When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (56 page)

Fain, Prestin, and the others were soon released and suffered little personal retribution (Fain was even given an exit visa six months later, in June of 1977). But the destruction of the Jewish symposium itself taught the
kulturniki
and the wider refusenik movement an important lesson. The Soviets were not going to allow any sliver of unsanctioned Jewish cultural expression. They saw little distinction between the Hebrew teacher toiling away in his apartment and the hunger striker sitting down in the middle of Red Square. Both were manifestations of Jewish nationality and both presented a threat to Communist ideology. But despite the symposium's failings, the
kulturniki
had made their point: the problem of how to inspire more Soviet Jews to choose emigration—and emigration to Israel in particular—was not going away. With the number of dropouts increasing by the month, the concerns of this group no longer seemed so irrelevant.

The image of Vladimir Slepak moving in slow motion on Soviet primetime television on January 22, 1977, ushered in a new phase in the life of the movement. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were shown an hour-long documentary titled
Traders of Souls,
which told a conspiratorial tale of lies and deceptions. In the process, the state did the unthinkable, providing the faces, names, and even addresses of four leading refuseniks for members of the public to do with as they pleased. When the camera zoomed in on the bearded Slepak hugging a visiting Israeli athlete at an international competition in Moscow, the voice-over intoned, "How can it be that Zionist cadres were allowed to form inside the Soviet Union?"

The film was a classic example of Soviet propaganda. The refuseniks saw it as a terrifying sign that the authorities had very few remaining boundaries. A response of sorts to the British film featuring Shcharansky,
Traders of Souls
tried to make two arguments. First, it presented the Jews who had immigrated to Israel as having been lured into a trap. Using crude techniques like staged scenes and cartoons, it showed the miserable existence of Jews who had left and were now clamoring to get back to the Soviet Union. The film even presented what it called "Zionist abuses of the Helsinki Accords," referring to emigrants who had left their parents behind when they went to Israel. "This is separation of families, not reunification of families," the narrator insisted. Even more perilous was the depiction of Jewish activists as Western agents out to undermine Soviet society. Slepak and Shcharansky were mentioned by name, as was Yosef Begun, a Hebrew teacher close to the
kulturniki.
A still shot of a check made out to Begun, one of many that was often sent to refuseniks in need, appeared on the screen. The refuseniks' addresses were then displayed while the narrator warned, "These people are all soldiers of Zionism within the Soviet Union and it is here that they carry out their subversive activities."

It seemed Brezhnev had had enough. In the first few weeks of 1977, all the dissident forces in the Soviet Union, from democrat to refusenik, began to feel the vise tightening. At the beginning of January, three weeks before
Traders of Souls
aired, most of the apartments of the Moscow Helsinki Watch members were searched. When he heard the knock on his door, Yuri Orlov quickly tried to dump important documents into the oven and down the toilet. The KGB agents who finally broke down his door found him sitting calmly in a room filled with smoke and the smell of incinerated paper. At Ludmilla Alexeyeva's, linen bags filled with Helsinki Watch reports and other samizdat were carted off. After a bomb exploded in a Moscow subway station on January 8, killing seven and seriously injuring thirty-three, the official press insinuated that the dissidents were responsible.

Shcharansky's apartment wasn't searched with the others in early January, but the film and the media articles supporting its message (like one in
Ogonyok
headlined "The Espionage Octopus of Zionism") was proof that the government was on the offensive. So was the increased number of KGB agents that surrounded Shcharansky, which, he joked, had transformed them from a "tail" to a "box." Tolya told his friend the reporter Robert Toth, "There is always anti-Semitism among people in this country and as a Jew you learn to sense it. But now it is at a very much higher level than normal. Everyone in buses and subway are discussing these films and articles. It smells of pogrom." The refuseniks tried to fight back in the immediate aftermath of the film. Shcharansky filed a formal legal complaint in the local people's court, arguing that the film "distributed information that did not correspond with reality and that constituted an insult to my civil honor and national dignity." He demanded a retraction of the "slanderous information" and insisted that it be presented "in the same way the information was distributed." All through the first half of February, those refuseniks featured in the film tried to sue the state television company, to no avail.

