The gates of November (27 page)

Refusals from OVIR were communicated orally. If, however, one’s application for a visa had been approved, one received a postcard in the mail. On March 11, 1971, an OVIR postcard arrived for Masha’s mother, who had recently suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. “You are permitted to leave for Israel. To obtain your exit visa, you must appear at the office of OVIR with these documents.” A list followed.

Masha went to see her the following day and showed her the postcard. After a long moment of silence, her mother said she would go alone.

“The trip is difficult,” said Masha. “Will you be able to make it?”

“It’s up to God. Begin the process.”

Masha spoke with her mother’s doctor, who said the trip would kill her. Masha said it was her mother’s decision; she would go.

Volodya and Masha went about collecting the necessary documents. The only place where her mother, weak and shaky, had to appear in person was the Austrian Embassy, for her transit visa.

Four days later, Masha and her mother were in the apartment on Gorky Street; Volodya had been arrested for participating in a sit-in. They drank tea and talked about the family, about Israel. Mother and daughter were up most of the night. “I’ll heal,” said her mother. “I’ll go to Europe and America. I’ll speak everywhere about you. I’ll be a bridge for you and get you out of here.” She seemed tortured by her decision to leave. “I am not abandoning you. We will see each other soon.”

She left the country on a stretcher and flew to Israel. She settled in Jerusalem and lived on a government old-age pension until her death in the desert city of Beersheba in 1980. Masha never saw her again.

By the early 1970s non-Jewish Russian dissidents of what had come to be called the democratic movement had established clear channels of communication to the West, along which flowed a steady stream of information about their activities in the Soviet Union and the efforts by the authorities to silence them. The refuseniks began to use the channels of the Russian dissidents to communicate with the West. Lists of Jews in refusal were slipped to foreign correspondents, along with carefully documented information concerning human rights violations. The lists also appeared in the Russian dissident samizdat publication
Khronika.

The Slepak family chronicles are particularly clear on the help the refuseniks received during the early 1970s from those in the Russian dissident movement. Volodya recalls the day, March 13, 1971, when Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the leading Russian dissidents, suddenly appeared at the apartment on Gorky Street, accompanied by two men. Volodya had met Bukovsky some months before and had since that time been regularly giving him information to relay to foreign correspondents. A tall man in his early thirties, with broad shoulders, brown hair, brown eyes, and a wide face with a prominent nose and cheekbones, Bukovsky had been arrested for dissident activity while still on the faculty of biology at the University of Moscow. Assuming that the Slepak apartment was bugged by the KGB, he proceeded to write on a magic slate, from which the script could be easily and repeatedly erased: “I know that I will be arrested in two or three days. The KGB agents are following me day and night, making no effort to hide. It took me about two hours to lose them so we could come to you without the KGB tail. When I’m arrested, you can be in direct contact with these gentlemen, and through them with other foreign correspondents.” One of the two men was Bob Catlin of Reuters. The other was the UPI correspondent, whose name Volodya does not now recall.

The next day Volodya met one of the correspondents—he does not remember which one, but the agreement was that all information related to one would be communicated by him to the other—and informed him that on the following day he and a group of others were going to the Supreme Soviet with a list of grievances against the Soviet Union. Volodya was arrested March 15 and given fifteen days in jail. While he was serving his fifteen days, the KGB arrested Bukovsky, who was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and an additional five years of exile.

That was the start of Volodya’s direct contact with the foreign press, the public word in the outside world, one of his weapons in the visa war. There were other weapons.

