When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (57 page)

A week later, to Sakharov's surprise, his appeal appeared on the front page of the
New York Times.
"It's very important to defend those who suffer because of their nonviolent struggle, for openness, for justice, for destroyed rights of other people. Our and your duty is to fight for them," the physicist had written Carter. "I think that a great deal depends on this struggle..." That his letter was presented to such a wide readership at a time when Orlov and Ginzburg (and soon Shcharansky) were all under arrest was promising. But what happened next was unprecedented. Carter wrote back. In the middle of February, Sakharov was summoned to the U.S. embassy, escorted inside by Soviet policemen, and handed a letter dated February 5. "I received your letter of Jan. 21, and I want to express my appreciation to you for bringing your thoughts to my personal attention. Human rights is a central concern of my Administration.... We shall use our good offices to seek the release of prisoners of conscience, and we will continue our efforts to shape a world responsive to human aspirations in which nations of differing cultures and histories can live side by side in peace and justice. I am always glad to hear from you, and I wish you well."

Throughout his decade of opposition, Sakharov had never received a communication from an American president. Holding up the letter for a photographer in his apartment, he smiled triumphantly. Just two years before, Ford had refused to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the exiled dissident and Nobel laureate, fearing it would be "inconsistent with détente." Now, Carter was sending an open letter to the Soviet Union's public enemy number one. Sakharov wrote back immediately. "I said in a congratulatory cablegram after your election what deep admiration your attitude evokes in us ... Today, having received your letter, the exceptional character of which I recognize, I can only repeat this once again."

The letter to Sakharov was just one of the ways Carter was trying to make good on his oft-repeated campaign promise to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy. The issue had been a winning one for the toothy Georgia governor in his long-shot presidential bid. People had become disenchanted with Henry Kissinger's realpolitik approach, the guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1969. As Carter put it to the national convention of B'nai B'rith two months before the election, Ford, like Kissinger, had "rationalized that there is little room for morality in foreign affairs and that we must put self-interest above principle." It was a criticism that resonated on both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals had been railing since the early 1970s about the government's support of right-wing dictatorships like Augusto Pinochet's Chile. And on the right, the idealistic anti-Communism of Henry Jackson had been taken up by a large faction of the Republican Party, including Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, who had nearly clinched the Republican nomination. Throughout the election, Ford insisted on pursuing Kissinger's model of détente, focusing on disarmament and increased trade relations and viewing human rights as a secondary, domestic matter not to be confused with foreign affairs. As his loss indicated, there was no longer a real constituency for this compartmentalized way of thinking.

In his first few weeks in office, Carter, through tone and substance, began making good on his vow to abandon Kissingerian diplomacy. At his inauguration, he released a taped address to the "citizens of the world," pledging "to shape a world order that is more responsive to human aspirations." On January 26, Carter's State Department publicly berated Czechoslovakia for violating the Helsinki Final Act: A group of three hundred leading Czech intellectuals, including the playwright Vaclav Havel, had signed a document called Charter 77, which established a watch group similar to Yuri Orlov's in Moscow; many of the charter's signers were interrogated and detained. This was the first time the State Department had singled out a particular country for violating the Helsinki Accords. As one anonymous analyst told a reporter, "I doubt that under Kissinger we would have bothered drafting a statement." The very next day there was yet another declaration from the State Department, this time about Sakharov. "Any attempt by the Soviet authorities to intimidate Mr. Sakharov will not silence legitimate criticism in the Soviet Union and will conflict with accepted international standards of human rights."

One could write off these early moves as the naive idealism of a new administration not yet schooled in the harsh realities of power politics. Carter was under the impression that he could slap the Soviets on human rights with one hand while cordially signing arms reduction pacts with the other. It remained to be seen in those early days of 1977 whether this was in fact possible. Undeniable, though, were the societal forces that propelled Carter and his ideas to victory. Helsinki was a promising document, and not just for Soviet dissidents and refuseniks like Shcharansky. Americans saw it as an effective tool. And American Jews in particular understood that it might be their next best chance—now that Jackson-Vanik had been rendered impotent—to press the case for Soviet Jewry. With an administration that was suddenly a potential ally as opposed to a perpetual obstacle, human rights was the tool that might finally pry open the Soviet Union.

Carter's election put real power behind the principles of human rights for the first time in American history. But it was Congress that had begun laying the groundwork as soon as the Helsinki Final Act was signed—struggling, like the Moscow activists, to monitor the Soviets' adherence to their new promises. Leading this effort was a very eccentric sixty-five-year-old congresswoman who had been deeply affected by a trip she'd taken to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1975. Millicent Fenwick had the wit and patrician grace of a Katharine Hepburn character. Six feet tall and a pipe smoker, she was from New Jersey's affluent horse country and made an immediate impression when she was elected to the House in 1974—so much so that Garry Trudeau based a character in his
Doonesbury
comic strip on her, the aristocratic do-gooder Lacey Davenport. Fenwick grew up in a fifty-room mansion in Bernardsville, the daughter of a wealthy financier with a record of public service. Her mother had drowned in the torpedoing of the
Lusitania;
she had been on her way to Paris to set up a hospital for war victims. Fenwick was a striking beauty and spent her early life as a model and then as a writer and an editor for
Vogue.
By the time she arrived in Moscow, in the summer of 1975, she had settled into her new role as a legislator, projecting a certain noblesse oblige attitude about the poor and the oppressed.

