When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (68 page)

More than any specific policy, though, it was the way Reagan re-framed the Cold War in his trembling, jocular voice that was so unsettling to the Soviets. He was not about to send American troops into Afghanistan to confront the USSR directly, but he did ratchet up the rhetoric. "The West will not contain Communism," he said in early 1981, "it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to renounce it, we'll dismiss it as a bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." In March of 1983, he made a speech to an association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, that would become infamous for this sentence: "I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."

To sustain this vision of an "evil empire," to make sure Americans bought into it after a decade of détente, Reagan turned to human rights as a potent ideological weapon. He found his intellectual grounding in the ideas of the neoconservatives, former liberals turned Cold War hawks who came to see Communism as a debased and dehumanizing system that had to be fought as aggressively as Nazism had been. The main propagators of this doctrine were Jewish intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Midge Decter (Podhoretz's wife and the ex-wife of Moshe Decter, the onetime Lishka agent), political critics who had been making their arguments with increasing influence in the pages of
Commentary,
a magazine produced by the American Jewish Committee and edited by Podhoretz. Their patron saint was Henry Jackson, and with him they had spent the past decade arguing for a robust American defense policy (even in the face of post-Vietnam retreat) and championing the human rights of those living under Communism.

Reagan not only rode many of Jackson's ideas into office, he also filled his administration with Scoop Jackson Democrats. Ten years after he got his start as a legislative aide in Jackson's office, Richard Perle became the assistant secretary of defense. Paul Wolfowitz, Perle's old friend, was made director of policy planning at the State Department. Jeanne Kirkpatrick was appointed American ambassador to the United Nations. A professor at Georgetown University, Kirkpatrick had gained Reagan's attention with an article in
Commentary
called "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which argued, as Jackson had, that a distinction had to be made between Communist regimes and right-wing authoritarian governments. While the former ignored personal liberty as part of its guiding principles, the latter were aberrations, usually instigated by strongmen or the result of democratic regimes that had temporarily lost their way. Human rights could not be championed equally everywhere, as Carter had tried to do. Strategic thinking had to play a part, and Communism was the greater evil. This became government policy.

Henry Jackson had faced an internal political crisis during the election campaign. He could not bring himself to endorse Carter, but he also could not leave the Democratic Party, his home for over four decades. And yet he was completely aligned with Reagan on almost every foreign policy issue. After Carter's nomination in the fall, Jackson offered the candidates a litmus test of sorts. He wanted their views on the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Reagan replied with a letter offering the most unequivocal support: "As President I would implement fully the letter and the spirit of the freedom of emigration provisions of the 1974 Trade Act. We would seek to make it clearly understood that we would uphold the law, and that we will make no effort to modify the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. Fine words about human rights are one thing; action is another.... I am proud indeed of the extraordinary bravery of those seeking to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Jews in particular have shown the world what courage and determination to be free can mean even for men and women who could be imprisoned as a desire to emigrate." Jackson was eventually pressured by his party to offer Carter a lukewarm endorsement in the weeks before the election, but he secretly told many of his Jewish supporters, who looked to him for advice, that it was okay to back Reagan.

Soviet Jewry as a cause gained a huge boost with Reagan's presidency. The individual refuseniks struggling against a repressive Communist regime fit perfectly into Reagan's narrative. Only a few months after being sworn in, he invited Avital Shcharansky to visit him in the Oval Office. With her was Yosef Mendelevich. A year before his scheduled release date and after a hunger strike that lasted for weeks, Mendelevich was suddenly put on a train for Moscow and then sent out of the country. Now, living in Israel and finally allowed to grow a beard and practice his Orthodox Judaism, he became a fierce advocate for the refusenik activists that had been left behind. Like Avital, he found a home among the right-wing settlers and enrolled at Mercaz Ha Rav, the school at the center of their activity. He studied Torah, married, and finally let himself experience the openly religious life he had sought since his revelation in Riga more than fifteen years earlier. Avital and Mendelevich spent half an hour with the president and Vice President George Bush. Avital, now used to meeting with world leaders, told them of Tolya's worsening health. The photo that was taken at the visit captured the strange clash of worlds. Bookended by the tall and robust Reagan and Bush are the dour-looking Avital, her hair covered with a kerchief, and Yosef Mendelevich.

