When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (76 page)

As long as exit continued to be denied and refuseniks were being arrested, there was little to counteract the feeling that a genocide—even if it was only a spiritual one—loomed and had to be fought against. Certainly Gorbachev's youthfulness alone did not offer sufficient reassurance. In the spring and summer of 1985, one had to look hard for signs of change. But for those who cared to see them, it was possible to discern slight differences.

The greatest legacy of the Helsinki Accords, now ten years old, was its provision of venues to repeatedly humiliate the Soviet Union on the world stage. At the most recent follow-up conference, held in Madrid at the height of Cold War tension and lasting an interminable three years, from November 1980 to March 1983, the Helsinki process effectively turned into a cataloging of Communist human rights abuses. It was in Madrid that Arthur Goldberg's attempts in Belgrade to shame the Soviet Union became legitimized. Goldberg's mention of seven specific cases had been revolutionary at the time, a grave breach of diplomatic protocol; in Madrid, the head of the U.S. delegation referred to sixty-five individual refuseniks and prisoners in the first six weeks alone.

Leading the American assault in Madrid was Max Kampelman. A soft-spoken man with strong political instincts, Kampelman was a lawyer and an old-school Washington insider who had been born in the working-class, immigrant Bronx, the son of a Yiddish-speaking butcher. He was also one of those alienated Cold Warrior Democrats, like Henry Jackson, who along with a handful of neoconservative intellectuals created the Committee on the Present Danger, a policy shop meant to develop and promote a serious anti-détente alternative. Appointed by Carter to lead the delegation to Madrid, Kampelman was kept on when Reagan took office, the highest-profile Democrat to survive the transition. Reagan was a much better fit for him. The ideas that Reagan brought into office—about America's strength, about the evils of Communism, about the need for a strong defense and an offensive strategy to push back the Soviets—were an integral part of Kampelman's political identity.

He brought this ideological fight to the Palacio de Congresos, the concrete precipice of a building where the conference took place. From the first day, he was unrelenting, drawing sharp contrasts between an American system that he asserted was "rooted in the importance of the individual" and a Soviet system "whose collective values bring with them the suppression of the individual." Soviet Jewry was exhibit A in this indictment. Never before had so many speeches been devoted to the issue in such a public forum. And where Kampelman led, other Western countries followed. Unlike Belgrade, where America had been alone, in Madrid, every European delegation brought up Soviet Jewry. Little Belgium assaulted the Soviets on the issue of anti-Semitism before any other country did. Kampelman held this coalition together—drawing on the antipathy toward the Soviets then dominant in Western Europe. "The Soviet Union is a society that is large and powerful and has existed for more than sixty years," Kampelman declared in one of his typically gracious yet sharp speeches, this one on Soviet anti-Semitism. "There is no need for that society to crush human beings, small and insignificant as they may appear in the broader perspective of history. There should be no need to stimulate hatred among peoples. It is time for that society to develop a stronger faith in itself and in the inner strength of its people."

Madrid was in every way a departure from Belgrade. The city became a nonstop human rights circus. Every day brought news of another hunger strike or protest. On any random evening, one could attend an exhibition of Soviet samizdat or a choral concert in honor of Estonian independence. Madrid was a magnet for every conceivable organization concerned with minority or religious rights, from the Union of Russian Soldierists to the Congress of Free Ukrainians to the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte.

Kampelman drew on these associations, turning often to a new human rights group, U.S. Helsinki Watch, that had been born in Belgrade's wake. A dejected Arthur Goldberg in 1978 had secured a grant of $400,000 from the Ford Foundation to start a watchdog group that would monitor and then provide to the Western public a steady stream of details on Soviet human rights transgressions. Led by Robert Bernstein, the publisher of Random House, U.S. Helsinki Watch had quickly become a reliable resource on human rights, supplying the media with meticulous reports on Helsinki Accords violations and keeping close contact with grassroots monitoring groups like those that had sprung up in the Soviet Union.

