The gates of November (29 page)

When his wife died, the Old Bolshevik married again and now lived in a small house with his second wife. From time to time he and Volodya and Masha continued to call one another and meet—until the complete separation that followed when they told him of their plans to emigrate to Israel. From then on, the Old Bolshevik would have nothing to do with his son and daughter-in-law. They would hear about him on occasion through Volodya’s cousin Anatoly.

Masha’s mother once remonstrated with Solomon Slepak. “Grandchildren shouldn’t suffer because a father and a son have difficulties between them. The grandchildren have only one grandfather. How can you bear to deprive them of their grandfather?”

And so Sanya—at times alone, at times with his little brother, Leonid—traveled by Metro and tram three or four times a year to Solomon’s house. The Old Bolshevik lived on Mashkova Street, a narrow side road in the center of old Moscow. The one-story house, inside a courtyard, was made of wood, a ramshackle affair, leaning walls, creaking floors, something out of Gogol. It had a small backyard, with flowers and bushes. A big German shepherd dog raced about, barking furiously. Redolent of poverty, the house looked shrunken and withdrawn from the outside world, forgotten by history, like the man who lived inside.

Almost always their grandfather’s wife would let them in, and they would find their grandfather seated at a large round table, writing. She was much younger than Solomon, with little education, a typical Russian commoner, from the lowest rungs of society. Always seeming agitated when the children visited, she fussed about anxiously, worked too hard at her hostessing, talked endlessly, until Solomon would say, “It’s enough, it’s enough, calm down.”

Sometimes their grandfather would meet them at the door, push the dog aside, and take their coats, happy to see them. Books and papers lay heaped on the table, together with large dictionaries, and it would take a few minutes for him to put everything away. The room was small, a couch on one side and the table in the center, and furnished in Russian peasant fashion: a clutter of ornamented pillows and a tablecloth and shelf hangings and needlework on the walls. The boys and their grandfather would sit around the table and engage in small talk. He would ask about the health of their parents. They knew not to say anything to their grandfather about their father’s activities. The old man’s wife brought them tea and preserves. In later years the boys learned that she was an alcoholic, that she often abused their grandfather, stole his money, beat him.

Leonid Slepak, slight of build, strikingly attractive, and seven years younger than his brother, spent much of his childhood in neighborhood child care centers. At times, if he was ill, his grandfather would come over to the apartment on Gorky Street and stay with him. He would bring along his work—he was always writing, translating—and sit at the living room table with his books and papers. Once Leonid kept disturbing him, and Solomon put aside his work and read him an Italian fairy tale, “Qnionhead,” translated into Russian and very popular then in the Soviet Union. How the little vegetables—onions, radishes, leeks—made a revolution and overthrew the oranges and tomatoes.

One time Solomon handed little Leonid a Russian rendering
of Alice in Wonderland.
In his own hands he held another copy, in English. He told Leonid to follow as he read and translated directly from English into Russian and to see if he made any mistakes. With growing wonder and delight, Leonid followed his grandfather’s flawless translation.
Alice in Wonderland was
the first book Leonid read in English.

The boys also went to visit Solomon in the hospital when he lay recovering from a heart attack in the fall of 1974. That time they came with their father, who brought along a gift of fruits. It was early evening, cold and rainy, no snow yet on the ground. Solomon Slepak lay in a small room with only one other bed, which was empty. That was surprising; most hospital rooms had six or ten or twelve beds. Clearly, he was in a room reserved for Old Bolsheviks.

He lay in the far left corner, and as they entered, he looked up and brusquely asked Volodya if he had changed his mind about emigrating to Israel. Volodya said no. Solomon pointed to the fruits and then to a small table and then to the door. Volodya put the fruits on the table and left the room and stood outside in the hallway. The boys came over to their grandfather and sat on his bed for a while, talking with him. Then they said good-bye and joined their father and went home.

