by Chaim Potok
Soviet law did not explicitly prohibit citizens from tuning in to foreign radio stations; such a law would have been tantamount to forbidding the movement of air. The authorities tried to prevent reception by jamming broadcasts, thereby producing a screen of noise the voices of the enemy could not penetrate. Jamming was costly, however, and centered mainly on the large cities and even there was not entirely successful. In forests and fields, retuned shortwave radios were able to pull in the signals that relayed to Volodya and Masha and their friends events in America and Europe and Israel, the hum of new possibilities.
Though there was no specific law against listening to the outside world, a hint of habitual tuning to those voices might easily have resulted in suspicion being cast upon one’s loyalties and the beginning of mistrust on the part of one’s superior. And one doubt leading to another and still another. And perhaps one day the loss of one’s job, and the KGB at the door.
Why, then, did they do it? Why all that clandestine listening by those very successful, very assimilated Russian Jews, that circle of accomplished men and women, many with families and in splendid jobs, virtually all, despite some doubts, committed to Marxist ideology and conditioned to the Soviet way of life? Why that beginning effort by Volodya and Masha and the others to dismantle the Soviet core of their beings, to bore tunnels to their individualities, to discover their separate selves?
Volodya had repeatedly felt his father’s brutal single-mindedness of puarpose. Alone among his circle of friends, he had a father who was an Old Bolshevik, one who had mysteriously survived all the Stalinist purges, and whose sudden rages and evasive answers in defense of party policies had caused his son to view him as an uncompromising Soviet ideologue, a man of relentless cunning and cruelty on political issues, including those pertaining to Jews, in the matter of which he seemed to acquiesce entirely to party instructions, at times to the point of groveling servility. Indeed, though the notion never occurred to Volodya, it is not too farfetched to wonder if in ideology and temperament his father was only a few steps removed from the ruthless Lazar Kaganovich, the sole Jew left in the Politburo, who had long ruled with Stalin.
As Volodya continued working on the air-defense system of the Soviet Union, his sense of his personal future began to be increasingly somber. He was aware that Jews could no longer enter the ministries of Foreign Trade and Foreign Affairs; that the upper echelons of the party and the secret police, where Jews had been so heavily represented from the time of the Revolution until the mid-thirties, were now closed to them; that there were proportionately increasingly fewer Jews in local soviets, in republic-level legislatures, in the Supreme Soviet. He knew too that from 1958 to 1961, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, not a single Jew was to be found among the numerous government ministers. Until mid-1957 many Soviet Jews had thought that some kind of cultural and religious rebirth might be at hand: A few Yiddish books had appeared; the authorities had even permitted amateur theatricals in some cities; synagogues were undisturbed; a theological seminary had been added to the synagogue in Moscow; and three thousand prayer books were published in Moscow. Indeed, during the first half of 1957 about thirty thousand Soviet Jews were repatriated to Poland as part of a Soviet-Polish agreement to allow the return to their homeland of pre-1939 Polish citizens and their families; many soon left Poland for Israel and elsewhere. There were the visits by Israeli athletes, and the Israeli participants in the 1957 international youth festival in Moscow, and the tourists from Israel and other countries, and the concerts given by Israeli performers. But abruptly, as if awakening to the fear that it might have opened its doors dangerously wide and that things might soon go spinning out of control, the Kremlin again reversed itself. An antireligion campaign began to sweep through much of the country in mid-1957, intensified in 1959, and continued in ferocity until 1964. It was directed against not only Judaism but all faiths. About fifty synagogues—“nests of speculators,” rose the cry from the local press—and thousands of churches were shut down. The last synagogue in the city of Minsk had its roof removed during a service and was turned into a club. Baking the traditional unleavened Passover flatbread, matzah, was forbidden. And a campaign against economic crimes netted an astonishing number of Jews, whose names were prominently announced in the press. More than 500 trials took place in the early 1960s for the crimes of embezzlement, speculation in foreign currency, bribery, and connections to foreigners; 117 individuals, of whom 91 were Jews, received the death penalty. That so many Jews were among those arrested is no surprise, as Jews were prominent in certain areas of the economy. But it is not unreasonable to wonder why the number of Jews executed was disproportionately so much higher and to regard with dismay the atmosphere of hatred generated by the anti-Semitism in the Soviet press, so starkly reminiscent of the late forties and early fifties under Stalin.