A week after the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Fenwick, together with eighteen other congresspeople, landed in the Soviet capital. The trip was organized as a standard press junket—Moscow, Leningrad, a trip to the Black Sea coast, and a final stop at Brezhnev's dinner table. Fenwick and another congressperson had been charged with the nearly impossible task of reporting on the human rights and emigration situation. One night a group of refusenik leaders paid a visit to their hotel. Among them was Lilia Roitburd. Her husband, Lev, had tried to attend the June 1975 meeting with U.S. senators but was arrested in Odessa as he was boarding a plane. He was now awaiting trial. Lilia looked exhausted. She showed Fenwick a recent picture of herself from before the arrest, and the congresswoman could not believe that this was the same woman, so small and damaged did she appear compared with the person in the photo. The brief interaction nearly brought her to tears. "To know the pain of those people is very different from the abstract figures and the abstract stories we hear in the United States," she told Christopher Wren, a reporter covering the visit.

It was Wren who took Fenwick even deeper into the world of the dissidents. He brought her along the following day to see Yuri Orlov and Valentin Turchin, the two men who had set up an embattled chapter of Amnesty International in their apartment. That encounter became the most memorable part of her trip. Fenwick sneaked away from the rest of her group and, smoking her pipe, drove with Wren in his white Volga to an apartment in southwest Moscow. She was deeply impressed with the dissidents she met. They drank tea and talked about Helsinki's human rights provisions and how best to force the Soviets to comply with them. This was still a very new development, and Fenwick's enthusiasm about the "spirit of Helsinki" seemed slightly premature. But it made Orlov think, perhaps for the first time, about monitoring the Helsinki Accords, and it planted a seed that would later become the Moscow Helsinki Watch.

As for Fenwick, she returned to Washington determined to establish a congressional body that would enforce Helsinki. Within a month, she had drafted a bill that would create the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known simply as the Helsinki Commission. The accords themselves demanded regular checks on implementation. This was her way of taking them seriously. She wanted the commission to act as a clearinghouse for information about the state of human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In order to avoid the tension between the executive and legislative branches that had crippled the Jackson-Vanik amendment, she conceived of a commission that would include not only Democrats and Republicans but also representatives from the State, Defense, and Commerce departments. Fenwick mandated that the president deliver a semiannual report to the commission addressing how well countries were complying with Helsinki. She teamed up with Clifford Case, a fellow New Jersey Republican, who introduced the same bill in the Senate. Both houses' deep resentment of Kissinger made the bill an easy sell. As Case put it, the commission would once again allow Congress "to play an important role in the all-important area of human rights, which all too often appears to be of secondary concern to the executive branch."

Kissinger took the creation of the commission as a personal offense. He protested loudly, telling Fenwick, whom he jokingly called his "tormentor," that her proposed commission's blending of executive and legislative branches would set a "dangerous precedent." However, there was little that Kissinger could do. Ford was fighting to get elected, and many of his fellow Republicans backed the bill. There was growing support from various Eastern European ethnic groups, some in crucial swing states. Both the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, seasoned by their experience with the Jackson-Vanik amendment, threw their considerable lobbying weight behind Fenwick's bill.

By the spring of 1976, momentum was building, though Fenwick had been forced to hand over more power to a senior Democratic congressman who sat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Dante Fascell. He refashioned the composition of the commission to give Democrats a majority presence. Fascell was a short Italian American World War II veteran representing Dade County, Florida, and his support guaranteed the bill's passage; it also ensured that he would be chairman of the new body. On May 5, the Fenwick-Case bill passed in the Senate, and on May 17 it finally arrived back in the House.

Fenwick's role had been overshadowed, but she was the one who best articulated the significance of the new commission. She reminded everyone that earlier that week, from Andrei Sakharov's apartment in Moscow, Yuri Orlov had announced the establishment of a Helsinki monitoring group. "They and we are hoping that these international accords will not be just another empty piece of paper," she said. Fenwick talked about the idealistic strain in American history, the "respect for the dignity of the individual," and argued that "this ought to be the basis of our international relations. These ought to be the things of which we speak to the world: a concern for our fellow human beings, knowing that we are all one family, regardless of distance and descent or any other kind of barrier; concern for their right to freedom of religion, for their right to travel and be unified with their families. This is what this bill is about."

Only Fenwick and Case were at the White House when Ford signed the commission into life. The administration had no interest in trumpeting the passage of a bill they had opposed and that, according to a memo from Kissinger's deputy Brent Scowcroft, represented "another Congressional intrusion into Executive Branch functions." A few weeks after the signing, Kissinger told his staff, "The President signed the bill only because I had not been told what was happening. I would have fought it to the death. It never would have passed if I had known more about it." And that wasn't the end of it. Throughout the summer, Kissinger tried to find ways to kill the new initiative, fearing that its activities would undermine the effectiveness of his quiet diplomacy.

The young and energetic staffers who were hired to run the commission only added to Kissinger's worries. Spencer Oliver, a lawyer and Democratic Party activist, was named as director. He brought on people like Alfred Friendly, just back from a tour as Moscow bureau chief for
Newsweek
and personally familiar with many of the dissidents and refuseniks, and Meg Donovan, a longtime staff member for the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and an expert on the emigration issue. They set to work gathering information, including the reports produced by Orlov's Moscow Helsinki Watch and by the other monitoring groups that popped up all over Eastern Europe in the final months of 1976. Dante Fascell exchanged letters with Orlov, telling him, "We look forward very much to receiving more of [your] reports in the months to come."

In November of 1976, the commission decided to embark on an ambitious three-week fact-finding trip to all the signatory countries of the Helsinki Accords. They quickly found themselves thwarted by both Kissinger and the Soviets. Kissinger forbade the executive members to go any farther east than Brussels. Soon after the secretary of state made this decision, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries, with the exception of Romania, refused to grant the commission members entry visas. So extreme was the animosity between the secretary of state and the commission that it was rumored Kissinger had encouraged the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to stonewall the visit on the Communist side.