When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (54 page)

In early October, Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, providing an incredible boost to the demoralized democracy movement and validating his views on Helsinki. The award's citation read: "In a convincing fashion, Sakharov has emphasized that the inviolable rights of man can serve as the only sure foundation for a genuine and long-lasting system of international cooperation." For the Soviets, this was another ideological attack from the West. Sakharov was cursed daily in the Moscow newspapers, a "Judas" whose Nobel Prize was his "30 pieces of silver." He wasn't even allowed to travel to Oslo—the Soviets refused to assure his safe return—and Elena Bonner, then in Italy receiving her long-denied cataract treatment, accepted on his behalf.

The promise of Helsinki remained out of reach for Soviet Jews. In the six months after the document was signed, not one prominent refusenik was given an exit visa, and in all of 1975 fewer than twelve thousand Jews left the Soviet Union, a third of the peak number in 1973. In February of 1976, a headline in the
New York Times
admitted, "So Far, the Helsinki Accords Have Not Opened Soviet Doors." Still, Shcharansky, now working closely with Sakharov, saw possibility in Helsinki. In September of 1975, Shcharansky had recorded a Rosh Hashanah greeting to American Jews that was smuggled out and played at many synagogues. In it, his preoccupation with Helsinki was evident, as was his frustration: "Every time the Soviet Union undertakes new international obligations, such as the Helsinki Accords now, the authorities do their best to frighten all the people who can make use of them..." This certainly seemed to be the case. To mark the six-month anniversary of Helsinki, the Communist Party's Central Committee ran a four-thousand-word article in
Pravda
leaving no doubt as to how they would deal with anyone who dared criticize the regime's human rights record: "Our law proceeds from the fact that just as slander smearing the good name of one person is punishable, so is slander towards the entire society—social defamation—punishable."

Then, in March of 1976, Shcharansky came up with a way to make Helsinki work for both the democrats and refuseniks. His first sounding board was a dissident he had been tutoring in English, Yuri Orlov. Orlov was a small man with a large cloud of bushy red hair (which earned him the nickname Angela Davis); his troubles with the authorities began in 1956 when as a young physicist he wrote a letter in support of Khrushchev's infamous denunciatory secret speech. The letter was deemed overzealous. In 1976, Orlov had only recently returned to Moscow after spending sixteen years of self-imposed exile twelve hundred miles away, in Yerevan, Armenia, where he had become an expert on particle acceleration and had been elected a corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Not long after he returned, Orlov wrote another letter, this time to Brezhnev in support of Sakharov. He was promptly fired from his new job as a senior scientist at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Dissemination of Radio Waves and became a full-time dissident. He even started a branch of Amnesty International in his apartment.

Orlov's interest in human rights made him a natural partner for Shcharansky, who was eager to share his idea. It was simple: encourage citizens in the West to bypass their governments and form grass-roots committees to monitor how well their own countries and those in the Communist bloc were complying with the Helsinki Final Act. If this took off, Shcharansky thought, such a monitoring group could be formed in the Soviet Union with less fear of suppression. Orlov took POLITIKI AND KULTURNIKI a long time to think about it. A few weeks later, he came back with an even bolder proposition. He hesitated to give the job of monitoring their own societies to people in the West, since he doubted they cared enough about human rights to follow through—at the time, Europeans seemed most interested in nuclear disarmament. If the dissidents wanted to see Helsinki taken seriously, they should monitor it themselves. "We should stop wasting time convincing people to talk and start instead to collect and share facts about human rights abuses," Orlov told Shcharansky.

As they both knew, any nongovernmental group was de facto illegal in the Soviet Union, never mind one whose objective was to embarrass the authorities in the eyes of the world. But even if it only survived as a publicity stunt, the idea of a committee that would monitor implementation was compelling. Orlov chose an official-sounding name, the Public Group of Assistance to Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement in the USSR, and began making his case to others. By May, he had recruited eleven highly regarded dissidents. Sakharov, the obvious choice to lead the group, said he preferred to stay on the sidelines. But Elena Bonner joined, as did Sakharov's private secretary, Alexander Ginzburg, the long-bearded dissident and former prisoner then busy administering the Prisoners' Aid Fund started by Solzhenitsyn before his exile (subsidized from the sale of
The Gulag Archipelago).
Shcharansky enthusiastically became the group's Jewish representative. Along with him was Vitaly Rubin, a gaunt, good-humored scholar of Confucian philosophy. When Rubin unexpectedly received an exit visa a month later—he had become a cause célèbre in the international Sinology community—he was replaced by Shcharansky's good friend Volodya Slepak.