Back and forth went the Soviet Union in its relationship with the Jews, now warming to them, now freezing them out. As in tsarist times, a dizzying policy of peace and war, progress and retreat, acceptance and rejection, yawing this way and that: the classic, paralyzing Russian ambivalence. No pogroms anymore, nothing quite so crude as that, especially with the world always watching. Khrushchev was not a boorish anti-Semite; the butchery of pogroms, which he had witnessed during his early years in the Ukraine, was unseemly to him, unfit for a superpower attempting to influence the third world. Still, the Jews had to be dealt with. They were too easily attracted to Zionism and bourgeois nationalism, far too intellectual, too quick to avoid collective labor and group discipline, too exploitive of Gentiles, too eager to attend universities, too entangled with ancient superstitions, too individualistic. Deviants. Best to just barely tolerate them, to treat them as marginal, and as forever incapable of entering the Soviet mainstream.
That attitude toward the Jews was at times brought home to Volodya on the job. In 1963 the laboratory he headed had a staff of about twenty-five people, all working on improving the air-defense system of the Soviet Union. On occasion he informed the deputy director of the institute that some additional engineers were needed, and each time the response was: “Please find good engineers, and they will be accepted. But they must not be Tatars or Jews. I can do nothing for them.”
Masha never encountered anti-Semitism on the job, because most of the doctors in her hospital were Jews. But she knew of Volodya’sexperiences, was intensely aware of the poisoned air of the country. She and Volodya asked themselves often how they could raise a family in that atmosphere. Even those who wished to assimilate could never be certain that they would not be told one day, “You come from Jewish grandparents and parents, and therefore you cannot be fully Russian.” And those with excellent jobs today might be fired at any time in the future simply because they were Jews, and then arrested, exiled, shot. On the one hand, Jews were being deprived of their culture, their religion, their history; on the other hand, the authorities bluntly refused to acknowledge that they could ever become an integral element of the Soviet people. For all the foreseeable future, “Jew” would be the word on the fifth line under “nationality” on the passports of Soviet Jews, save in those instances when one parent was not Jewish and one chose to adopt that parent’s nationality upon turning sixteen. The identity of Jews was being defined for them by their enemies. Even Volodya’s father—who had helped to make the Revolution, who had metamorphosed the core of his being from village Jew to Bolshevik fighter—was regarded as a potentially menacing outsider by the very party to which he had always shown nothing but blind loyalty! What kind of a land was this in which to bring up children? What security could Volodya and Masha hope to have in a country where their lives might be destroyed one day by some cruel and violent upheaval? Were Jews so helpless everywhere in the world? Was there someplace where they were differently treated?
So Volodya and his friends turned to overseas voices in the forests. And in 1963 he and Masha began to listen to their shortwave radio inside their apartment, in which he
had located certain areas where the metal construction within the walls screened more of the jamming signal than it did the signal from the radio station. Depending upon the earth’s atmosphere and the sun’s activity, it was often possible to hear the words through the jamming. When he was alone, Volodya used earphones. When he and Masha were together, they kept the volume low. The walls in their building were of good quality and thick; thus no one outside their apartment could hear the radio’s foreign voices. The children never listened with them.
Most of the time they listened in the evenings. They followed closely over the Voice of America the reporting of the assassination of President Kennedy and over the Voice of Israel, events in the Middle East. That was the period when the Kremlin had begun to court the Arab world, and Soviet relations with Israel were cooling. But connections between the two countries were still being maintained—the Soviets worried about the many millions of dollars’ worth of Russian property in Jerusalem, and the Israelis had awakened to the realization that vast numbers of Russian Jews might yet be saved for Zionism—and there were fully functioning embassies in both countries and diplomatic personnel traveling back and forth.