On March 15—a cold, cloudy day, with melting dirty snow on the ground—a group of about fifteen Jewish dissidents whose visa applications had been refused, arrived at the building on Pushkinskaya Street that housed the Office of the General Procurator. The entrance to the building was from the rear, which faced Sovietskaya Square. Earlier that morning, they had gone to the office of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on Mokhovaya Street near the Kremlin only to be told that their grievances had first to be presented at the office of the general procurator of the USSR. Now they waited in the receiving room of General Procurator Roman Rudenko’s office, after having informed the clerk that they wished to present their applications for exit visas, together with a number of demands: (1) that those arrested in Leningrad, Riga, Kishinev, and other cities for requesting visas to Israel be released and (2) that OVIR comply with Soviet law and send refusals in written form, stating the reasons for the refusal, the date of the refusal, and when the refusal would be terminated and the applicant free to leave the USSR.

After two hours they were told by the clerk that no one would speak with them. Spontaneously they determined not to leave and informed the clerk of their decision: They would wait until the general procurator or one of his aides responded to their demands. They sat in the receiving room until the office had to be closed. An officer of the militia arrived with several militiamen and said that if they did not leave immediately, they would all be arrested. The group refused to move.

Eventually about thirty militiamen came into the room. They removed the dissidents by force and pushed them into a bus, which transported them to the prison in the Moscow City Department of Militia on Petrovka Street. Each member of the group was separately interrogated in a small room furnished only with a table and two chairs: Your name? Your date of birth? Who is the organizer of this action? Do you personally know the people in the other cities who were arrested for their anti-Soviet activity and whose release you demanded? Do you know that their activity was inspired by foreign intelligence? Do you know any foreigners? Do you know that if you do not stop your anti-Soviet activity, you will never leave the Soviet Union? Do you know anyone in the so-called democratic movement?

Each interrogation took about twenty minutes. The members of the group gave their names and dates of birth and refused to answer the other questions or sign any statements. Instead they insisted upon their release and repeated their demands. Most stated that if they weren’t released immediately, they would go on a hunger strike. Volodya told his interrogator that he would answer none of his questions, not even about the weather, unless he was shown an official protocol accusing him of a crime.

All were put into cells, two to a cell, where they spent the night. Each cell contained two iron beds, a table with iron legs, and two benches, all screwed into the concrete floor. In the corner there was a tank instead of a lavatory. An iron door with a tiny sliding iron window sealed the cell from the outside. A high iron-barred window permitted a view only of the sky.

The next day each in turn was brought to a room where a woman in a dark skirt and jacket and a white blouse introduced herself as a judge and said, “Because of your noncompliance with the demands of the representatives of the authorities, you are hereby sentenced to fifteen days of administrative imprisonment.” That category of imprisonment was more severe than the usual kind in a local jail. It meant the prisoner did not receive a sleeping mat, blankets, or a pillow. He or she was given hot food only every other day and could be put to work cleaning yards, shoveling snow from the streets. As a rule, however, Jews who were arrested were kept separated from the others and were not subjected to forced public labor.

The members of the sit-in were returned to their cells and began the hunger strike. All were aware of revolutionaries who, during the time of the tsars, had refused food. And they knew of Gandhi. They refused all food and only drank water.

Volodya had been placed in the same cell with one of his close friends, Victor Polsky, a physicist whom he had met at the Moscow Electro-Vacuum Factory. Tall, red-haired, well groomed, Polsky was always one step ahead of the others in the group: the first to purchase a boat, the first to acquire an automobile. “Commander,” they called him. His father-in-law was a well-known professor of physics, a position that normally opened doors for Polsky but was of no avail now as he sat in the cell with Volodya, starving and counting the days.

Out of a scrap of paper they made a chessboard, coloring squares dark with burned matches. They molded chess pieces out of bread. They played all the time. Nights they tried to sleep, Volodya’s resounding snores later described by Polsky as a torture far worse than hunger.

Polsky and most of the others gave up the strike. By the thirteenth day Volodya was one of two still striking.

Masha had not participated in the sit-in. She, together with the wives of other prisoners, went to government offices to demand the release of their husbands.