It was hard for Shcharansky to focus on the film, because while this was happening, the leaders of Moscow Helsinki Watch were disappearing one by one. On February 3, Alexander Ginzburg was arrested as he stood at a phone booth outside his apartment. In charge of Solzhenitsyn's prisoners' fund, he handled and distributed tens of thousands of rubles. Now he was being accused of currency speculation. The same day, the KGB came looking for Orlov. He tried to hide, first in a village two hundred kilometers south of Moscow and then in Ludmilla Alexeyeva's apartment, but he was finally arrested on the morning of February 8.

A day later, Shcharansky visited Alexeyeva. He was concerned about what would happen to the Helsinki monitors now that their leader was imprisoned. His experience with the bickering refuseniks had taught him that a strong personality like Orlov's could sometimes hold an otherwise fractious group together. Alexeyeva gave him something to eat and the two talked for the first time about their own paths to dissidence. Shcharansky explained why he had embraced his Jewish identity. "I would like to be tall, curly-haired, and broad-shouldered. But, instead, I'm short, bald, and pudgy. So I have to be the best of what I have. Same with being Jewish. I had to make the best of it." When he met Sakharov and the other dissidents, he told her, he discovered that he could "be proud not only of being a Jew, but also of being human." Ludmilla Alexeyeva was forced into exile in the West at the end of February.

Shcharansky saw the Helsinki group destroyed in just a few weeks. The bonds that he had formed with others in the group during a period he called the happiest in his life were shattered. He felt increasingly targeted. The number of KGB agents following him was growing, and though he tried to fight it, the sensation that he might be next never left him. He just hoped that he could approach the moment as resolutely as possible, without fear or weakness.

That moment finally arrived on March 5, when he opened
Izvestia
and saw a stunning denunciation of him by a fellow refusenik, Sanya Lipavsky. A kindly, soft-spoken, gray-haired doctor with a mysterious past in Uzbekistan, Lipavsky was well known in the activist inner circle. A former neurosurgeon, he had access to medicines and could sign prescriptions, which proved very useful. He checked Alexander Lerner's blood pressure almost every day. Lipavsky also had a car, a black Volga, which was unusual for the average Soviet citizen, even a doctor. But the refuseniks never questioned his identity. In the hectic early months of 1977, Shcharansky was looking for a new apartment and Lipavsky, ever helpful, said that he had just found one for himself and would be happy to share it. Shcharansky moved in that February, but within days, Lipavsky disappeared. Only after his betrayal did people like Dina Beilin look back and see the subtle signs that should have tipped them off—a moment when he was caught in a lie, his strange omnipresence, his reluctance to talk about his past. The refuseniks had always assumed their circle was teeming with informers, but they knew they would lose their sanity if they started letting themselves be led by every suspicion.

Lipavsky's story was more tragic than the refuseniks could have known. His relationship with the KGB began in the early 1960s when he sold his soul to save his father's life. They were living in Tashkent at the time, and both Lipavsky's father and father-in-law were accused of stealing huge quantities of expensive fabric from a textile factory where they worked as engineers. The men turned on each other, and the father-in-law produced evidence that would have resulted in a death sentence (the penalty for "economic crimes") for Lipavsky's father. Lipavsky eventually found his way to the local KGB office and offered to make a deal: he would become an informer if his father was spared. The KGB agreed, and blame was pinned on the father-in-law instead, who was later executed (Lipavsky's wife left him soon after). His father received a ten-year sentence. It took a decade for the KGB to extract its full payment from Lipavsky. They asked him to infiltrate the refuseniks, which he did with charm and obsequiousness. And that wasn't all. In 1975, the KGB had Lipavsky present himself as a walk-in to CIA agents operating in Moscow and offer to provide information on Soviet technology based on what he said were his contacts in the scientific community. It was unusual for the CIA to employ such walk-ins, given that they were mostly undercover KGB agents. Aware of the risk, the Americans decided to string him along and see what would come of it. After nine uneventful months, they let him go.