The Soviet Jewry movement could now count on the sympathies of those at the highest levels of the American government, but that seemed to have no effect on what was happening inside the Soviet Union. In a way, the refuseniks and activists in the West were suffering for their success. The major struggle of the 1970s, starting crudely with Kahane and culminating in the brilliant organization of Jackson-Vanik, was to make Soviet Jews a central issue in the Cold War, an unavoidable obstacle on the way to vaunted peace and prosperity. Helsinki then provided the Soviets with directions to remove the obstacle. The 1970s could be seen as a giant behavioral-conditioning project. There would be positive reinforcement for releasing Jews and negative reinforcement for treating them poorly. The Soviets had absorbed this—witness the burst of emigration in 1979 when Brezhnev wanted SALT II passed and the abrupt end to it when he realized he had failed. But this mechanism of reward and punishment only worked as long as the Soviets desired engagement with the West. When the superpowers chose to ignore or demonize each other—as they did once Reagan took office—the Soviet Jews became more like hostages than pawns.

For the Kremlin there was little left to lose by crushing any and all activity deemed anti-Soviet. Andrei Sakharov was confined to Gorky and watched constantly by KGB agents; his phone was disconnected and all communication with the outside world severed. He was sentenced to a de facto exile without even the fiction of a trial (a breach of the Soviets' own laws). The State had simply kidnapped its most forceful and influential critic and bundled him off to a place where he was deprived of his greatest source of strength: contact with the West. A few days after Sakharov's forced exile began, Elena Bonner, his wife, returned to Moscow and handed journalists Sakharov's statement demanding a trial. "I do not need a gilded cage," he wrote. "I need the right to fulfill my public duty."

The Helsinki Watch movement started by Yuri Orlov, who was still in a labor camp serving his seven-year sentence, had spawned a network of regional groups from Lithuania to the Ukraine. These had all been squashed. Thirty-three members of Helsinki Watch groups were imprisoned in 1980. The Moscow group was in tatters, all of its dwindling members increasingly susceptible to harassment or arrest. By the end of 1980, only Elena Bonner and two others, including Naum Meiman, a respected refusenik mathematician in his early seventies, were not in jail. Hobbled and depleted, they continued to put out reports in the group's name. But the destruction went beyond the Helsinki Watch groups. Between the fall of 1979 and the summer of 1980, a hundred and fifty dissidents of all sorts were put on trial. Any independent group with even the slightest civil or human rights bent—like the re cently formed Working Commission Against the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes—became a target.

In Moscow, the refusenik activists tried to carry on. The ranks of the
politiki
had been decimated over the past few years. With the exception of the elderly Alexander Lerner, most of the main leaders of this group, people like Slepak, Shcharansky, and Dina Beilin, were in exile, jail, or Israel. Even Lerner had become demoralized and scared. He canceled the regular gatherings that took place in his apartment, one of the few safe spaces for refuseniks. The
kulturniki
suffered less, but many of their leaders had emigrated in the big wave of the late 1970s. Of the group of scientists that had helped establish the weekly scientific seminars and the samizdat journal
Jews in the USSR,
only one person remained, Victor Brailovsky, the goateed statistician and former lecturer on probability theory. He had been left in charge of both endeavors. Then, in November 1980, he too was arrested.

