When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (80 page)

The change began with rhetoric. At the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party, Gorbachev formally presented his ideas for how to revitalize the Soviet Union. During his major policy address on February 25, he introduced concepts that indicated not only a radical departure from the past but a serious challenge to Soviet dogma. He wanted perestroika, a restructuring that would bring some democracy and transparency to government and allow for a more versatile and enterprising economic system. He wanted glasnost, openness. To become prosperous and competitive, Soviet society would have to be more self-critical, would have to look honestly at itself and not lie about the things that were happening right under its nose. The very words he used were shocking in their newness: he mentioned "restraint," "tactical flexibility," and "a readiness for mutually acceptable compromises ... the aim not being confrontation, but dialogue and mutual understanding." And most dramatic of all for Soviet Jews, he spoke positively about the human rights goals of Helsinki, even using the language of the third basket to define his objectives. He understood that "an all-embracing system of international security" would necessitate "the resolution ... of questions related to the reunion of families, marriage, and promotion of contacts between people and between organizations." This was unprecedented. No Soviet leader had ever mentioned the human rights provisions of Helsinki, let alone referred specifically to "family reunification," which everyone knew was code for Jewish emigration.

In the following months, there were more symbolic gestures. On a visit to France in July, he uttered the words
human rights
—a piece of progress in itself—and spoke of a civilization no longer willing to "tolerate arbitrariness and lawlessness." That same month, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced the establishment of a new office: a bureau of humanitarian and cultural affairs, to be headed by Yuri Kashlev, a knowledgeable and cultured diplomat who shared the approachable and genial character of his boss, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Though these moves led to little real difference in the lives of Soviet Jews, they showed that Gorbachev understood that he had to present an entirely new face to the West. This meant being receptive to what seemed like an incessant harping on human rights. But, equally important, the Soviet Jewry movement had effectively closed the door to détente until this issue was dealt with. The Jackson-Vanik amendment made any economic cooperation impossible. And now George Shultz was using every opportunity to drive home the point that arms negotiations, though not legislatively linked to human rights, could not go forward in good faith if concessions weren't made to the demands of American Jews and human rights activists. This was the price of admission. Gorbachev certainly had self-interested reasons for trying to open up his society. He saw it as the only way forward. But he was also cornered. If he wanted to avoid another arms race, he would have to solve his Jewish problem.

While Soviet Jews waited to see if this new tone might affect their reality, the gradual liberalization of Soviet society was having actual effects elsewhere. As happened under Khrushchev's thaw, once the ice began to melt, historical memory began to resurface. The particularly Jewish character of the Holocaust had always been obscured by Soviet propaganda that spoke generally of the victims as "Soviet citizens." When Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar" had appeared, twenty-five years before, it lifted the veil and spoke with emotion about a Jewish tragedy that had occurred on Soviet soil. During the Brezhnev years and since, there had been a return to the "Great War" rhetoric. But in July of 1986, in a government-sanctioned youth magazine called
Yunost,
there was an article, part prose and part poetry, by the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, a cohort of Yevtushenko, that picked up the earlier themes. Titled "The Ditch: A Spiritual Trial," Voznesensky's article examined the mass killing of twelve thousand Jews in the Crimea during World War II and the subsequent robbing of their graves by Soviet citizens. He described discovering the site and finding a "squalid monument" that "suggested oblivion much more than remembrance." Also, he pointed out, "there was no mention that most of the victims were Jews." Voznesensky was interviewed by Western journalists about his piece, and he said he saw it as a protest against anti-Semitism. "A year ago, it would have been impossible to publish this work," he admitted.

History—the undistorted, sometimes ugly past—made its appearance in other ways. A 1984 film by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze,
Repentance,
a powerful allegory about Stalin's crimes that had been previously suppressed, was screened in Moscow and Tbilisi. In the fall, the seventy-five-year-old Soviet Jewish writer Anatoli Rybakov announced that his magnum opus,
Children of the Arbat,
would finally be published the following spring in the literary monthly
Druzhba Norodov.
Circulating for years in samizdat, the novel told the unabashed story of a group of friends coming of age in 1934, just before the start of Stalin's purge—Communist believers who then suffered under the regime's arbitrary terror. Rybakov, whose previous work, the 1978 novel
Heavy Sand,
told the story of one Soviet Jewish family's fate during the Nazi invasion, had written a book that was mostly autobiographical and seemed a perfect test of the limits of glasnost. Not only did it describe in great human detail what Stalin had wrought, but Rybakov had managed to leap into the dictator's mind and provide a picture of his machinations and psychosis.
Children of the Arbat,
which became the
Doctor Zhivago
of the 1980s, had been rejected for publication by the Soviet government twice before. Now, both
Repentance
and
Children of the Arbat
were personally approved by Gorbachev.