On the morning of May 12, 1976, Orlov was close to finalizing a formal declaration of purpose when he got a summons to appear at KGB headquarters. He sensed a preemptive strike in the works. Sakharov called an AP reporter to his apartment and hastily put together a press conference to announce the group's formation. The group, Orlov explained, would function as a sort of fact-finding team. Soviet citizens could bring written complaints to them, and they would also compile their own reports on "direct violations of the articles." Copies of their research would be sent to all the signatories of the Final Act. The press conference had begun at ten thirty at night and it went on past midnight. Orlov was sure the KGB would be looking for him in the morning. So he returned home, got in bed, turned out the lights, and then climbed out his window and went into hiding. He wanted the new group to exist for at least a few days before the inevitable occurred.

Orlov's and Shcharansky's pessimism about the group's viability was warranted, given all that had transpired. But Moscow Helsinki Watch, as it became popularly known, turned out to be an enormous success. On the surface, there was nothing radical about the group's mission. Over the past decade, the airing of human rights violations had been the main focus of the democracy activists, and the
Chronicle of Current Events
had been their primary instrument. Since the early 1970s, Valery Chalidze had advocated using international treaties and Soviet law to hold the regime accountable. What made Moscow Helsinki Watch different was not its philosophy but its application. The principles laid out in the Helsinki Final Act and adopted by the Soviets provided cohesion to the human rights argument. Dissidents could refer again and again to this one document. They could quote from it. They could own it.

From the moment the news of the group's founding was broadcast on international shortwave stations, people from all over the Soviet Union began tracking down members of the committee, sometimes traveling great distances to get to them. Orlov called them
khodoki,
an old Russian word meaning "walkers." On May 18, the group presented its first report, an examination of the legal case against a Crimean Tatar who was being tried for his nationalist activities. The next report came just a few weeks later and looked at the KGB's disconnection of phone lines and confiscation of mail to refuseniks and dissidents, activities in direct violation of Helsinki.

A steady stream of reports followed, about two a month, covering a wide range of Final Act infringements. The tone was always dispassionate, with hard facts and little rhetoric. For example, one report about living conditions of political prisoners examined their extremely low calorie intake (fourteen hundred a day, compared to the World Health Organization's mandated three thousand) and came to this conclusion: "The Group's information on the Soviet penal system ... indicated that the Soviet administration has committed gross violations of Article VII, Section 1(a) of the Final Act.... The Group believes it is necessary to form an international commission to study these alleged violations, beginning with torture by hunger and torture by confinement in punishment cells ... The Group is prepared to turn over all relevant documents to such a commission."

Orlov originally wanted each report to be no longer than a page and a half. And the first one was. But a certain inclination toward long-wind-edness took over, and the second was twice as long. The third report, the summary of the conditions of political prisoners, was twenty-eight single-spaced pages, including footnotes and a table breaking down the nutritional components of one day's worth of meals. The task of reproducing all these pages at least forty-five times (one for each of the thirty-five signatory countries, nine for reporters, and one for their own archives) fell to Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a longtime dissident who had worked for the
Chronicle of Current Events.
She coordinated with an underground samizdat press that employed ten full-time typists. Copies of the first few reports were sent directly to the Moscow embassies of the signatory countries with return receipts requested. Only the receipt from Brezhnev's office was returned. After six lost reports, they began using journalists and diplomats to transmit their work to the West. And their targets became more precise: specific countries and organizations that would publicize their findings.

