When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (83 page)

In the refusenik community that spring, not a week passed without a farewell party, frenzied get-togethers with lots of vodka and cheek kissing and the passing of notes and information for relatives abroad. Many did begin to feel hopeful. But others became frantic that they would somehow be left out, that Gorbachev was tricking them, just offering a small carrot to the West that would soon be chewed up. Hunger strikes proliferated in March, a form of protest but also an expression of this anxiety. Some of the refuseniks were afraid that they were in a fleeting period of warmth, just like 1979, and that if they didn't do something dramatic, it might just pass them by. A well-organized group of seventy-five Jewish women in nine cities across the Soviet Union, from Riga to Baku, collectively abstained from food for three days. One young refusenik fasted for more than forty days. Another demonstrated by sitting cross-legged in the middle of Pushkin Square until his sign demanding an exit visa was torn up by a group of young men.

The rate of emigration—still modest by 1970s standards—was not the only indicator of change. The oppressive atmosphere suddenly seemed to lift. In February, activists in Moscow thought that Yosef Begun was not going to be included in the general prisoner amnesty, and about twenty people held a series of protests led by Begun's son Boris on the Arbat shopping promenade. For two days, they were left alone. They arrived with their signs, marched up and down Moscow's most fashionable outdoor mall, elicited some catcalls and shouts about what Hitler should have done, and then packed up. This in itself felt like an achievement of glasnost. Some bystanders were even supportive. But then, on the third day, a group of a hundred plainclothes KGB agents tried to break up the protest, aggressively striking out at both the refuseniks and reporters covering them, cutting the wire to the ABC television crew's camera. A journalist for the London
Times
was present and described how the violent scene escalated: "After being punched, jostled, and abused by burly men in plain clothes—many wearing identical tartan scarves—I was present as they repeatedly kicked a female refusenik in the breasts and kidney as she screamed in agony and pleaded for help from a uniformed policeman, who looked on with studied indifference." Boris Begun and two other men were detained and charged with hooliganism but never forced to serve the fifteen-day detention. The brutal response was reminiscent of Brezhnev's darkest days, except that immediately after the incident was over, the foreign ministry tried to distance itself, claiming that the attack was simply the "arbitrary action of local residents." A month later, gathering at a spot on Moscow's busy Garden Ring Road, a group of thirty refuseniks protested with placards around their necks day after day. Nobody bothered them. For the first time, a protest—in the past no more than thirty seconds of banner waving before arrest—was allowed to proceed uninterrupted. Policemen simply smiled at them.

In Leningrad that March, a few of the more active refuseniks decided they too would test the limits of glasnost. Misha Beizer, who had been leading the dissident Soviet Jewish history tours through Leningrad and publishing his samizdat
Leningrad Jewish Almanac,
decided to hold a demonstration. He sensed that something was changing and thought this was the time to fight. He wanted to organize a big protest, something that would force the local authorities to act. But almost everyone in the activist community was too scared to take part. In the end he managed to gather only seven people, including Aba and Ida Taratuta, the godfather and godmother of Leningrad's refusenik community, to stand with him in the cold near the bronze bust of Marx at the entrance to the Smolny Institute, Leningrad headquarters of the Communist Party. Beizer was sure they would be arrested; changes in Leningrad were occurring much more slowly than in Moscow. He wore used clothes to the protest and didn't cut his hair or trim his beard—he knew that in prison they would give him a uniform and shave him. As soon as they took their places, carrying placards above their heads, the local police surrounded them. But rather than arrest them, they shielded them from the growing crowd so that passersby couldn't see them. Then the protesters were informed that an official would speak with them. They agreed, but on condition that they be allowed to stand for two hours in protest. After freezing in the snow, they were brought in and introduced to the third secretary of the Leningrad district Party committee, the head of the local OVIR office. The protesters made their case, all the while sure that any moment they would be taken away. But they weren't. The next day the tiny demonstration was even covered in one of the Leningrad newspapers, with a photo. The Soviets were now openly promoting the fact that they allowed dissent. A couple of days after the protest, Beizer received a phone call from OVIR. They were inviting him to renew his application. A month later he was in Israel. The Leningrad protest led to two more that spring, each with a larger crowd.

