by Chaim Potok
On the way to the airport, Rabbi Wolpe said to a non-Jewish woman in their tour group, “We’re trying to help some people. Could you take this film out for us?” She said, without hesitation, “Yes.” Elaine Wolpe had taped documents and copies to her underwear and skin and managed to get through customs without being searched. The film and the documents reached their intended destination in the United States.
Shcharansky spent sixteen months in solitary confinement, was tried in July 1978, and sentenced to three years in prison and ten in a labor camp.
The KGB had an especially malicious weapon in the visa war: the exit visa itself, which it used to break up dissident groups and families. In 1977 it wielded this weapon against the Slepaks.
Until he reached tenth grade in 1967, Sanya Slepak did not encounter anti-Semitism in his school, It was one of the best schools in Moscow; his grandfather, whom he loved deeply, had somehow persuaded the principal to admit him. Children and grandchildren of the Soviet elite sat in its classrooms, walked through its hallways, romped about its playground. His first sense of the abnormal in the world around him came not from contact with Jews but from the Russian friends of his parents. He remembers listening to discussions about the Stalin purges, unjustified bans on books, censorship of poets and novelists, matters cultural and intellectual rather than ethnic.
In those post-Stalin years the most gratifying aesthetic experience of many Muscovites was not the official theater or ballet but the companionship of friends: social gatherings, discussions about the latest books, about one’s experience abroad; smoky rooms, barbecues, shish kebab, Georgian dinners, Russian folk songs, the guitar, wine. Not the same apartment always, but always the same group. Those were the early years of the Moscow intelligentsia, the time of the kompanii, vividly and scrupulously described by Russians who were there, the nascent years of the democratic movement. During his year in tenth grade Sanya on occasion attended such gatherings in the company of his parents and listened to the talk. In later years, he went on his own.
Among the Russians were Jews, most of whom at first felt entirely Russian. Then, with the impetus of the Six-Day War, some of the Jews began to concentrate upon Jewish issues. And that was the start of the Jewish movement. David and Goliath, Sanya remembers thinking when he learned of Israels stunning victory, suddenly aware and proud of being a Jew. And for the first time he began to encounter the anti-Semitism in his country: in the newspapers, over the radio, in the streets.
His summer trips with his parents and their close Jewish friends began after that; before, he had spent vacations with his grandmother. Now, the sailing and hiking; the quiet talk around campfires; the study of Hebrew from the little vocabulary book Elef Milim; the ghostly voices from shortwave radios. And the slow opening out of himself to alternative worlds where Jews were not despised, slandered, maligned.
Never during all his years in high school was he called zhid to his face, but he had no close friends among the Russian students. He refused to take part in classes on Marxist-Leninist teachings. Still, because of the watchful stewardship of the principal and the teachers, no incidents marred his high school years. His classmates were polite, but aside from the cool hello, they shunned him.
He wanted to pursue studies in biology, but the KGB saw to it that no university or institute would accept him after he graduated from high school in 1969. A friend got him a job as a lab technician in a medical research institute in Moscow. He worked there for two years. The KGB arrested him for his dissident activities and kept him in prison for fifteen days, and he lost the job.
He worked at odd jobs, and for the dissident movement: liaison with foreign correspondents, demonstrations, protests, samizdat. His girlfriend, Alyona, who later became his wife, typed carbon copies of Exodus by Leon Uris; the novel, illegal in the Soviet Union, was a near-sacred text to Jewish dissidents. His entire life was now given over to dissident activity; life in Russia was a long, cold twilight of bleak waiting until they received their visas. The KGB harassed him regularly, picked him up, threatened him, at times beat him, warned him that he would never get his visa if he continued his activities. But youthful bravado pushed away fear and filled him with confidence: No harm would come to him or his family; the authorities would not dare. Too many knew about them; all the world was watching. Publicity would save them, no matter what Soviet regulations they might disobey.
He was twenty-five years old in 1977. Of medium height, with features remarkably like those of his mother: roundish face, full lips, weak eyes behind thick lenses. He led two separate lives, one with the Jewish dissidents, the other with Russians and Jews his age, the latter a purely social, nonideological group with whom he partied, got drunk. The Jewish dissidents were the wrong crowd for wildness.
In the early fall of that year the KGB called him in and offered him an exit visa. They would bring him in often, at times show him his exit visa, all filled in, his picture on it, put it on the desk in front of him, offer him the visa if he telephoned to cancel the next demonstration, agreed not to communicate with correspondents. He would refuse, and they would tear up the visa and sometimes beat him before sending him home.
In the fall of 1977 an international conference was to commence in Belgrade, where adherence to the Helsinki Accords would be evaluated. The Slepak case was scheduled to be brought before the conference by the representative from the United States. The KGB, wanting to forestall embarrassment to the Soviet Union and, at the same time, seeing a way to break up the Slepak family, brought Sanya in and informed him that he could leave for Israel on condition that he telephone the foreign correspondents and inform them he had been given permission to emigrate. He said no, he didn’t trust the KGB; he would make the call, he said, and what would prevent them from then tearing up the visa? They sent him home.
