When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (55 page)

Never had the government responded with such raw violence. Slepak, Shcharansky, and Boris Chernobilsky, another prominent refusenik, demanded an audience with a government authority; incredibly, they were invited to meet with the minister of internal affairs, Nikolai Shchelokov. He denied any involvement with the physical assault, telling them he had only heard about it on the BBC and was as astounded as they were. "I would never permit beating," he told them. "If it were my affair, I would arrest the organizers." After half an hour the three left the ministry empty-handed—Shchelokov said he would review the case but refused to put anything in writing. They were met by a group of waiting protesters, now numbering more than forty. The refuseniks had pinned yellow cloth Stars of David to their jackets. They started marching. The group walked down Gorky Street to the sounds of jeering crowds and then back to the Supreme Soviet building, where they resumed their protest. That evening they were again put on buses and dumped at the edge of the city. More sit-ins followed during the next two days, culminating in the arrest of thirty protesters, all of whom were given fifteen-day detentions for hooliganism.

The authorities' heavy-handed response was widely reported. Jimmy Carter, the Georgia governor then in the last days of his campaign as Democratic candidate for president, felt compelled to send Slepak a cablegram through the American embassy: "I have read with great concern about the treatment that you and some of your colleagues suffered recently. As you know, I have spoken out on this matter as governor and during this campaign and have referred to your case by name. I want you to know of my deep personal interest in the treatment you and your colleagues receive."

During the following weeks of detention, it became clear that two of the refuseniks arrested that day, Chernobilsky and Joseph Ash, a young doctor, were not going to be released but put on trial for "malicious hooliganism," a charge that carried a penalty of up to five years' imprisonment. Dina Beilin, the keeper of the refusenik lists, quickly organized a defense committee on the model of Moscow Helsinki Watch. All the major refusenik activists, both
politiki
and
kulturniki,
took part. Beilin then put on a mock trial in Alexander Lerner's apartment. She invited Sophia Kalistratova, who was one of the most revered defense attorneys in Moscow and was sympathetic and often helpful to the dissidents, to make the case for the two men. All the material gathered that day, including details of the beatings, pointed to an abuse of Soviet law and the Helsinki Accords. The information was written up in a report and passed to the West through the committee's channels—Ludmilla Alexeyeva added a letter in support of the cause. Within days, on November 15, and to the utter disbelief of the refuseniks, Chernobilsky and Ash were released without trial on the grounds that they were both family men with no prior records. "It's unprecedented—I don't remember any precedent in our movement," Shcharansky excitedly told David Shipler.

This was the power of Helsinki. By the end of 1976, local Helsinki Watch groups were founded in the Ukraine and Lithuania. In January, Georgia Helsinki Watch began operating. Each of these offshoots engendered the same cooperation among varied dissident groups as the original in Moscow had. In these remote cities, collaboration was even more critical, as many of the refusenik activists were vulnerable and working in total isolation. In Lithuania, for example, members were mostly persecuted Catholics, but Eitan Finkelshtein, an active refusenik, played a central role.

For all its success—the committee produced eighteen reports from May 1976 to February 1977—Yuri Orlov and his fellow members knew it was only a matter of time before the government made its move. In the first weeks of 1977, this foreboding grew. Shcharansky experienced the pressure in a very physical way. The number of KGB agents assigned to him had increased, and he often had as many as half a dozen men in suits trailing him as he ran around Moscow. When he hopped in a taxi, they usually followed in their cars. Sometimes he would get stuck riding with them in elevators. Shcharansky, typically, tried to joke about the situation, insisting that his tails split the cab fare on those occasions when they actually jumped in along with him. But it was becoming clear that the refuseniks had finally struck a nerve. The scene of a small man in a leather coat followed by a swarm of black suits might have been comical, but it was also a sign that the regime was reaching a point of desperation and was trying to zero in on the source of its troubles.