Volodya and Masha had no way of knowing about the covert operation then being run in the Soviet Union by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. In the judgment of those who conducted it, and others, that operation had a startling ripple effect on the destiny of Soviet Jewry—and on the future of the Soviet Union itself.
Israel made a slow entry into Soviet Jewry’s dissident movement and, once inside, seemed to walk an overly cautious path. Geopolitical interests forced upon it a proceed-with-care policy: It needed Soviet support and could not become involved in overt criticism of the Soviet Union or in its disputes with contentious nationalities.
A few in Israel thought that what could not be achieved openly might be done secretly. To that end, in 1952 a small group of people in Israeli intelligence, with the approval of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, set up an operation whose main task was the classical Zionist one: Contact Jews in the Baltic regions and Soviet heartland, especially those who had once been members of Zionist youth parties, and establish escape routes to Israel in case of Stalinist pogroms. At the same time, begin to bring certain reading material from Israel into the Soviet Union through diplomatic channels.
It was not, by any ordinary standards, a spy operation: no clandestine meetings that might be interpreted as a threat to Soviet authority; no sub rosa photography; no thefts of classified documents. Inordinate care was taken to avoid the inevitable agents provocateurs: the beautiful woman who offered to slip into your bed; the young man who promised you a fortune in icons; the anxious writer who pleaded with you to smuggle out his manuscript. During the period of Khrushchev, who was abruptly removed from power by the Politburo in October 1964, and all through the suffocating years of Leonid Brezhnev and the leaders who followed, there were no precarious spy games. Just a small number of Mossad agents, at times with their wives, entering as tourists or as embassy personnel, carrying into the Soviet Union books forbidden by Soviet law—Hebrew Bibles, grammars, Jewish calendars, Israeli newspapers, periodicals, Zionist tracts—and leaving behind with seeming carelessness a Bible here, a periodical there, in a synagogue, an apartment, on a park bench, at a summer beach, as one might discard a newspaper after a train ride. Everywhere in the Soviet Union meeting anxious and forlorn Jews—in an old bazaar in Samarkand, a resort on the Black Sea, a synagogue in Lithuania, a village in the Caucasus, a town in Georgia—often by chance and at times by design, enabling them to experience the presence of an Israeli, and witnessing in those Jews a sudden spark of astonishment, a rushing buoyancy of spirit. The Mossad operation is one of the reasons why, when the Soviet Jewish dissident movement finally began to take form after—in a few places even before—the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East, there were at least some books in place, some Hebrew grammars available, for study and duplication.
In addition, a number of invaluable old books were within reach—classics by Leon Pinsker, one of the pioneers of Zionism in nineteenth-century tsarist Russia; by Simon Dubnow, the Jewish historian; by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism; and others—because of the work of a few Russian Jews who had chanced upon them in forgotten private libraries, recognized their cultural value, and dusted them off for possible use by a new generation of young people.
Volodya and Masha Slepak could not know that during the sixties, before the Six-Day War, they were part of a still-shapeless tide of dissidents slowly rising in the Soviet Union.
How did the movement begin?
