that in light of Israel's continued aggression against the Arab states and its flagrant violation of the decisions of the Security Council, the government of the USSR has taken the decision to break off diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel."

With that, nineteen years of shaky but consistent diplomatic relations (broken off only once, after the 1953 Doctors' Plot) came to an end. A day later, the Israeli flag was lowered and the delegation flew home. The Dutch embassy took over responsibility for Israeli interests—it was to this embassy that Kochubievsky had gone to submit his documents in Moscow.

In the months before the war, there had been a small increase in exit visas—a jump from the 891 who left in 1964 to 1,406 in the first half of 1967. This had mostly to do with an incident in December of 1966, when Premier Aleksei Kosygin, the most liberal of the troika then running the Soviet Union following Khrushchev's ouster, was asked at a press conference in Paris by a correspondent from UPI if he could possibly give Jewish families separated by the war "any hope of meeting, as was done for many Greek and Armenian families." After shaking off his annoyance at the question and insisting that there was no problem of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the premier made the following unprecedented statement: "We, on our side, shall do all possible if some families want to meet or even if some among them would like to leave us, to open the road for them, and this does not raise here, actually, any problem of principles and will not raise any." After his comments were reprinted—strangely, they appeared in
Izvestia,
one of the state-run newspapers—hundreds of Soviet Jews bombarded the Office of Visas and Registration (OVIR). Many carried copies of the article in their hands. But this brief increase in visas—most still went to elderly or sick people the state didn't want anyway—ended as soon as the war began. In the remainder of 1967, after the Israeli delegation left, only 116 Jews were allowed to leave.

And yet, at the same time, the burst of energy provided by the victory increased the hopefulness of those few active Zionists and made more Jews curious about their Jewishness and Israel.

On November 17 of that year, Yuri Andropov, who had only recently been appointed head of the KGB by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, wrote a memo to the Soviet leadership describing the alarming trend of young Jews massing before the synagogues on Simchat Torah. The gatherings had been taking place for years, but this Simchat Torah, just months after the Six-Day War, was particularly joyous. In what remains one of the best contemporary descriptions of the scene at the Moscow Choral Synagogue that October, Andropov wrote, "The autumn Jewish religious holidays have attracted a large number of citizens of Jewish nationality who, for the most part, are not believers or regular congregants. They come to the synagogue as a sort of club where they can meet with relatives, acquaintances and conclude various deals (speculative, marital, change of apartments, etc.)."

He noted that "these holidays are celebrated by young people of college age" and that on Simchat Torah, "several thousand individuals of Jewish nationality attended including students of several faculties of Moscow State University, the Moscow Auto Transport Institute, the V.I. Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers and other Higher educational institutions in the capital." The popularity of the synagogue gatherings could be "partially explained," he said, by pointing to

the intensifications of Zionist propaganda on the part of foreign centers and the Voice of Israel radio station, which calls on Jews "not to forget Judaism, and to struggle against assimilation, for the purity of Jewry." Infected with Zionist ideas, nationalistically inclined individuals from among Soviet citizens try to take advantage of religious gatherings at the synagogue to stir up nationalistic sentiments. They talk about the need for Jewish solidarity, express their sympathies for the state of Israel, and try to stir up nationalistic feeling among the youth.

Based on observations compiled by informers, Andropov's memo goes on to describe, in some detail, what took place on that Simchat Torah:

Individual instigators organized a performance of Jewish songs and dances near the synagogue. Nationalistic calls were heard, such as: "Long live Dayan!," "We'll go to Israel, machine gun in hand!," "Long live the Jewish student body!," "Long live the Jews!"...Ia. I. Bogomol'nikov, a scientific worker who was present at the gathering, declared in a closed circle of young people: "If in the Soviet Union the situation were different, i.e. if there were more Jews than Russians, then we would, in fact, crush the goyim." Then he went on: "What would the Soviet Union do if there were no Jews? Think of the losses Soviet science, technology and culture would suffer."

Andropov ended with the caveat that "such provocative actions of individuals are not supported by the fundamental mass of those in attendance, but neither are they met with any active resistance." His official recommendation was that the activities of those "instigators" should continue to be "monitored and documented" by the KGB, and that the Komsomol organizations at the universities should "intensify educational work among students who are exposed to Zionist influence."