No movement, however, was better represented than Soviet Jewry. Both the National Conference and the Union of Councils understood that this was an opportunity to advocate publicly and lobby quietly for their cause—and at a time of deep freeze, when Soviet Jewry was not being discussed in any international venues. They both set up offices not far from the Palacio de Congresos and began issuing a steady stream of press releases. Kampelman was naturally sympathetic. When it became clear that the Madrid conference would not conclude as quickly as initially predicted, a more permanent presence was established. The Union of Councils set up the Robert F. Drinan Human Rights Center, named after the Massachusetts congressman, a full-time office that became a clearinghouse for information on various refUseniks and prisoners of Zion. Kampelman became a regular visitor. On the second night of Hanukkah in December of 1980, he was invited to light the first candle in the Union activists' Hanukkah Freedom Light Ceremony. While he was there, a phone call came from Moscow. Kampelman got on the line with Alexander Lerner, who told him about his various friends in exile or in jail. To the amazement and satisfaction of the gathered activists, Kampelman's voice began to break, and tears formed in his eyes.

In the end, though, Madrid was a stalemate. The Soviets had come with the intent of focusing the conference—and moving the Helsinki process—away from human rights and toward a discussion of how to increase trade and tamp down the arms race. "The USSR is not prepared to be a bull in the corrida of Madrid," said Andrei Gromyko at the conference's outset. But Kampelman and his NATO allies had stayed on message. At the end of three years of the superpowers' talking past each other, only a leveraging of their two interests would allow Madrid to end with any kind of concluding document. With another follow-up conference already scheduled for 1986 in Vienna, the bargaining took place over a series of smaller, interim meetings. Specifically, the Soviets were angry about NATO's decision to counterbalance the medium-range, SS-20 nuclear-tipped missiles then aimed at Europe with U.S.-made Pershing II and cruise missiles to be placed in Germany. They wanted a forum to denounce what they saw as Reagan's escalation of the Cold War. Kampelman let the Soviets have their meeting, which opened the following year in Stockholm (too late to stop the controversial deployment). In exchange, after much wrangling and resistance, Kampelman and his allies gained Soviet participation in two more interim meetings. One would be a gathering of human rights experts in Ottawa in 1985 and the other a six-week conference dealing exclusively with the issue of "reunion of families" (read: Soviet Jewry) in Bern in 1986. Apart from a few fairly anodyne new human rights resolutions added to the accords, this was the sum total of Madrid's success. If Helsinki had finally provided human rights with a powerful megaphone, it was one the Soviets were still ignoring.

But this seemed to change in a small and subtle way at the Ottawa conference in May 1985, three months after Gorbachev's ascendance. Once again, the U.S. representative was someone whose background and philosophy aligned with not only the neoconservatives' view but also the American Jewish community's. Richard Schifter was born in Austria, the child of Polish Jews. At the age of fifteen, he was permitted to immigrate to America following the Anschluss but was forced to leave his parents—the Austrian Jewish quota was much larger than the Polish one. Schifter's parents died in Majdanek while he was studying at an American high school. After a thirty-year career as a lawyer, he was convinced by Jeanne Kirkpatrick to join the Reagan administration as a delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission. He would often tell people—particularly Soviet Jewry activists—that his attachment to the issue was highly personal; it came out of his inability to help his parents escape from Europe in 1939.

Just before the Ottawa meeting opened, Schifter took the Russian delegation out to lunch. He was hoping that Gorbachev's rise would make the human rights conversation easier. The Soviets quickly disabused him of this notion, informing Schifter that no more than three hundred Jews even wanted to leave and that all he had heard about religious or cultural persecution was simply Zionist propaganda. The proceedings, which lasted six weeks, were no more productive. Schifter continued to name names, speaking daily about Shcharansky and Begun. He used hard language, calling the Soviet treatment of Jews "schizophrenic." His job, as he explained to the press in Ottawa, was to use this relentless pointing out of violations as a way of "drawing a map for the Soviet Union and its allies...[as to] what they have to do."