Because the Slepak apartment was in the heart of the city, it had become by 1974 a collection point, a kind of lodgment area and operations center, in the visa war. It was down the street from two major hotels, the National and the Intourist: 15 Gorky Street. You walked past the shops to the entrance archway. To the left of the entrance was a large bookstore; to the right, a dairy products store. You went beneath the archway and turned into the courtyard. All the entrances to the apartments were from the courtyard, and the way into the Slepaks’ was through the first entrance, a wooden double door with waist-high glass panels, then another set of doors into a small foyer, where you saw the back of the elevator shaft, covered with wire mesh. You went left to the spiral staircase and up half a flight to the elevator, where you pulled open a heavy steel door and pushed through two swinging wooden doors into the tiny elevator. You pulled the steel door shut and stepped out of the way as the two doors swung back into place. Then you pushed the button to the eighth floor, rode up, opened the swinging doors and the steel door, and stepped out. You found yourself looking at two apartments, one in front, the other to the right. Number 77, the one to the right, with its brown wooden door, was the apartment of the Slepaks.

By 1974 Volodya’s name had appeared several times in the newspapers: a dissident, an enemy of the people. Most of the dwellers in the building might say hello when passing by in the courtyard or on the street but otherwise avoided Volodya and Masha. The only friends they had in the building lived on the floor below theirs, a married couple, he an architect, she an editor. Leonid’s classmates no longer visited. Sanya, now grown, lived elsewhere with a girlfriend.

Inside that communal apartment, in the room he shared with Masha—the other occupants were Leonid and a police sergeant and his wife, who lived behind their closed door and were often drunk—Volodya carefully prepared the means by which the lists of names, and the necessary accompanying data, of those requesting invitations to Israel were smuggled out to the West; tens of thousands of names went through his hands. First he bought Russian souvenir wooden dolls. He then cut the head off each doll, drilled a hole in the body, inserted the tightly rolled film negatives of the lists, glued the head back on, and gave the doll to a visitor who had been recommended by friends from abroad. The souvenir doll left the Soviet Union unconcealed in one’s baggage, a tourist’s memento. Among the Jewish dissidents, only three knew of the dolls, and only Volodya, and on occasion Leonid, handled the operation. None of the dolls was ever unmasked.

A tiny weapon, those dolls, and among the most effective.

A new weapon emerged: the Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group. The Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975 by thirty-five nations, including the Soviet Union and the United States, the former, because it wanted the international recognition given by the accords to its theretofore provisional postwar borders; the latter, because it wanted the Soviet Union to commit itself to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which called for universal freedom of expression and opinion. The agreement, three years in the making, carried no legal weight but was considered of great moral and political significance. The nations that signed the accords were to be “guided by the principle that such universal guarantees … should be firmly adhered to in their own country and elsewhere.” Of special significance to Soviet Jewish dissidents was the commitment by participating nations to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion,” and the promise to work for the reunification of families through emigration.

But the Soviets, who wanted the West to honor the fixed-border guarantees in the accords, had no intention of adhering to the human rights provisions, which they regarded as mere rhetoric. To counter that attitude and the possible sacrifice of human rights by the White House for the goal of détente, Representative Millicent Fenwick introduced a bill on March 23, 1976, to set up “a commission to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Accords.” The bill passed. Congressman Dante Fascell became chairman of the commission.

At the time the bill was making its way through Congress and to the desk of President Ford, who signed it that June, Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and longtime dissident, organized a group in Moscow to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights agreements, which came to be known as the Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group.

Similar monitoring groups, stimulated by the Helsinki group but independent of it, then came into existence in other regions of the Soviet Union—the Ukraine, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia. From those groups issued a steady stream of reports on arrests, on trials, on the persecution of Pentecostalists, Catholics, Crimean Tatars, on conditions in labor camps, on the use of drugs and psychiatric treatment against political prisoners—on a vast range of human rights abuses.

Among the earliest members recruited by Orlov for the Moscow group were Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Shcharansky, and Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’swife. Orlov asked Shcharansky and Vitaly Rubin, the prominent Sinologist whose emigration requests had been turned down repeatedly since 1972, to serve as representatives of the Jewish emigration movement. That June, Rubin was suddenly granted his visa, and he departed for Israel. Volodya stepped into his place.