Not all the refuseniks in Moscow supported Shcharansky's involvement with the democrats. While most of the
politiki
hitched themselves to Helsinki and the rhetoric of human rights, the
kulturniki
continued to reject direct confrontation with the authorities. The circle that surrounded Alexander Voronel and helped him start his journal
Jews in the USSR
and the weekly scientific seminars had only become more entrenched in their thinking. Even though the two sides of the movement had reconciled and were civil toward each other, they continued along separate tracks.

At the beginning of 1975, Jackson-Vanik had failed to live up to its promise of ensuring sixty thousand exit visas a year and a release of Zionist political prisoners. The two groups again diverged in their approaches. The
politiki
began searching for other levers to pull, like Helsinki. The
kulturniki
turned inward. Not only had Jackson-Vanik failed to deliver, but the number of Jews leaving for Israel was decreasing every year. And the problem was not just stricter emigration. Fewer Jews were applying. According to the
kulturniki,
this was because the great mass of Soviet Jewry had no knowledge about Israel or their own Judaism. They were not being sensitized. If the
kulturniki
didn't do something soon, it wouldn't matter whether the Soviet Union allowed them to leave. No one would go.

This had been Alexander Voronel's preoccupation. After Voronel received an exit visa in 1974, Vladimir Prestin, a member of his group, took over many of his responsibilities and pushed the
kulturniki
even further in this direction. A lanky, athletic man with a dark goatee, Prestin had grown up sharing a room with his grandfather Felix Shapiro, author of the only state-commissioned Hebrew-Russian dictionary, which had been published in the 1950s. His earliest memories were of falling asleep in a tiny apartment filled with books in Hebrew and Yiddish. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet were ingrained in his mind from a young age; his scholarly grandfather gave private lessons to KGB operatives who needed Hebrew so they could spy on the Israeli consulate. Prestin didn't become an activist immediately after his refusal, in 1971. He started giving classes in rudimentary Hebrew, a language he himself was just learning. Using a manuscript of a beginners' Hebrew textbook he'd discovered among his grandfather's papers, he set up shop in his minuscule apartment. Ida Nudel was one of his first students.

It wasn't until the end of 1974 that he decided he needed to do more. He was motivated by a trend that was beginning to trouble refuseniks and roil their community of supporters in the United States and Israel: an increasing percentage of Jews who left the Soviet Union did not end up in the Jewish State. In Vienna, their first stop in the Western world, many abandoned their Israeli visas and presented themselves instead as refugees bound for America or European countries. In 1975, the magnitude of this trend registered for the first time. Nearly 37 percent of emigrating Soviet Jews took this option, double the amount of the previous year. Confronted with this declining interest and in some cases clear disdain for Israel, some refuseniks felt personally betrayed.

Mark Azbel, the physicist and
kulturniki,
later described his own reaction: "When people who expressed these strong patriotic sentiments turned out to have America or England or Western Europe as their destination, we were not only disillusioned; we were humiliated. The very possibility of anyone leaving the Soviet Union was due to the heroic efforts of Jews who dreamed of Israel, who sacrificed their liberty, and in some cases their lives, to build the road to freedom. In our opinion, those who rejected Israel cast shame and mockery upon the memory of those people."

For Prestin, the solution to the dropout situation, as it was called (or
neshira,
in Hebrew), was to reject the path of the
politiki.
Refuseniks had a responsibility to do more than just help themselves and the prisoners. They had to be more expansive in their thinking, addressing the two million Soviet Jews who had absolutely no connection to their identity. The motivation was practical as well as ideological. If the movement continued to overlook this problem, one of two things would happen: either there would be fewer and fewer demands for exit visas and the Soviets could justify shutting down emigration altogether, or a majority of departing Jews would head to America, allowing the Soviets to argue that Jews were not interested in family reunification but in capitalism.