This time, the Soviets answered the charges somewhat differently. At the shaming sessions in Belgrade and then Madrid, the Russian delegates had merely complained that the West was interfering in their internal affairs. Now they fought back. Tentatively at first and then with great defensiveness, they started pointing out Western human rights violations. Their examples were mostly economic and social—the rights valued by Communists—such as the right to free health care and job security, education and maternity benefits. They even tried to attack on the issue of minority rights, using the Anti-Defamation League's statistics to argue that it was in fact the United States that had the real problem with anti-Semitism.

Schifter recognized that this was a shift in tactics that would work in the Americans' favor. The Soviets were tacitly acknowledging the legitimacy of debating another country's human rights record. This was a kind of progress. "We talk about human rights and they talk about unemployment and racism," he said at the time. "Rather than making them think we are running away from these issues, we need to respond clearly to them." Schifter had his staff compile information to equip him for this new field of play. He pointed out that the Soviet Union had a living standard one-third that of the United States', that at the current rate, it would take a hundred and fifty years before the Soviets got the quality of their housing to Western levels, and that the only economic statistic in which the Soviets led the world was in per capita consumption of hard liquor. The average Soviet citizen, Schifter told the gathered delegates, "lived less well than someone living at the official US poverty line."

To the outside this looked very much like two children fighting in a sandbox. At the ten-year anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Accords, two months later, many commentators would perceive the process as a failure. To the hard-core Cold Warriors, it looked like a gain for the Russians, who just by sitting at the table had achieved some kind of moral legitimacy. But to those closer to the process, like Schifter, this slight change was very significant. Once the Soviets opened themselves to being criticized, the process could start to have an effect. The Ottawa meeting was a failure in that the Western countries and the Soviets could not agree on any concluding document—even Madrid had achieved that. But as the British delegate put it in his closing remarks: "Even if few satisfactory answers were secured, we at least established in practice that it is possible to discuss each other's records."

That summer of 1985, American and Soviet Jews watched to see what Gorbachev might do differently; the changes were subtle and anticlimactic. A shift in debating tactics from a stance of nonengagement to one of abrasiveness, as had occurred at Ottawa, did not feel like progress. The one place where light did begin to peek through the tiny cracks was Israeli-Soviet relations.

Israel's part in the movement had always been covert, managed mostly by the secretive Lishka. Soviet Jewry was hardly ever debated as a foreign policy issue in the Knesset. Even the sensitive and fateful issue of the dropouts played out behind closed doors, with sympathetic American Jewish leaders arguing Israel's position in public. The reasons remained the same. The Cold War was too precarious to enter directly. Israel would never risk going up against American priorities or giving the Russians an excuse to retaliate by arming their Arab allies. Even a prime minister like Menachem Begin, the great hope of militant activists, had disappointed by keeping a low profile on the issue.

But forces were starting to alter this status quo. When emigration ceased in the early 1980s, a debate began in Israel about the effectiveness of a behind-the-scenes strategy. Right-wing parliament members like Geula Cohen—Kahane's clandestine financial backer during his New York days—attacked what she called the Lishka's "hush hush" policy. When Shimon Peres became prime minister in September of 1984, bringing the more dovish Labor Party back to power, he instituted a more openly conciliatory approach to the Soviet Union that, if not what Geula Cohen had in mind, at least gave Israel a position. In small ways, Gorbachev seemed to reciprocate. In May of 1985, on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II,
Izvestia
printed a greeting from Israeli president Chaim Herzog expressing the gratitude of Jews for the role the Soviets had played in "the final rout of the Nazi scum in Europe." Considering how often
Izvestia
had characterized Israel itself as "Nazi scum," this was an interesting development.

Beyond the occasional grand gesture, there were many geopolitical factors at work. The United States seemed to be reigniting a peace process. By spring, there was a new joint Palestinian-Jordanian negotiating team, backed by Egypt and even Iraq. The Kremlin's influence in the Middle East was diminishing, and it found itself caught. It wanted a seat at the table at any future peace conference, but it risked angering its only remaining ally in the region, Syria, if it engaged in the process without first demanding that Israel end its occupation of the Golan Heights, the Syrian territory captured in 1967. Israel held both the admission to the peace process and the Golan Heights firmly in its hands. It now had something the Soviet Union wanted.