The next morning they brought him back and said they were giving him the visa on his terms. He said he would first leave the country, and then the correspondents would be called by his father. They agreed, and gave him one week to get out.
Among the refuseniks the response to obtaining a visa was straightforward: Take it and leave. No matter the pain, the family circumstance, the cost of separation. Sanya spent part of the week lurching about in a drunken stupor. It was a very difficult time for him—difficult to say good-bye to his friends, to his family, to the apartment, to Moscow.
He called his grandfather, who said he did not want to see him. Sanya went anyway. When he entered the house, the old man was standing in front of the window, with his back to the room. Sanya sensed he did not want to be touched. He said he was leaving in a few days and was sure he would never see him again. The old man began to tremble and cry. He said, “I would understand if you were going to America. But to that fascist country! You are so stubborn.”
Sanya turned to leave. The old man said, with his back still to his grandson, “Good luck.” Sanya heard those words as his grandfathers blessing.
Hundreds of people were at the airport to see him off, most of them Jews, some his partygoing Russian friends. No elation, no dancing; a sober, quiet, sophisticated crowd. He embraced his parents. Leonid, his younger brother, was not present; a week earlier he had received his conscription notice and written a letter to the authorities saying he refused to serve in the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Then he had left the apartment and gone underground, first saying good-bye to his older brother. Sanya boarded the plane and flew to Vienna with one other Jewish family. Two days in the Vienna holding center: a Red Cross building, slanted roof, guard towers with Austrian police at the gates. In the morning a loudspeaker called out, “Achtung! Achtung!” An uncomfortable experience.
In Israel he was met by his grandmother and relatives and friends. He rented an apartment in Jerusalem, was asked by the Israeli Foreign Office to work on behalf of Russian Jewry, began to travel to conferences.
One day in June 1978 Sanya was listening to the English-language news broadcast over Radio Israel and heard that
his parents had been arrested. He hurried to Tel Aviv and met with Nechemyah Levanon, an Israeli who had once played a major part in the secret Mossad operation that had brought Hebrew books into Stalin’s Soviet Union. After some while Sanya was told that the Israeli government could do nothing about his parents. Sanya’s dark sense of things was that the Israelis wanted his parents and certain other leading refuseniks to remain in the USSR because they were keeping alive the drive for emigration to Israel.
The international campaign to obtain exit visas for the Slepaks now changed direction and began to focus massively upon getting Volodya released from prison. About a year after his arrival in Israel, Sanya found himself needing to make a decision. His father had been sentenced to five years of exile in Siberia. His mother, given a suspended sentence, had gone to live with his father in a village near the Mongolian border. His brother was in hiding with friends in Moscow or elsewhere. Their lives were scattered, frozen. Sanya was twenty-six years old. The dissident years had stolen from him his university education; they had suspended and sundered his life. He was not sure what to do.
In telephone conversations with his father, he had talked about studying veterinary medicine and said there were no such schools in Israel. His father, disturbed by what he perceived to be the intent behind the words, said it would be wrong to leave Israel; Russian Jews should go to Israel, look how long they had been struggling for exit visas. But in Israel the sunlight hurt Sanya’s eyes, and the language was strange to his ears. He had begun to consider applying to universities in America.
On June 2, 1978, the Slepak apartment became a field of combat. It had been a battlefield of sorts since the early 1970s, a planning area, a headquarters, but never had there been an act of violence against people inside its rooms. During even the most heated of debates, hands were never raised. The bitterest of quarrels among the refuseniks had been settled without force inside the apartment.
The quarrel centered on the distribution of funds, and the man who helped resolve it was an American lawyer, one of the many hundreds of visitors who knocked on the door to apartment 77. Many came from Philadelphia, the hometown of the American: Leonard Shuster, Stuart and Enid Wurtman, Sheila and Dan Segal; Eileen Sussman. And from other American cities. And from Canada, France, Britain, Sweden, Denmark. And from as far away as Australia.
On a day in July 1974 the American and his wife, Joseph and Connie Smukler, came out of their hotel in the center of Moscow, walked along Gorky Street past apartment buildings and shops, turned left into number 15, and took the elevator up to the eighth floor. The wooden door to apartment 77, pieces of it jaggedly bolted together, had plainly suffered a recent smashing.
Joseph Smukler’s knock was answered by Volodya. The Smuklers had not met him before and were immediately taken by the handsome man with the deep voice and thick shock of graying hair and luxuriant beard. To the right of the vestibule in which they stood was a doorway that led to the room once occupied by Volodya’s parents and now the room in which Volodya and Masha lived; beyond were a hallway and the bathroom and water closet and kitchen, and the room of the couple with whom they shared the apartment, and that of their sons, where Leonid, then fifteen years old, lived by himself. As soon as they came through the doorway to their right, the Smuklers saw at the far side of the room a window covered with a lace curtain and, on the right-hand wall, to their astonishment, a small Israeli flag and a map of Israel. An Israeli flag and a map of Israel—in the heart of Soviet Russia!
