The Gates of November

by Chaim Potok

  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.

  7

  The Visa War

  On 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.”

  Volodya said, “I don’t know Fedorov. I know nothing about his anti-Soviet activity, and I have no anti-Soviet material.”

  The men proceeded to search the apartment. They went about the search slowly and with great care. Major Nosov read English fluently. He began to look through the English-language books, listing their titles in English, which he then translated into Russian, He came upon shelves that held lawbooks, hundreds of lawbooks.

  “You’re an engineer, why these books?” he asked.

  “I’m interested in Soviet law,” said Volodya.

  Sanya Slepak, eighteen years old, watched the search in fascination, imagining himself inside a movie, remembering films he had seen about tsarist police ransacking the living quarters of courageous Bolsheviks. At one point he said he needed to go to the bathroom, and one of the men in civilian clothes accompanied him to the small water closet. Sanya remained awake throughout the eighteen-hour search, witnessing the gradual confiscation of much of his father’s library. His younger brother, Leonid, eleven, went to sleep.

  The men riffled the pages of every book, turned over every sheet of paper. Books and journals printed in a foreign language were impounded, together with personal letters and notebooks. Also seized were tape recorders, tape cassettes, the shortwave radio, even a broken typewriter once owned by Solomon Slepak. Those devices might be used to spread anti-Soviet propaganda, explained Major Nosov politely.

  In the course of the search, two friends of the Slepaks, Norman Sirkin and Mark Elbaum, appeared in the doorway of the apartment on a visit and were ordered by Major Nosov to remain until the search was completed. The KGB did not want them informing anyone that a search was in progress because that would attract people to the apartment house. Especially to be avoided was the annoying presence of the foreign press. At about two in the morning Volodya fell asleep in an armchair. His noisy snores brought from an astounded Major Nosov the comment “I have never had anyone fall asleep during a search. Sometimes they jump out the window or hang themselves in the toilet by their tie.” Norman Sirkin later told Volodya that he said to Major Nosov, “Only a person with a clear conscience can sleep in a situation like this.”

  The search came to an end at six o’clock in the morning. Major Nosov presented Volodya with a list of the items the KGB was about to remove from the apartment and requested that he sign it. Volodya refused. He said the search was against Soviet law and the confiscated objects had no connection to anything illegal. Without further ado, Major Nosov folded the list and slid it into an inside pocket of his jacket. The men left, carrying with them four large sacks of the Slepaks’ possessions. Nothing they took was ever returned.

  The chronicles record Volodya’s odd comment that books confiscated by the KGB often ended up in prison camps. Some of the most politically unreliable books in the hands of some of the most intractable political prisoners! And books that might help one learn a foreign language. And take one on a journey into forbidden lands. Asked what kind of logic there was to that, Volodya responded, “If you want logic, you have to go someplace else.”

  Ten days earlier, on June 5, Volodya and seventy-four others had signed a letter to Secretary-General of the United Nations U Thant, who was soon to visit Moscow. The letter, which has come to be known as the Letter of the 75, was read on overseas radio stations and appeared in newspapers around the world. It was an appeal to U Thant that he intercede with the Soviet government for the right of the signers to emigrate to Israel.

  Volodya did not know Yuri Fedorov, the man named by Major Nosov as the reason for the apartment search, and was unaware that he had been arrested in Leningrad in the morning of that same day on the charge of having hijacked an aircraft for the purpose of fleeing from the Soviet Union. Also searched that day were the apartments of others who had signed the letter to U Thant.

  In Leningrad, as Volodya later discovered, nine Jews and three non-Jews had been arrested at eight-thirty that morning while walking to an aircraft about to depart on a scheduled flight. They were a group of men and women who had been repeatedly refused exit visas. Made desperate by loss of hope, they were caught up in the possibility set before them by one of their number, Major Mark Dymshitz, who had been a pilot in the Soviet Air Force: They would hijack an aircraft, and he would fly them to Sweden. There is the clea
r possibility that someone in the group was a KGB agent, for the hijacking never occurred; they were arrested before they got to the aircraft. Nevertheless, the charge brought against them was hijacking, and hijacking—as well as betrayal of the Motherland, which is an act of treason, and anti-Soviet agitation and complicity in an anti-Soviet group and preparation of a crime—was what most of those involved were tried for that December in Leningrad’s City Court, found guilty, and sentenced.