At the beginning of April, during Passover, the American embassy hosted a Seder. It had been doing so for a few years as a small, symbolic gesture, serving matzo ball soup in the enormous czarist-era ballroom of the neoclassically grand Spaso house. This year, all the well-known refuseniks were present. Vladimir and Masha Slepak had just completed a seventeen-day hunger strike to mark their seventeenth year of refusal. Yosef Begun, slowly gaining weight and strength, was there. Alexander Lerner and Naum Meiman, both in their seventies, were given places of honor. Victor Brailovsky, his exile in Kazakhstan over, sat at one of the dozen tables. Ida Nudel had flown in from Bendery. The Seder began with the reading of the Haggadah. Then, about halfway through, George Shultz walked through the door, a yarmulke on his head.

The secretary of state was in Moscow for discussions with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev and had made much of the fact that he would be attending the Seder. When he arrived, he began to walk slowly around the room. He seemed to know the names of every refusenik. Shultz knelt down by the Slepaks and gave them a photograph of their grandchildren, whom they had never met. He appeared sincerely moved and inspired by what he saw as the great courage of these activists. When he addressed the refuseniks, it was with rare emotion in his voice. "You are on our minds; you are in our hearts," he told them. Then he channeled Winston Churchill's famous speech: "We never give up, we never stop trying, and in the end some good things do happen. But never give up, never give up. And please note that there are people all over the world, not just in the United States, who think about you and wish you well and are on your side." Once the Seder was over and Shultz and most of the refuseniks had left, the Slepaks and Alexander Lerner stayed up late into the night at the embassy discussing the problems of Soviet Jews with Richard Schifter, the assistant secretary of state for human rights, who was now regarded by the refuseniks as a good friend.

Shultz's visit was well publicized—Western journalists and television cameras covered the event—and Gorbachev was annoyed. At a meeting the following day, the general secretary asked Shultz why he dealt "only with a certain group of Jews, people who do not like it here and have complaints, and show no interest in the millions of other Soviet Jews, who are out of your field of vision." Shultz answered, as he had in the past, that he would be glad to take those unhappy Jews back home with him. "I've got a deal for you. I've got a great big airplane. If you don't want them, there isn't a person in my party, including the reporters, that wouldn't give up his seat for those people. And you can just put them all on and get rid of them if you don't want them. We'll take them."

Gorbachev ignored this comment, but it demonstrated just how serious the United States was about dealing with this problem before anything else. Shultz used his visit to try to continue an intellectual conversation about liberalization with Gorbachev and, even more so, with Shevardnadze, which he had begun before Geneva. Shultz had become personally close to the congenial Georgian-born foreign minister and even sang a version of "Georgia on My Mind" to him during an informal lunch, a joking gift that was followed by a quartet singing a Russian rendition. The argument that Shultz continued to make to him was that the freedom of individuals was in the Soviet Union's own interest, a necessary evolution for any country hoping to keep up in a changing world. "The degree of constraint that you now exercise over information flows, economic opportunities, and consumer choices will not permit sufficient development of the human potential needed to keep pace with more open societies," he told Shevardnadze the evening after the Seder. "There is no way to get there from here without lifting many of the restraints you place on your people." Shultz told him that though he didn't see a change on human rights as a "concession to the United States," it would "build support among the American people for further improvements in our relations." Shevardnadze and Gorbachev were listening.

The rapid changes in the Soviet Union seemed to arrive overnight. It was disorienting, especially to those who for so long had thought of the Communist empire as fundamentally malevolent. Although faced with the reality that political prisoners were being freed, human rights championed, protests permitted, and emigration rates rising—reaching 717 for the month of April and 871 in May—the skeptics continued to insist that the West was being duped. There could be no other explanation. Gorbachev was simply more artful than his predecessors. Still, it was hard not to see the signs of genuine progress that were staring American Jews in the face in the late spring and summer of 1987.

