The gates of November (25 page)

The office of the Trust Geophysica was near the Povarovka Railway Station on the Moscow-Leningrad railway, a half hour train ride from the Leningradsky Railway Station. The work paid considerably less than what he had been earning at the institute.

About six months later, while walking along a street in Moscow, Volodya met one of his former colleagues from the institute and was told that one month after he had left the job, there had been a meeting in the institute of all the party members and heads of departments and laboratories. The sole topic of the meeting was Volodya Slepak and his plans to emigrate to Israel. In the course of a furious speech against Volodya, the party secretary had said, “How blind we were not to see that among us was a traitor, an enemy of the people!”

Masha retained her job as a radiologist because her chief received no instructions to dismiss her. He was an upright man and would not fire her on his own even though he knew that she intended to emigrate. Besides, there was a dire need in Moscow for radiologists.

David and Noya Drapkin submitted the necessary documents to OVIR, requesting permission to emigrate. In April 1969, about the time that Volodya gave up his job at the institute, David Drapkin received a call from OVIR and was told that his request had been refused.

“There are too many of you Jews,” the OVIR official said over the telephone. “We will not let you leave; we will finish you off here.”

Volodya’s new job at the Trust Geophysica began in June. Because he had no vacation coming to him, he and Masha and Sanya remained in Moscow that summer. The weather was hot; the air dusty, brown. Some weekends the Slepaks went with friends into the forests. And listened to the news over the radio. That was the summer two American astronauts walked on the moon. In Moscow the political atmosphere was portentous with neo-Stalinist resonances after a year of increasing repression and the surprise overpowering of Czechoslovakia the previous summer. Leonid Slepak, then ten years old, spent his vacation in a Young Pioneers camp.

A man from Leningrad, Sasha Blank, an old friend of the Slepaks’, emigrated to Israel that August, carrying with him the data for a second invitation. Many were being refused visas at that time because according to the OVIR officials, those sending the invitations were not “close” relatives; hence Masha’s mother had asked Sasha Blank to find an Israeli woman about fifty years of age, who was to claim in the invitation that she was her daughter. Masha’s mother had contrived a lengthy story to tell the emigration officials about how during the Civil War she had suddenly fallen ill with typhus and fainted on a train; after having been removed from the car, she woke in a station to find her daughter gone. The amulet the daughter had worn around her neck all through the years had finally led to her mother.

The same August that Sasha Blank left for Israel carrying with him Volodya and Masha’s data and the story of Masha’s mother’s “daughter,” eighteen Jewish families from the Soviet region of Georgia took the astonishing step of sending a petition directly to Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir, with the request that it be forwarded to U Thant. The petition solicited his backing for their constantly thwarted attempts to emigrate to Israel. “It is incomprehensible that in the twentieth century people can be prohibited from living where they wish to live,” read the petition. “We will wait months and years, we will wait all our lives, if necessary, but we will not renounce our faith or our hopes.”

The petition, which seemed to signal the start of a mass movement, was read to the Israeli Knesset and presented by the government of Israel to the United Nations as an official document. News of the petition filtered into the major cities of the Soviet Union: Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Riga, Vilna, Odessa, Kiev. More petitions and letters followed, from individuals and groups, addressed to the United Nations, to Soviet Premier Kosygin, to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to President Zalman Shazar of Israel. For years we have suffered humiliation, the letters and petitions said; we have the right to request a new home in a land of our choice.

Volodya and Masha, barely aware of those letters, had no notion that they were becoming part of an expanding horizon of opposition to tyranny. But with his job at the institute now lost, Volodya knew that he no longer needed to be concerned about his security clearance. And so that fall, for the first time in their lives, he and Masha and their sons walked from the apartment on Gorky Street to the Moscow synagogue on Arkhipova Street, where they became part of a multitude of Jews celebrating Simchat Torah.

They would not enter the synagogue, avoided contact with the rabbi and state-hired officials of the Jewish community, all of whom, they had been told, were under the control of the KGB. One of their friends, David Chavkin, had brought along a self-made amplifier with two powerful speakers, a tape recorder, and cassettes. Jewish music resounded through the street. Volodya and Masha were caught up in the tumult and enthusiasm of the huge crowd, thousands of people. Militia stood along the rim of the crowd, and everyone there knew that KGB agents in civilian garb were among the crowd—some may even have been participating in the singing and dancing—but no one seemed to care. The celebration lasted until midnight.

The Slepaks went often to that synagogue from then on, on Sabbaths and festivals. They never entered but stood on the street with friends and other dissidents, watching the crowds grow from year to year.

In late 1969 dissidents from Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga met and decided it was now time to initiate collective letters of protest to the authorities and make them public. That was the first clear move toward organized open confrontation with the regime. In early 1970 Jewish dissidents in Riga issued the Jewish samizdat bulletins
Iton Aleph
(“Newspaper A”), and
Iton Bet
(“Newspaper B”), a few copies on poor paper in Russian, the first independent public voice of the embryonic movement: an interview with Golda Meir; an article about the Israeli Army; a passage from a book about the 1943 uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis; the texts of letters to government officials by Soviet Jews voicing their right to emigrate; the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

The second invitation to Israel arrived in the Slepak mailbox on a day in January 1970—from a different “relative.” This time the names were correctly spelled. Volodya and Masha went to the OVIR office for the necessary application forms and to learn from instructions posted on the walls how to complete the forms and what accompanying documents they were required to submit.