  The prosecution had demanded the death penalty for two members of the group, Mark Dymshitz and Eduard Kuznetsov, and five to fifteen years for the others. And on December 24 those were the verdicts handed down by the court. A worldwide wave of protests and demonstrations followed: appeals from religious and political leaders; from Communist parties in the West; from the Soviet Human Rights Committee, established by Andrei Sakharov and others without official sanction in November 1970. The Kremlin found itself in the uneasy position of having to explain its actions to a court of world opinion that was constantly being fed information on events heretofore kept sealed inside Soviet borders. True, the authorities had control of the press and radio, but the dissenters circulated samizdat publications, slipped vital information to Western journalists, sent crucial documents abroad in the luggage of sympathetic tourists. Another regular source of inside news for Western journalists was Andrei Sakharov. Adding to the embarrassment of the government was the coincidence of the trial of Basque nationalists taking place in Spain at that same time, a trial repeatedly denounced by the Soviets; the Basques received death sentences, which Franco then commuted. And so, finding it necessary to respond to the protests, the Kremlin appealed the verdict to the Soviet Supreme Court, which, on December 29, commuted the death sentences to fifteen years and ordered that a number of the other sentences be reduced.

  Clearly, the regime was using the hijacking as a pretext for a major effort to crush the entire Jewish dissident movement. From the time of the arrest of the so-called hijackers in June to their trial in December, dozens of activists were arrested and jailed—in Leningrad, Moscow, Kishinev, Riga. More trials took place: May 1971 in Leningrad; May 1971 in Riga; June 1971 in Kishinev. The government linked all those tried to the Leningrad hijacking. Alarm, disarray, and depletion in numbers occurred among the ranks of Jewish activist leaders. It was a while before new people joined the dissident movement, most especially in Leningrad.

  To this day it is not entirely clear whether the hijack attempt was instigated by KGB provocateurs. It is conjectured that at the highest levels of Soviet policy-making, a decision was reached, in the spring of 1970, that Jewish dissidence had become too widespread and worrisome and needed to be put down. The hijack scheme was either a KGB operation or a convenient moment seized by the Kremlin for its own purposes. Much as Stalin used the murder of Kirov as a springboard to eliminate his opposition, so the Kremlin now used the hijack attempt to bear down relentlessly upon Jewish dissidents.

  Volodya and Masha Slepak were aware of the trials—through word of mouth and samizdat publications. They were aware, too, that in the wake of the trials there had been a sudden upsurge in immigration requests, the reverse of what the Kremlin had expected. Some of their friends soon received exit visas. There is a photograph of Volodya standing amid a group gathered in the airport in Moscow to bid good-bye to a departing dissident. About twenty people, all posing, many smiling. In the front row is Anatoly Shcharansky, the Jewish dissident who would one day be accused of spying for the CIA. Volodya and Masha attended many such farewell gatherings.

  Volodya had lost his job at the Trust Geophysica, whose management had agreed to give him his kharakteristika on condition that he leave. For three months he looked for work. Friends found him a job in the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences. The head of the department, a decent man, knew that Volodya had applied for an exit visa but said nothing about it to his superiors.

  Volodya worked with electronic equipment for measuring nuclear magnetic resonance; the institute was researching the structure of organic molecules. As head of a laboratory in the Moscow TV Research and Development Institute, he earned 250 rubles a month; at the Geophysica, 140 rubles; at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, 160 rubles. One day KGB agents showed up at the institute and inquired into Volodya’s behavior. His situation became known throughout the institute. The head of the laboratory asked Volodya to leave; his own job was at risk, he said. The institute heads did not want a person of Volodya’s dubious political status on their staff.