But that "Zionist influence" only expanded following the Six-Day War. In Leningrad,
ulpanim
began functioning regularly in the fall of 1967. The first one took place in a rented dacha in a distant suburb of Leningrad with no more than a dozen students. In order to justify the group's presence, leaders drafted a note explaining that these were ill children who needed fresh country air. Half the day was devoted to studying—Hebrew and Jewish history—and the other half to skiing. Everyone took the lessons very seriously, and exams were even given at the end. But the dacha was not winterized, so the students spent much of their time just sitting around the large ovens trying to stay warm. They read samizdat together, three or four people peering over the shoulders of a single person holding up the mimeographed pages.

Butman and Dreizner held another
ulpan
a month later, also in a large, freezing dacha on the outskirts of Leningrad. Butman was happy to see that the university students, even if they weren't exactly picking up Hebrew, were enjoying one another's company. They sat close together to stay warm. They ate all their meals as a group, sang songs, and looked at the slides of Israeli postcards on the wall of the dacha. One of Butman's objectives was to create a community, and this was beginning to happen.

After that first fall, a more regular
ulpan
began with a schedule that paralleled the school year's. Starting in September, the group would meet in various apartments in Leningrad. Students quickly transformed into teachers: those who knew fifty words in Hebrew were soon teaching those who knew only five. Already by the end of 1967 there was another group of four added to the original two cells of the Zionist organization. These were all young men from Kishinev who were studying at the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad. The original organization had decided to stop meeting as a group—it was too risky—so they created a central coordinating committee with one representative from each cell. This way, contact among the groups would be minimal.

An active but less structured group of Zionists had existed in Moscow since the late 1950s. But it was Yasha Kazakov, a twenty-year-old university student, who captured the post-Six-Day War spirit when on June 13, 1967, he publicly renounced his Soviet citizenship. This was unprecedented. A few months before the war, Kazakov, a stocky bulldog of a man, had barreled his way past policemen into the Israeli embassy. Once inside, he told a member of the embassy staff that he had no family in Israel but desperately wanted to leave the Soviet Union. The Israeli staff member signed a document inviting him to emigrate, a
vyzov,
but said that it was up to Kazakov to figure out how he was going to get out. The officials at the Moscow OVIR laughed at Kazakov when he presented them with the invitation. He had no chance. Once the war started and it became clear that the Israeli delegation was going to be kicked out, he grew desperate and wrote his letter to the Kremlin declaring that he was no longer a citizen of the Soviet Union.

Like Kochubievsky in Kiev, Kazakov shocked and confused the regime by taking such a public stand. He was called many times to the Moscow KGB headquarters and asked to repudiate his statement. The authorities threatened to draft him into military service. But when almost a year later, in May of 1968, Kazakov saw no change in his situation, he wrote another letter, this time addressed to the Supreme Soviet: "I, Yakov Iosifovich Kazakov, a Jew, born in 1947, residing at No. 6 Third Institutskaya St., apt 42, Moscow 2R-389, renounce Soviet citizenship, and, from the moment that I first announced my renunciation of USSR citizenship, that is, June 13, 1967, I have not considered myself a citizen of the USSR."

"I am a Jew," he wrote, anticipating Kochubievsky's letter to Brezhnev later that year. "I was born a Jew and I want to live out my life as a Jew. With all my respect for the Russian people, I do not consider my people in any way inferior to the Russian or to any other people and I do not want to be assimilated by any other people." His words were harsh and combative:

I do not wish to be a citizen of a country that arms and supports the remaining fascists and the Arab chauvinists who desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and to add another two and half million killed to the six million who have perished. I do not want to be a collaborator of yours in the destruction of the State of Israel because, even though this has not been done officially, I consider myself to be a citizen of the State of Israel (the more so as I possess an invitation for permanent residence in the State of Israel). On the basis of the above, I renounce Soviet citizenship, and I demand to be freed from the humiliation of being considered a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Kazakov was gambling that his bombast would force the Soviets to resolve his case one way or another. They'd send him to jail or they'd allow him to leave for Israel, and either option, he figured, was better than his interminable state of limbo. But first he needed publicity. He tried desperately to get his letter to the West, stuffing copies in the mailboxes at the British embassy and stopping tourists to ask in broken English if they could take his statement out of the country. Eventually a copy did make it out. And on December 19, 1968, the
Washington Post
ran an article headlined "Jew Living in Moscow Hits Regime" that included excerpts from it. Within a week, a friend told him she had heard his name mentioned on a Voice of America broadcast. Kazakov told his mother that this was it, the regime would now be forced to do something. He was headed to either Israel or Siberia. He hoped that his lack of connections to other Zionists, compounded by the amount of attention he had managed to generate, would make it easier for the country to just get rid of him. But this had been Kochubievsky's calculation as well, and he was now sitting in a Kiev mental hospital.