The monitoring groups became an indispensable weapon for Russian dissidents and Jewish refuseniks and the bane of the Soviet authorities. Yuri Orlov was told by the KGB that the Moscow group was illegal; he ignored orders to disband it. The KGB subjected the apartments of monitors to intensive searches. Orlov and Ginzburg were arrested in February 1977. Orlov was given the maximum sentence for anti-Soviet slander: seven years in a labor camp and five years of exile. Ginzburg, tried in July 1978—far beyond the nine-month limit for pretrial detention—was sentenced to eight years in the camps.

In a photograph taken some time in May 1978 outside the Lublino courthouse in Moscow, where the trial of Yuri Orlov was taking place—Orlovs wife had been made to strip and was searched by male guards before being permitted to enter the courthouse—one can see Andrei Sakharov in front of half a dozen uniformed guards. He seems to be walking past them in some hurry. Around that same time, Sakharov and his wife were photographed with Volodya. They are wearing leather jackets, and buds are growing on the bushes behind them. Volodya is sporting rather natty sunglasses. He was only days away from his own arrest.

The Helsinki Accords, which the Soviets had initially treated as the greatest moment in history since the crushing of Hitler—so elated had they been by the world’s recognition of their war-acquired territories—was now beginning to be perceived by them as a major tactical blunder. The accords had placed on the international agenda certain basic issues that affected the lives of all people: freedom of movement, the open exchange of information, family reunification. Regarded as neither rhetoric nor platitudes by the Americans, by Soviet dissidents, even by Communist parties in the West, the terms set by the framers of the Helsinki Accords had unexpectedly become a weapon directed against the Kremlin. The incessant reporting by the monitoring groups placed Soviet infractions in full view of the world and paraded the torn and tormented nature of life in the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union. Further complicating matters for the Kremlin was the fact that the direction of Jewish emigration had undergone a significant change over the years: Many were dropping out of the Israel pipeline near Vienna—to the great annoyance of the Israelis—and choosing instead to go to America. Thus many of the Soviet Unions best-educated Jews were now offering their services not only to the socialist Zionist state but also to the capitalist West. And perhaps the most ominous development of all: As if emulating the Jews, other national groups were embarking upon emigration campaigns. In 1974 Volga Germans demonstrated at party offices, where they displayed banners and placards, and staged sit-ins and hunger strikes.

In the apartment on Gorky Street, Volodya Slepak and Anatoly Shcharansky collected information on Soviet violations of human rights and sent it on to the Western countries that had signed the Helsinki Accords. Information came to them from everywhere, mostly by messenger—people traveling by train and plane, carrying lists of those harassed, searched, arrested, tried, sentenced.

Shcharansky was in his late twenties, a short, balding, feisty scientist and computer specialist, who had grown up knowing very little about being Jewish. He was bright, witty, life-loving. Anti-Semitism and the Six-Day War turned him into a dissident. He applied for an exit visa in the spring of 1973 and was refused. He married in 1974. Because his English was excellent, he served as Sakharov’s interpreter at press conferences. He was among the first to understand the value of contacts with the foreign press and had already experienced numerous collisions with the KGB, whose agents were now openly following him, standing alongside him on buses, running behind him on the stairs of the Metro, even jumping after him into the taxis he hailed; Shcharansky always insisted that they pay part of the fare.

He and Volodya worked assiduously at their task on the Helsinki Monitoring Group. Each infraction involving a Jew which came to their attention was documented and carefully confirmed. An accumulation of such cases was presented to the entire group. After lengthy discussion and further investigation, a statement was prepared containing the names of those whose rights had been violated. The statement was reviewed by the group, and numerous copies were then made on a typewriter. Every copy was signed by all the members of the group. No statement was issued if there was any doubt as to the trustworthiness of the facts it contained. Then the copies were distributed through the regular mail to the Soviet government and to each of the other governments that had signed the accords; to the other signatories through channels considered more reliable than the mail, such as diplomats, correspondents, visitors from abroad; to
Khronika,
the dissident publication that had ceased appearing regularly in 1972 and was now being published intermittently; and to the archives of the Helsinki Monitoring Group. Usually the group published from two to four such statements every month.