In 1975, Prestin found a kindred spirit in Dr. Benjamin Fain, a physicist who was based at the Institute for Chemical Physics in a town just outside Moscow and who was a regular attendee of the weekly scientific seminars. Together, Prestin and Fain decided a few innovations were in order. First they introduced a new samizdat journal,
Tarbut
(the Hebrew word for "culture"), which would be more accessible than
Jews in the USSR
and include explanations of Jewish holidays, recipes, and calendars with important religious dates. Aware that they were trying to reshuffle the movement's priorities at a time when attention was focused on the protests and press conferences of people like Slepak and Shcharansky, they needed a forum where they could make their case to the world. In March of 1976, they came up with the idea for an international Jewish symposium. Planning for the event, which would take place at the end of the year, consumed them. Throughout the summer and fall, with help from a few sympathetic Western supporters, they invited experts from around the world and the Soviet Union—even the Soviet minister of culture—to submit papers in two areas, the "present situation of Jewish culture" and "future prospects." The symposium would have a completely nonpolitical tone. Fain's invitation made this clear; there was no mention of the word
emigration.
The focus was on "preserving and reviving Soviet Jewry," and they hoped that on this basis they might be given a small space to maneuver.

They even tried to involve the
politiki,
going to the most respected name among them, Alexander Lerner. The éminence grise of the refUseniks agreed, but only if he could present a paper—eventually titled "Emigration or Culture: Which Is More Important?"—that opposed the emphasis on Jewish culture. Lerner conceded the
kulturniki's
point that "we cannot wash our hands" of those Soviet Jews who were rapidly assimilating. But, he argued, making Jewish culture the focus of the movement would give the Soviets a chance to offer a superficial solution to their Jewish problem, quieting criticism with a few token concessions, and might even lull activists in the West into thinking that everything was all right: "A misapplied orientation in regard to priorities of aims and objectives could result in the Soviet Union receiving from the West a series of important privileges (preferential credits, technology, the status of most favored nation, etc.) in exchange for ephemeral steps in the direction of liberalization in the attitude of authorities towards dissemination of Jewish culture in the USSR, while the problems of freedom and free emigration for those who have linked their fate with that of their people will remain unsolved."

Fain and Prestin included Lerner's paper, but they couldn't have disagreed with it more. It was not enough, in their minds, to focus on emigration. The state had to be forced to open up a space for Jewish life. Otherwise it would be impossible to cultivate the emigrants of the future.

As the symposium approached, it became clear that the authorities were intent on crushing it. The apartments of all the organizers were raided and any material related to the meeting was confiscated. Fain stood by, nearly in tears, as his research and books were dumped into a bag. The invited foreign guests were all denied entry visas, told there were no available hotel rooms in Moscow. Activists traveling to Moscow from other Soviet cities, such as Riga and Leningrad, were taken off trains or detained in KGB offices. As a sarcastic
New York Times
editorial put it, "It seemed at times as though all the non-nuclear forces of the Kremlin had been mobilized to halt this fearsome threat against Soviet power."

On the morning of December 21, the day of the symposium, Fain stepped out into the snowy street with his wife; he was trying to remember his opening statement, the text of which had been confiscated from his apartment the day before. Two men, one in a police uniform and one in a suit, came up to him, grabbed his arm, and escorted him to a black Volga, leaving his wife standing on the sidewalk. The same thing happened to dozens of other organizers and speakers. They were either picked up on the street and detained or placed under house arrest for the week. Some form of the gathering did, however, take place that day. The wife of Grigory Rosenshtein, one of the detained refusenik speakers, led a handful of people, including Sakharov and Elena Bonner, to her apartment, the designated secret meeting spot for the symposium. Of the forty speakers slated to present their work, only two were present. Seven papers were read, two of which were by the absent Rosenshtein, one about the history of Jews in Europe and one about Jewish mysticism. Periodic loud knocks on the door punctuated the proceedings, and more than a dozen policemen stood downstairs in front of the building, but the refuseniks continued until the end of the day, content with their small triumph.