  That was in September 1971. Volodya then found a job sharpening pens for a little workshop. During the mornings he would visit design offices in the area of the workshop, places where technical drawings of one kind or another were made. He collected draftsmen’s pens that had been blunted by use and brought them to his apartment, where he sharpened them. The next day he returned the sharpened pens and again picked up blunted ones. He would show up at the office of the workshop, on Prospekt Mira, to drop off his receipts and collect his salary, about 130 rubles a month. Then KGB agents began to appear at the workshop almost every other day, inquiring of the manager about Volodya’s behavior, how many hours a day he worked, where he was at any given moment. Finally, in September 1972, harassed beyond endurance, the manager asked Volodya to leave. That was Volodya’s last official employment in the Soviet Union, the final job recorded in his government work book until his arrest and trial in 1978.

  Masha retired from her work as a hospital radiologist in December 1971. Her pension was seventy-six rubles a month. From the end of 1972 on, she and Volodya lived largely on the kindness of others: money from a special fund organized by refuseniks, the name soon given to the Jewish dissidents whose visa applications were being repeatedly refused; visitors from abroad who left behind clothes and things that she and Volodya could sell through secondhand shops.

  Volodya experienced a slow sinking into an abyss of ever more shabby jobs—elevator operator, hospital orderly; he had to work at something in order to avoid the serious charge of parasitism—and a growing sense of worthlessness. For the Soviet Union’s highly educated dissident scientists, self-worth was measured by achievement. Now Volodya faced psychological torment as a result of the barriers that blocked his work, accomplishment, progress, recognition—all the things that made his life meaningful.

  The suffering was caused not only by the status of pariah in which he and Masha were living but also by a bitter awareness that what was happening to them was touched with an outrageous illogic over which they had no control. In the matter of visas to Israel there were no clear and consistent guidelines from above; hence local officials felt themselves able to mete out capricious decisions from below. It was all so arbitrary, so pitiless. “You’ll never get out until you grow old,” one visa applicant would be told, and to another an official might say, “You’ll rot here.” Families with sons in their mid-teens were refused because they had not yet served in the army. Those whose sons had served were refused because as former soldiers they knew state secrets. People in their fifties and sixties were refused because their parents or former wives or husbands would not give them the necessary written permission to leave for Israel. Yet in seemingly haphazard fashion, others would be granted approval and were soon on their way out of the country.

  In the early 1970s a number of Jewish scientists, denied visas and plunged into professional limbo after losing their jobs, organized seminars to help themselves stay informed of developments in their various fields. The seminars met on Sundays. In a photograph of one such seminar, Andrei Sakharov sits, chin in hand, listening attentively.

  Volodya attended the Sunday seminars and remembers that among the many subjects dealt with were mathematical logic, radio physics, the architectonics of computers, the chemistry of polymers, quantum mechanics, computer programming, genetics, cybernetics. He could do little, however, to keep up with the field of engineering, for which special equipment was needed. Every Soviet citizen who attended those se
minars stood the risk of sudden arrest, imprisonment, exile. But the knowledge gained, the fraternity experienced, the heartache assuaged, made the risk worthwhile.

  At the same time, clandestine study groups where Jewish history and Hebrew could be learned were formed throughout the Soviet Union. In 1969 there were about ten groups in Moscow, a hundred or so individuals, studying Hebrew. By the 1980s many thousands in major cities of the Soviet Union attended secret Hebrew classes, with the result that a significant number of Soviet Jews arrived in Israel already knowing the language. I remember teaching one of the Moscow groups in the mid-1980s: the silent climb up the dim staircase of the apartment building; the warm, crowded room; the hushed voices; the quiet lecture; the subdued discussion; the silent climb down the staircase; the sudden snowy street; and the icy wind like a stinging slap across my face.

  Volodya and Masha often helped duplicate textbooks for the groups, but, save for a class in Hebrew held on occasion in their apartment, neither participated seriously in Jewish study. That was not their weapon of choice in the visa war.

  Volodya had been told by the OVIR authorities that he would have to wait five years before he could apply again for an exit visa. It was OVIR policy not to return documents; thus in order to reapply, one had to repeat from the start the entire documentation procedure. Volodya refused to wait and would not reprise the nightmarish grind and embarrassment of document acquisition; the first effort had taken about three months. Repeatedly he addressed applications to OVIR requesting that his case be reopened. Regularly he called the OVIR office, only to be told that his application had been refused. And when he asked for the reason, the response always was “Secrecy.”

  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.