Through his work on the committee, Shcharansky became a central, indispensable figure. By 1976, he had formed deep friendships with Western journalists—some of them were even willing to use the U.S. embassy's diplomatic pouches to ferry books and other materials. The most fruitful of these contacts was Robert Toth, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter. Toth gave Shcharansky an education in dealing with Western journalists; he explained the demands his editors placed on him for stories beyond the dissidents'. So rather than becoming frustrated each time Toth ignored some twist in the tale of a particular refusenik, Shcharansky gave him other leads, helping him cover, in particular, the Soviet space program, a personal interest of Toth's. For a journalist working in the Soviet Union, living in a walled-off compound and fed only the official line, this was a chance to find out what was really happening. Shcharansky led Toth to important stories and acted as his translator, so Toth found ways to thank him.

Shcharansky's celebrity in the West received a boost on June 14, 1976, when the documentary film
A Calculated Risk
was shown on television in Britain. Two months earlier, a British production company called Granada had managed to sneak out footage of Shcharansky in his leather jacket slunk down in the front seat of a car and talking into a clunky microphone. He was giving a reporter a refusenik tour of Moscow, including a quick stop outside KGB headquarters. There were shots of Shcharansky with Slepak, his big beard spilling over his turtleneck, chatting together in the back seat. The two came across as charismatic and eccentric, a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza team, though with a slightly more disheveled air. In the last shot of the film, their faces are weary as they walk off into the cold mist of a Moscow winter morning. The film was seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Shcharansky had acted as a guide for countless Western tourists, and now he was the warm, open face of the refusenik movement for a much larger audience.

Baptists, Russian Nationalists, Crimean Tatars, Zionists, and Pentecostals, among many other Soviet citizens, bombarded Moscow Helsinki Watch throughout the summer and into the fall of 1976. Strangely, the authorities showed restraint. Although followed constantly and frequently harassed by KGB agents, the Helsinki Watch monitors were largely left alone to collect information for their reports. And so the work continued and even grew more ambitious. In October, Ludmilla Alexeyeva went to Lithuania to look into the story of seven boys who had been expelled from their school in Vilnius for attending Mass and becoming friendly with Viktoras Petkus, a Catholic dissident who had just completed sixteen years in labor camps. Shcharansky and Slepak drove four hundred miles south of Moscow to investigate the strange story of an undiscovered rural community of a hundred and thirty Jewish families who lived and farmed together as a kolkhoz, or collective farm. Ethnically Russian, the community had mysteriously converted to Judaism generations before and were long settled in a forest in the region of Voronezh, faithfully practicing Jewish tradition (and even traveling six hundred and fifty miles to the Caucasus to have their sons circumcised). They had been left to themselves, hidden and peaceful, until the 1960s when their collective, Ilynka, was absorbed by three other Russian villages. The story of the community and of how the chairman of their new, consolidated collective farm was preventing their emigration to Israel made up the ninth Moscow Helsinki Watch report.

It wasn't long before the refuseniks learned the power of this approach. On the morning of October 17, after a night of dancing the hora in front of the Moscow synagogue for the annual Simchat Torah festivities, a handful of refuseniks decided to stage another demonstration inside the Supreme Soviet waiting room. As usual, their demands were ignored. When the office closed for the day, at five thirty in the evening, uniformed policemen arrived, loaded them onto three buses, and then dropped them off in a forest fifteen miles outside of Moscow. Undeterred, the protesters returned the following day. The police once again took them away in buses, but this time they left them farther out, forty miles from the city. When the buses stopped, it was dark and the refuseniks were afraid to get off, imagining an ambush. The policemen, many of whom were wearing the red arm badges of the volunteer militia, started kicking and punching them, forcing them out of the buses and even throwing some of them into the water-filled ditches that lined the road. For the next half hour, they were chased through the forest and beaten by the police. David Shipler of the
New York Times
interviewed the group that night after they'd walked a few miles to a nearby town, taken a train back to Moscow, and gathered in Slepak's apartment. Slepak, who had been with the group, described how his fingers were smashed as he tried to hold on to the bus. "Then I was kicked on the back and the head," he said. They all remembered one plainclothes leader of the police crew, who they thought might be KGB, warning his men not to beat the Jews in the face. Nevertheless, Shipler observed many bruises and at least one broken nose.