Joseph Smukler had first heard of Volodya from the news stories of the dissidents who had signed the 1970 Letter of the 75 to U Thant requesting his support in their effort to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Volodya’s name was prominent among the signatories.
A chance encounter with a newly arrived Russian couple in a restaurant in Israel during the summer of 1973 had plunged the Smuklers deep into the travail of Soviet Jewry. The man pleaded with them to help get his brother out of Leningrad. Back in Philadelphia the Smuklers became increasingly involved with a small circle of people who were attempting to establish an organization to serve as a disciplined instrument in the growing struggle for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. They decided to travel to Leningrad the following summer and meet the brother of the man they had happened upon in Israel. They were given a list of people to see in Moscow, and on that list were the names of Volodya and Masha Slepak.
They arrived in Moscow shortly after the visit of President Nixon. To deter possible demonstrations in Nixons presence, the KGB had arrested many dissidents and scattered them to prisons dozens of miles from the city. Volodya, too, had been arrested, the door to the apartment smashed in by fifteen militiamen at eight o’clock in the morning, then the door to the bedroom broken, and Volodya hauled out of bed and taken away. Only recently released, many of the dissidents had joyfully reunited earlier that day in the apartment of Alexander Lunts, a noted mathematician and refusenik. Now some had assembled in the Slepak apartment and were quietly sitting and standing about as the Smuklers entered.
Also in the room at the time, and under the table, was Sanya’s dog, a huge 145-pound, thirty-inch-high Russian black terrier named Akhbar, which Sanya had bought as a puppy. One of the men who had broken into the apartment had threatened to shoot the dog if it was not removed to another room. Leonid had tried to slip out to call foreign correspondents and been warned that if he went anywhere near the telephone on the street, they would break every one of his fingers and he would never be able to dial a telephone again.
Previous visitors had informed Volodya of the Smuklers’ arrival: Joseph, then in his early forties; Connie, slender, quietly blond and strikingly lovely, possessed of a discerning intelligence and a sharp wit. Both were untutored in the ways of combat and survival in the visa war.
The furniture in the room was old and threadbare. Volodya directed Joseph Smukler to an overstuffed armchair. There were brief and muted introductions. Masha left the room and headed down the hallway to the kitchen. Using a magic slate, Smukler wrote, “We’re friends from Philadelphia. How can we help you?” They drew up lists: books, goods. How to get money through to them: American Jews were in the habit of writing checks for their philanthropic causes, but don’t send checks, urged the refuseniks, because the government takes 35 percent of every check. Bring in jeans instead. They were all so new at it in those early years of the visa war, before the time of organizations, movements, bureaucracies, the Helsinki Accords, the monitoring groups, the focus of the world on the issue of human rights. Quickly the warmest of friendships developed between the refuseniks and the Americans. Masha entered with tea and snacks. The dog suddenly rose, and the table shook. At one point Masha spoke quietly in Russian, and someone wrote down her words in English on a magic slate and showed them to the Smuklers: “We are doing this for the children. Not for ourselves but for the children. So they won’t have to live here.”
Back home the Smuklers became more deeply involved with the competing territories of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, an establishment organization; the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a grassroots outfit; the Jewish Community Relations Council; the United Synagogue; and others.
From the Soviet Union there began to be heard disconcerting news of a rift in the ranks of Jewish activists.
Early in 1975 Robert Toth, the Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, who had written frequently about Jewish activists on the basis of material given him by Shcharansky, wrote a disturbing piece about internecine warfare between two groups of refuseniks: bitter accusations, abuses of funds, contending ideologies. A war inside a war.
The dissension was born of a deep ideological difference: Should the refuseniks spend precious money and energy building educational institutions in the Soviet Union and educating themselves and their children while waiting to get out, or should they concentrate all their efforts on emigration and make no attempt at all to establish a community while still there? Volodya sided with the latter gro
up; he wanted nothing to do with any sort of possible communal life in the Soviet Union.
That summer the Smuklers returned to Moscow and the Slepak apartment. Nothing much had changed, except that the Israeli flag and map had been torn from the wall by the KGB, and pale outlines marked their haunting absence. At a meeting of refuseniks in the apartment, Joseph Smukler tried to smooth over the differences and, aided by Volodya, who turned out to be an adept negotiator, to some extent succeeded. With the help of the indispensable magic slates, the factions agreed not to issue damaging statements against each other and to set up a committee that would monitor and be accountable for the spending of funds collected from overseas. Smukler assured the refuseniks of the continued cooperation of the American Jewish community.
Participating in the meeting was Dr. Sanya Lipavsky.
From February 17 to 19, 1976, the Smuklers attended the second Brussels Conference: twelve hundred delegates from thirty-two countries. They met Masha’s mother; she had been brought in from Israel to plead the cause of her daughters family. “Please do something for them,” she implored. “My children are dying.”
There was more bureaucratic wrangling. Conflicts broke out between the establishment organizations and militant student groups. No overall goals were set by the conference; no international directions established. The movement to save Russian Jewry had pretty much begun as—and now looked to be remaining—a loose gathering of grass-roots organizations.