This encouraged those who saw quiet diplomacy as the answer. The billionaire diplomat with the Soviets' ear, Edgar Bronfman, decided to take another trip to Moscow to see his contacts in the Kremlin. And this time he brought Morris Abram with him. The two were an unlikely pair—the former civil rights lawyer from Georgia and the privileged son of a Canadian bootlegger. Abram, who wielded more power than any other American Jewish leader—and was more connected to the Reagan administration—had resented Bronfman's attempts over the past few years to act in the name of the Jewish people while not actually being accountable to anyone. As chairman of the National Conference, Abram had to be more responsive to the community, and this often forced him to vacillate between an aggressive approach and a conciliatory one. Bronfman, on the other hand, was more business-minded and quick to compromise with the Soviets. The two had frequently sparred on the letters pages of the
New York Times
over the issue of repealing Jackson-Vanik, with Bronfman encouraging American Jews to make the first move, eliminating the trade restrictions as a goodwill gesture, and Abram demanding the Soviets act first if they wanted to be rewarded. But in spite of this rivalry, each had something to gain from the other. The Soviets listened to Bronfman because of his wealth. And Abram, as the respected head of the official Soviet Jewry organization, had a legitimacy that Bronfman could not buy. Traveling together served both their interests.

They arrived in Moscow in late March, carrying in their plane an electrocardiograph for the refuseniks as well as two knives for the kosher slaughter of animals. Anatoly Dobrynin, now back in Moscow leading the government's international department, was initially reluctant to include Abram in the discussions—understanding the symbolic significance of meeting the head of an organization called the National Conference on Soviet Jewry—but he eventually relented. The talks involved Dobrynin and Alexander Yakovlev, one of the more reform-minded advisers in Gorbachev's inner circle, and were genial (at one point Dobrynin told Abram not to worry about the new emigration laws, which, he said, were meant "to expand emigration, not to restrict it"). After their negotiations, the Americans gathered a group of thirty refuseniks in a hotel room, including the recently released Yosef Begun, and told them what they had managed to extract: all the long-term refusenik cases would be resolved within the year, with the exception of real national security threats; as many as twelve thousand Soviet Jews would emigrate in the short term by direct flights to Israel that would go through Romania; and more Jewish cultural expression would be allowed, including the unhindered study of Hebrew, the addition of a kosher restaurant near the Moscow synagogue, facilitation of rabbinical training outside the Soviet Union, and accommodations for kashrut. The agreement on direct flights through Romania was particularly noteworthy, as it effectively eliminated the dropout problem by bypassing Western Europe altogether and removing an escape route to the United States. In exchange for these promises, Abram and Bronfman had pledged that they would recommend a repeal of both the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson amendments so that the Soviets could freely get credit and trade at a lower tariff.

The refuseniks and grassroots activists immediately attacked the Bronfman-Abram trip as an act of hubris and naiveté. Alexander Lerner, sitting in the two men's hotel room as they described their dealings, could not believe that they hadn't first consulted the people they were supposedly representing. Lerner was sure the two had been fooled by wily Soviet leaders. A few of the most prominent refuseniks, including Lerner, Kosharovsky, and Slepak, wrote a letter addressed to "the leadership of the state of Israel and Jewish organizations of the Diaspora." Even though recent developments "show that now real possibilities have appeared to lead out of the cul-de-sac the entire complex of Jewish national problems," they were disturbed by the lack of any consultation with them before the meeting, which, they wrote, could have prevented "many possible side effects." In America, the reaction was equally fierce. Pamela Cohen, a Chicago housewife who had gotten involved locally and then risen to the top of the Union of Councils, was indignant on behalf of the thousands of Soviet Jewry activists she represented. They believed deeply in the principle of freedom of choice. And in addition to not involving the Union of Councils in their negotiations, Bronfman and Abram had cut a deal that would funnel Jews to Israel without giving them the opportunity to decide if that's where they wanted to go. It seemed a paternalistic move—American Jewish leaders telling these Soviet Jews what was good for them—one that went against the founding principle of the Union of Councils: to simply represent the interests of the refuseniks in America, to do whatever they wanted.