The authorities did not want anyone of the group to die in jail or to look wan and wasted upon release, and so the prison doctor visited the cells and warned that if they did not end the strike, they would be fed by force. The prisoners were brought into a room where the tools of forced feeding had been laid out on a table: tubes, funnels, a device to keep the jaws apart. “We have our orders,” one of the militiamen told them. “Whether you want to or not, you will eat.” It is part of the torture for the torturer to display the instruments of torture before the one about to be tortured.

They were taken back to their cells.

One of the leaders of the group was Michael Zand, a linguist with a knowledge of ancient and modern Persian, as well as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Urdu, a strong-willed, determined man with a powerful look. On the thirteenth day of the hunger strike, he was strapped to a bed and held down by two men while bouillon was poured into a tube that had been inserted through his nose—not down his throat, because he could have bitten down on it—into his esophagus and stomach. Volodya was then told by the militia that Zand had voluntarily ceased striking, and he terminated his strike. The first food they gave him was a soup of grits and pork and beef; the sudden ingestion of fat after thirteen days of starvation permanently injured his liver and gallbladder. After two days of forced feeding, Michael Zand was put into a hospital. The others were sent home when they finished serving their prison sentence.

Volodya arrived home, weak, gaunt, joking that he had been to a rehabilitation clinic to lose his paunch. His young son Leonid remembers being proud of his father and, at the same time, feeling frightened. No one in his family had ever before had any serious conflict with the authorities. A new kind of life had begun for him and his parents.

The hunger strike and the sit-in—the latter, according to Volodya, used for the first time ever in the Soviet Union—were additional weapons in the visa war.

There was a collective weapon as well, one organized by the entire Jewish people.

About eight hundred delegates from thirty-eight countries and every continent arrived in Brussels on February 23, 1971, to attend the first conference of world Jewry on the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. The idea for the Brussels conference appears to have originated in New York. Many who came were uncertain whether there even was an issue: Were there any Jewish communities or individuals left in the Soviet Union after the Stalin decades and the war?

In Brussels there were terrorist threats and rumors of bombing by KGB agents. Everywhere, heavily armed police. A recent arrival from the USSR, Vitaly Rubin, addressed the conference and told of the Soviet Jews who were seeking the community of fellow Jews. As he spoke, it became apparent that Soviet Jewry was not a distant, dying remnant without vital memory and surviving on echoes alone. A stunning realization: There were Jews who had come through the decades of terror and war! Even those sympathetic early on to the cause of Soviet Jewry had not really believed that knowing and committed Jews were still to be found in the USSR.

Also at the conference were David Ben-Gurion, old and frail, together with the scholar Gershom Scholem, the writers André Schwarz-Bart and Elie Wiesel, and a number of Soviet Jews from Israel who had suffered imprisonment in labor camps and incarceration in insane asylums before receiving their exit visas. Masha’s ailing mother, Bertha Rashkovsky, was present as well.

On the second day of the conference, a sudden telephone call came from Moscow: Thirty Jews, Volodya among them, had gathered at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, where they presented a petition requesting the right to emigrate. The conference, spurred on by that deed, set up five commissions to carry forward the struggle and explore how to influence governments, media, and university campuses throughout the Western world. There was the usual bureaucratic infighting, the recurring organizational squabbles. In the end no worldwide assembly was established, and there was no coordinated strategy for an international campaign. But the charged atmosphere of the three-day conference sent delegates home eager to continue their labors.

Nothing was said of the situation of those Soviet Jews who seemed content to remain in the Soviet Union and whose lives might be profoundly affected by the dire repercussions of a persistent international thrust for Jewish emigration.

With nearly a hundred journalists present, the Brussels conference had received much worldwide attention. Close upon the heels of the conference came an abrupt increase in Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union: 13,022 in 1971; 31,903 in 1972. Probably the Soviets were hoping to empty the country of its contentious Jews and thereby put an end to the emigration movement. But the reverse occurred. Visa requests increased. The movement grew stronger. In the last weeks of 1971 there were days when two planeloads of Soviet Jews left Vienna bound for Israel.