It took them nearly three months to assemble all the necessary documents. The application form alone was six pages in length. It asked for your name, address, date and place of birth, place or places of work for the past five years, were you a member of the Communist Party or Komsomol, had you ever lost your membership and why, your nationality, names of your closest relatives, had you ever been abroad, where when why, who among your relatives had been abroad with you, had you ever before applied to leave the USSR, when, were you refused, why, who in your family was now applying with you, what country did you intend to enter, who in that country was your relative, why and from where did the relative leave the USSR, list all your communications with that relative, when did you receive the most recent communication, how did you discover where that relative was living, explain why you wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

Together with the application, you needed to submit to OVIR: your autobiography; the invitation from the relative in Israel, certified by the Foreign Ministry of Israel; the
kharakteristika
from your job, stating that it was addressed to OVIR specifically for a visa application and signed by the director of your place of employment, the party secretary, and the chairman of the trade union committee; a certificate, also specifically directed to OVIR, from the office running your apartment building regarding your status as a resident of Moscow and the condition of your domicile; a signed statement from your parents, if alive, about how they looked upon your desire to leave the country and whether they had any financial or other claims upon you, with their signatures certified either at their places of work or by the office of their apartment building; certificates of birth and, wherever applicable, of marriage, divorce, parents’ death; copies of diplomas; four photographs; two blank postcards with your home address; receipt from the bank certifying your payment of the special tax for the exit visa application; internal passport, military record, trade union card, work book, pension card.

Sometime in March 1970 Volodya telephoned his father and asked if he would write and sign a statement about how he felt concerning his son’s wish to leave the country. He explained that he needed the statement to complete his visa application documents.

“I will never write or sign such a statement!” shouted his father. “Do not call me again! I will have nothing to do with an enemy of the people!” And he hung up the telephone.

After repeated failed attempts to obtain the statement, Volodya decided to include with the documents an affidavit written and signed by him and certified by a notary to the effect that his father had refused to take part in the visa application process.

That same month Volodya requested from his chiefs at the Trust Geophysica the
kharakteristika
he needed for OVIR. They agreed, on condition that he resign from his position. It was three months before he found another job.

By the time Masha and Volodya completed gathering all the documents, everyone at Masha’s place of work and in their apartment house knew that they were applying to emigrate from the country.

On April 13, 1970, Volodya and Masha boarded a dark blue city minibus on Alexander Pushkin Square, one block from their apartment, rode to Pokrovskiye Vorota, and then walked a block and a half to the OVIR office on Kolpachny Pereulok, where they submitted their visa application for emigration to Israel.

An official from the Ministry of the Interior checked the documents attached to the application form for proper stamps, signatures, and answers. Pausing over Volodya’s statement regarding his father’s refusal, the official insisted on the need for a statement from his father.

Volodya said it was impossible. His father was an Old Bolshevik; he would never write and sign such a statement. Why wasn’t Volodya’s own statement to that effect sufficient?

After a moment the official yielded. Gathering up the application form and the documents, he said tersely, “You will be informed about the decision.”

Volodya and Masha went out of the OVIR office and rode the minibus back to the apartment. Volodya was forty-three years old, Masha forty-four.

Their sons, Sanya and Leonid, seventeen and ten, knew that their family was applying to emigrate to Israel. They continued to attend school without incident. No one seemed aware of their family’s plans.

One day two KGB officers appeared at the school and told the principal, Gregory Suvorov, that the family of one of his students, Leonid Slepak, was applying for a visa to Israel. The KGB was requesting, said the agents, that the principal and all the teachers in the school organize themselves into a pressure group to persuade the student, Leonid Slepak, to change his mind about going to Israel and to incite him against his parents.

Gregory Suvorov was a Russian, a teacher of history, and a member of the party. All in the school held him in high esteem; many loved him. Politely he informed the KGB agents that they had their business and he had his; he was responsible for everything that took place in the school and would not allow any interference with his work. He then asked them to leave the premises. Soon afterward he met with the teachers and told them that they were not to say anything about the status of Leonid Slepak; they were to make him feel warm and welcome.

No further incidents occurred in the school over the Slepak family’s emigration plans.

Weeks went by. The Slepaks heard nothing from OVIR. On a day in June, after having waited about two months, Volodya telephoned the OVIR office.

The official who answered said, “Your name is Slepak?”

“Yes.”

“We have just received the decision of the commission.” He said nothing about the nature of the commission or who had served on it. “Your request for a visa has been refused.”

“What is the reason?” asked Volodya.

“Secrecy,” the official said. “According to regulations, you have the right to reapply after five years; then your case will be reviewed.” And he hung up.

In the single word “secrecy” Volodya read the true and complete response of the Soviet authorities. His years of scientific work on the air-defense system of the Soviet Union had given him access to vital state secrets. He was a major security risk, and quite probably would never be permitted to leave the country.

The Visa War

O
n the afternoon of June 15, 1970, some days after the telephone conversation with OVIR in which Volodya was informed that his exit visa application had been refused, he and Masha were alone in the apartment when they heard the doorbell ring. Masha went to the door, while Volodya remained in the smaller of their two rooms. He heard the door being opened and called out, “Who is there?”

Masha returned to the room. “They came to make a search.”

From somewhere outside, a man said, “Please come here!”

Volodya followed Masha out of the room. In the hall near the entrance door stood five men in civilian clothes and one in a militia uniform. One of the men in civilian clothes said in a soft voice, “I am Major Nosov of the KGB.” He had on a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a tie. Under his jacket he wore a pistol. “I have a warrant to search your apartment,” he said.

“In connection with what case?” asked Volodya.

“The case of Yuri Fedorov,” said Major Nosov. He was very polite.

“What is he accused of?”

“Anti-Soviet activity,” said Major Nosov. He pointed to the man in uniform. “This is a representative of the militia. These two are witnesses, and these two are my aides. So, if you please, give us voluntarily all the anti-Soviet material that you have in your possession. Otherwise we will begin to search.”