By the end of the year, the government's powerful censorship agency had been instructed not to concern itself anymore with literary material, with the policing of fiction. Its sole mandate would be to safeguard military secrets.

Elie Wiesel arrived to test the openness. In October, on the twenty-first anniversary of the trip that resulted in
The Jews of Silence
and a week after being awarded that year's Nobel Peace Prize, he arrived in Moscow. From his new platform of world prominence, he declared that one of his goals was to insist that the Soviet Union "recognize the specific character of the Jewish tragedy, which has not been recognized officially yet in the Soviet Union." Confirmation of the regime's new willingness to engage this history arrived the moment Wiesel stepped off his plane at Sheremetyevo airport. He was greeted by a retired Red Army officer with a chest full of ancient medals. Vasily Petrenko, who as a colonel in January 1945 helped liberate Auschwitz, wrapped his arms around Wiesel in a large bear hug. The painfully thin, sallow-faced, wild-haired new Nobel laureate elaborately proclaimed his thanks to Petrenko, whose arrival in Auschwitz, he said, was anticipated "like religious people await the messiah."

The rest of Wiesel's trip was a whirlwind of refusenik meetings that culminated at the synagogue on Arkhipova Street on Simchat Torah, where Wiesel witnessed the same ecstatic dancing that had greeted him in 1965. The narrow cobblestoned street in front of the synagogue—another of Moscow's minuscule Jewish islands—was filled with four thousand people. He stood in front of the congregation, the white-bearded Vladimir Slepak at his side. "Not a day passes when I don't talk of you, dream of you, sing of you, pray for you. You give us so much hope throughout the world, all of you," Wiesel told the masses crowding into the dilapidated yellow synagogue. "We owe you a thousand times more than you owe us."

Another indicator, however symbolic, that the Kremlin was becom ing more flexible was the continued courting of Israel. Whether because he wanted to play a role in the perpetually postponed peace talks or because he was still trying to earn American trust, Gorbachev persisted in pursuing a conversation with the Israelis into 1986, even at the risk of angering his Arab allies. On August 20, for the first time since the breaking of diplomatic relations nearly twenty years earlier, a small group of Israeli and Soviet consular officials met in a tightly guarded Finnish government compound in downtown Helsinki. The highly anticipated meeting, which was scheduled to last for more than two days, was broken off by the Soviets after ninety minutes. They insisted on sticking to a discussion of the status of Russian Orthodox Church property in Jerusalem. The Israelis had no choice but to bring up emigration and the Jewish prisoners. There was simply too much pressure from the vociferous and increasingly powerful lobby of Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel. Each side walked away claiming the other was at fault for the breakdown. What got lost in the commentary was the very fact of the meeting. Israel and the Soviet Union were moving toward a normalization of relations. Only a month later, in New York, Shimon Peres, the prime minister, and Shevardnadze met at the United Nations for more than an hour, the highest-level official meeting since 1967. A photograph of them emerging from the office of the president of the UN Security Council shows two men enjoying each other's company, Peres laughing as he listens to Shevardnadze, who looks like he's in the middle of telling some particularly funny anecdote.

In late September of 1986, a surprise meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan was announced. It would not be a proper summit but rather a "pre-summit" tête-à-tête to prepare the way for a proposed Washington visit. The glacial North Atlantic island of Iceland, a cold, hard place, particularly in the winter months, was selected as the unadorned location where the two leaders could conduct business without pomp or media. It was scheduled for early October. In the short time they had to prepare, Soviet Jewry groups gathered their forces. A plane chartered by the National Conference flew to Reykjavik; the group was led by Morris Abram, the former civil rights lawyer. Abram was a Southern Democrat who had voted for Reagan in 1980, was friends with many members of the administration, including George Shultz, and had briefly served the president on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 1986, chairman of both the Presidents Conference, the influential umbrella group, and the National Conference, Abram was by far the most powerful voice on the issue of Soviet Jewry, at least in the United States. He had already personally handed Shultz a two-foot-high package containing detailed information on eleven thousand refuseniks.