Brailovsky had stopped producing issues of
Jews in the USSR
in the summer of 1979. The logistics of underground publishing had become too difficult. But the journal had never caused problems for any of its editors, including Brailovsky, who had purposely stuck to scholarly content on Jewish culture and history. He had continued the Sunday seminars, which were a source of sustenance for the out-of-work refusenik physicists and mathematicians. Brailovsky had first felt a shift in KGB approach when they interrupted his planning of the Fourth International Conference on Collective Phenomena—a grand title for a gathering that was to take place in his modest two-room apartment over snacks prepared by his wife, Irina. Agents conducted a tumultuous search, overturning the furniture and grabbing many of the scientific papers for the conference. His arrest came a few months later. He was charged with "defaming the Soviet state and public order" based on his editorship of the now-defunct
Jews in the USSR.
The Sunday following his arrest, with her husband sitting in Butyrka Prison, Irina Brailovsky invited the scientists to continue the weekly seminar at their apartment. Looking out her window, she could see two policemen standing guard at the door to her building and turning away each of the twenty refuseniks who arrived to participate. When Irina finally descended the stairs to confront the policemen, they informed her that they had no idea why they had been instructed to prevent the seminar from taking place but that they would be there the following Sunday and every Sunday after that. The weekly meetings were over. "Today is the first time in eight years that we have missed a seminar," a distraught Irina Brailovsky told a Western journalist.

Brailovsky's arrest was the first shot in a new war on Jewish culture. Until that point, the less openly political refuseniks had mostly been left alone. Anything that might cause embarrassment was of course put down—like the 1976 Jewish cultural symposium or the international scientific conferences that sometimes drew the attention of Nobel Prize-winning foreign scientists. But the organizers were rarely if ever put on trial or detained for more than fifteen days. Hebrew teachers and activists like Brailovsky had largely been left untouched. Suddenly, no one was safe. Quiet, nonpolitical activity now elicited the same response as a self-immolation in the middle of Red Square. Both would be suppressed.

The new crackdown announced itself in Leningrad with another knock on the door on May 17, 1981—around the time that Ovrazhki was being broken up. The Seminar on Jewish History, Culture, and Traditions had been taking place for two years, single-handedly reviving a Jewish movement in the canal-lined city. When the 1970 hijacking plot was uncovered and most of the Zionist activists in the city arrested, a decade of reverberating fear ensued. Refuseniks were scattered and mostly isolated from one another. When they did converge, it was usually around charismatic characters like Aba Taratuta. He was Leningrad's answer to Volodya Slepak—a good-natured and generous man who connected various refuseniks with one another and was a main contact for the movement in the West. His balding head, thick black beard, and impish smile were well known to tourists. Denied an exit visa in 1973 —making him second on the meticulous lists he kept of all the refuseniks in the city—Taratuta tried in his own way to duplicate what was happening in Moscow, though on a smaller and less conspicuous scale. He started a Jewish lending library with an eight-hundred-book collection that had been left behind by a departing refusenik. He organized in his apartment yearly Seders and Purim spiels, carnivalesque reenactments of Esther's story, which the kids loved. Later on, he and his wife, Ida, helped start a kindergarten for the children of the refuseniks. But nothing welded the community together quite like the seminars, which were begun in 1979 by a group of intellectuals looking to educate themselves about Jewish culture and history. What started as informal meetings with a handful of people and a self-proclaimed teacher evolved into a weekly event that drew anywhere from sixty to a hundred people.

The day the KGB came knocking, the subject of the seminar was the relevance of the Sabbath. All the furniture in the thirty-square-meter apartment had been placed in a storage space beneath the ceiling. In all, eighty-six people had shown up and were jammed into a single room; some sat on makeshift benches, but most stood. It was hot and the atmosphere was tense. Suddenly, eight plainclothes KGB agents led by a militia captain pushed open the door and, without saying a word, began snapping photographs of everyone in the room. The flashbulbs popped again and again. The large mass of people pushed together, and a few young students who had not yet applied for exit visas huddled close to the wall, pulling their shirts over their heads to hide their faces. In a few minutes, Evgeny Lein was taken into custody. Lein, a forty-two-year-old mathematician who had a long black goatee and dark rings around his eyes, had been a refusenik for three years. He demanded to see identification from the group of men who stormed the seminar. The last thing he heard outside before he was shoved onto one of the three waiting buses was an old woman yelling, "It's a pity Hitler didn't slaughter all of you!"