Of course, Shcharansky and the other refuseniks knew none of this when they saw Lipavsky's denunciation in
Izvestia.
"It was not easy for me to write this letter, but after thinking long and hard, I arrived at the conclusion that I must do this," he wrote. "Perhaps [it] will open the eyes of those who are still deluded, who are still deceived by Western propaganda that shouts from the rooftops about the persecution of 'dissidents' in the USSR and which balloons the so-called question of human rights." What followed was the accusation that refusenik leaders, including Alexander Lerner and the already emigrated Vitaly Rubin, were in collusion with the CIA. Shcharansky was fingered as the bridge between the Jewish and democracy movements, one of those "adventurers and money grubbers posing as champions of 'human rights.'" Lipavsky claimed that refuseniks regularly passed on secret information to the CIA and received instructions from operatives working in the embassy and disguised as American journalists. There could hardly be a bigger trespass in Cold War Soviet society.

A tense quiet followed. Shcharansky wasn't sure what to think. An arrest seemed imminent. The number of agents following him was now absurd. At all times, he carried a bag that held warm clothes for prison and a book. His friends treated him like he had a terminal illness, saying their goodbyes but assuring him he would be okay. Vitaly Rubin, now in Israel, spoke with Shcharansky on March 13, a week after the article. He recorded the conversation in his diary: "Today I talked to Tolya and Alexander Yakovlevich [Lerner]. They said there is no news. Tolya is still being followed by eight people. They are in a good mood—what good souls. I told Tolya about Natasha and how she and Misha [her brother] will soon leave for the U.S. and that powerful forces are starting a campaign on their behalf in the U.S. When I told Tolya that I thought that with every day the odds of their arrest decreased, he replied, 'I think so, too. It's almost a pity—we are so well prepared.' 'I see you haven't lost your sense of humor,' I said. 'Of course not. We laugh all the time,' he replied. That's what we call Jewish laughter.

Two days later, on March 15, Shcharansky, who had been staying with the Slepaks since the
Izvestia
article, got word that Mikhail Stern had been released early. A refusenik from the Ukraine, Stern had been falsely charged with bribery two years earlier and sentenced to eight years in prison. Two journalists, one from the
Financial Times
and one from the
Baltimore Sun,
delivered the news to the Gorky Street apartment, and the group toasted over cognac. Slepak was by now used to the two black Volgas on the street outside his apartment and the gaggle of KGB agents in the stairwell. They had arrived shortly after Shcharansky moved in. But suddenly he noticed something unusual. Peeking out his window, he saw that the Volgas had apparently left. Shcharansky offered to run downstairs and check it out. He wanted to use the pay phone anyway so that he could tell a few other correspondents about Stern's release. He stepped out of the apartment with the two journalists and Slepak. When they arrived at the elevator, two agents suddenly appeared out of nowhere and jumped into it, leaving Slepak to take the stairs. Shcharansky, who had come to know his tails well, could tell that something was not right. "They're nervous," he told the crammed reporters on the elevator. "Something's about to happen."

As soon as Shcharansky walked outside, and before Slepak could reach the bottom of the stairs, half a dozen KGB agents grabbed Shcharansky by the arms and pulled him into an idling car. The anxious wait was over.

A
S HARASSMENTS
and arrests plagued the Moscow dissident community in the first weeks of 1977, Andrei Sakharov received an unexpected visitor at his apartment. Martin Garbus, an American lawyer and at that time the assistant director of the ACLU, introduced himself as someone with close ties to the incoming Carter administration. He had two hours before his return flight to the United States and he wanted to take a message back with him from Sakharov to the new president, who had been inaugurated just the day before. While Elena Bonner was in the kitchen preparing an omelet for Garbus, Sakharov wrote a quick draft of a letter that included the names of sixteen political prisoners. He also mentioned the recent Moscow subway bombing, which he increasingly felt had been a KGB ploy to ensnare the entire dissident movement (Sakharov compared it to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933). Letter in hand and omelet eaten, Garbus rushed off. Sakharov was sure that his message—if it even made it out of the country—would just be filed away in a drawer of one of the new president's men.