Yosef Mendelevich was also in the Icelandic capital, pelted with freezing rain as he led a Torah service outside the Soviet delegation's hotel, his head covered only by a prayer shawl. Ida Nudel's sister was there, as was Vladimir Slepak's son. Their expectations were high. Shultz had repeatedly said that human rights would have equal billing with arms negotiations. In an emotional speech to the National Conference in the days before he left for Iceland, Shultz talked about the importance of emphasizing Soviet Jewry "over and over and over again." He told the establishment leaders, "The Soviets need to know that we cannot continue to improve relations with them unless we see significant, sustained progress on human rights, including the right to emigrate." A few days before their delegation set out for Reykjavik, the Soviets had released Yuri Orlov, the Moscow Helsinki Watch founder and Shcharansky's one-time collaborator. As Orlov was leaving his Siberian labor camp, a KGB official told him confidentially, "Know that changes are being prepared in our country such as you yourself once dreamed of."

Over the course of the two-day meeting, Gorbachev made stunning concessions, agreeing to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe; halving both countries' strategic weapons, including heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles; and even considering a wholesale destruction of all nuclear weapons. The fine print was hammered out in feverish, all-night sessions by a group that included Richard Perle, then undersecretary of defense, and Max Kampelman. Another group was working, also through the night, on various human rights issues—in itself a major concession on the part of the Soviets.

But the resulting agreement on arms control, for all the excitement it inspired, fell apart in the last hours. It turned out that Gorbachev had one major condition: the abandonment of Reagan's beloved Star Wars program. Reagan refused to confine the defensive shield to laboratory testing, and the meeting ended with both sides walking out tired and frustrated. As a result, no concluding statement was ever produced. Lost in the mix, as George Shultz later told the press, was the agreement reached during the human rights negotiations, which was as remarkable as Gorbachev's radical new position on arms reductions. The Soviets had conceded that human rights should remain a regular, open, and legitimate part of any bilateral negotiations. As Morris Abram and Jerry Goodman put it in a letter to the editor the following week as criticism of Reykjavik's failures mounted: "There can never be another summit at which human rights, including Jewish emigration, are not central."

If the human rights advances at Reykjavik were only theoretical and made behind closed doors, another international meeting only a few weeks later provided an opportunity for the Soviets to continue what was beginning to look like a full-scale public relations campaign to improve their image. The third Helsinki review conference would take place in Vienna, and for the first time since Madrid, all thirty-five signatory countries would be present. All three baskets would also be up for discussion. Disarmament talks would resume in Vienna but clearly would be even more dependent on resolving human rights issues. Shultz used a speech in Los Angeles before the conference to make the point: "Until there is substantial Soviet progress in the vital area of human rights, advances in other areas of the relationship are bound to be constrained."

From the beginning, the behavior of the Soviet delegates in Vienna differed starkly from earlier conferences. "There will be no forbidden themes, no taboos," announced a senior member of the delegation, Yuri Kashlev, to a group of journalists in Moscow a week before the opening. In Vienna, a younger, more educated team of Soviet diplomats went out of their way to respond courteously to the families of refuseniks and political prisoners, engaging directly rather than resorting to the usual dismissals. At one press conference on human rights called by the Soviets, a high-ranking official, Vladimir Lorneiko, spoke in a combination of English, German, and Russian about how the Soviet Union was "concerned with both the fate of humanity as well as the fate of a single individual." His country, he said proudly, had started "the increasing and broadening of human rights." In the audience was Alexander Slepak, one of Volodya and Masha's sons. Then a medical student in Philadelphia, he had managed to get into the conference as an accredited reporter for the
Jewish Exponent.
"I would like to know why the rights of my father have been violated for 17 years," he said. Lorneiko thanked him politely for his inquiry. He apologized for the situation and told a story about a friend of his, a young Soviet Jew, denied permission to leave because his parents had refused to sign the requisite forms demanded by OVIR that released their son from any financial obligation to them. Sadly, he said, "there are hundreds of cases like this."