Singling out its elements is like trying to take hold of waves in a swelling sea. The death of Stalin in 1953, the corrosive infighting of the Politburo, the astonishing secret Khrushchev speech at the Twentieth Congress in 1956—all gave early impetus to the unraveling, especially among some of the young intellectual urban elite, of the Communist web of belief, and also led to the rise of small friendship circles known as kompanii, like-minded young men and women who would come together, talk about literature, music, journalism, sing to a guitar, read forbidden poetry, tell somewhat perilous jokes (Question: What will happen after Cuba builds communism? Answer: It will start importing sugar. Question: What’s the difference between capitalism and communism? Answer: Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it’s the other way around)—and feel themselves fully alive outside the suffocating framework of Soviet life. Those kompanii—bearded men in homemade sweaters bearing Russian pagan symbols; smart, chainsmoking, keen-witted women—were the germinating seeds during the late fifties of the dissident movement, which rose in various forms throughout the land during the 1960s: long-suppressed nationalism sparking among Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians, Armenians, Crimean Tatars, Soviet Germans; Leninists who wanted a return to the pristine communism they believed had graced the dawn of the Revolution; democrats and humanists seeking a form of government free of political ideologues; Russians dreaming of a pre-Revolutionary Russian culture and a restored Orthodox Church; Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Pentecostalists awaiting the opportunity to garner new souls; and Jews fighting for the right to emigrate to Israel.
For many of the Russian intelligentsia—those among the early kompunii who remained troubled and alienated after the phenomenon of the kompanii began to burn itself out in the early 1960s—the turning point came with the arrest, in September 1965, of Yuli Daniel, a Jew, and his friend Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet writers whose works had been banned in the Soviet Union.
Using the writer Boris Pasternak as a kind of model—his novel Dr. Zhivago had been published in Italy during the late 1950s; “tamizdat” publishing, the Russians called it: “published over there”—Daniel and Sinyavsky had some of their manuscripts smuggled out and published pseudonymously abroad under the names Nikolai Arzhak, for Daniel, and Abram Tertz, for Sinyavsky.
Their arrests, coming less than a year after the sudden ouster of Khrushchev, were read by many as a signal of the new regime’s hostility to “samizdat” (“self-publishing”), which was then accelerating among intellectual circles. It was a painstaking, time-consuming process: covert duplication of uncensored literature, poetry, and political material by means of typewriter and carbon paper and then its illicit distribution, sometimes of foreign writers whose works were no longer available in translation, like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Orwell’s 1984; often of writers like Sinyavsky and Daniel and others whose works had been rejected by official Soviet publishing channels.
The arrest of the two writers, at first unannounced by the Soviet authorities, caught the attention of the world. For the first time foreign stations began to broadcast news of a KGB action. Shortly after the beginning of the foreign broadcasts, the Soviet press reported the arrests and proceeded to condemn the writers for their slanders of Soviet society. Frightened friends and relatives envisioned with dread a return to the horrors of the thirties: torture and confessions and furth
er arrests; execution by a pistol shot to the head, by a firing squad.
Volodya and Masha cannot recall how they first learned of the arrests. The radio, the newspapers. Very soon everyone knew.
Early in December 1965 the mathematician Alexander Yesenin-Volpin—the man who had gained entry into a 1962 trial by showing a copy of the new criminal code to the guards, with its promise that trials would henceforth be open to the public—composed a statement and arranged for it to be typed in numerous copies and distributed as leaflets around various institutes and Moscow University.
The leaflets told of the arrests of the writers and the concern that their trial would violate the laws regarding public court proceedings, and proclaimed: “Citizens have the means to struggle against judicial arbitrariness: public meetings, during which one well-known slogan is chanted—’We demand an open trial’—or is displayed on placards. You are invited to a public meeting.…”
For a number of Soviet citizens, the line of submissive endurance had been breached.
On the evening of December 5, 1965, about two hundred people, among them many students, assembled in Alexander Pushkin Square in Moscow, near the statue of the poet. At a prearranged signal they raised placards on which appeared the words “Respect the Soviet Constitution” and “We demand an open trial for Sinyavsky and Daniel.”
The demonstration ended almost as soon as it had begun. Hardly had the placards been displayed by Volpin and others than they were torn away by KGB agents and militiamen in the crowd. Flashbulbs popped on the cameras held by foreign correspondents who had assembled to witness and report the event. About twenty of the demonstrators were taken away in waiting cars—and released after a few hours. Some days later around forty people who had participated in the demonstration found themselves abruptly expelled from their institutes.
