At first, Feodor Sidenko had a poor understanding of our historical similarities. He grasped it after I said that as a ten-year-old I fought with boys who called me a kike.
“In Nakhodka, where we lived for a long time, Pentecostal children were stoned or just thrashed by other children,” Feodor said.
“Our kids didn’t use their fists,” said Goretoi.
“This is maybe the only difference,” I said. “Maybe your morals are higher than mine. This Jew could never turn the other cheek.”
“Arkady Abramovich,” Goretoi said softly, “sometimes it’s not for mortals to know that they are doing the Lord’s work.”
Meanwhile Feodor studied the image of me on the wall, depicted as a huge centaur.
“It’s by my friend,” I said. “A well-known painter.”
The centaur’s powerful arms and brawny chest didn’t necessarily look like mine, but the head had all my unmistakable features including outstanding nose, weak chin, and curly gray hair.
“Why did your friend portray you as a horse with glasses?” Feodor asked. “Nikolai Petrovich would draw you a lot more like you.”
I tried to explain, “Long before the Lord sent Christ to people, some folks believed in stories about such creatures—the upper half as a man, and the bottom like a horse.”
Feodor shook his head disapprovingly. “What savages!”
The next day I came home frustrated by disturbing news about Malva Landa, a well-known human rights activist. My guests had already returned from a meeting with local underground Pentecostals and were waiting for me to join them for dinner. Malva’s case was one of the most ridiculous I ever heard, but they were not surprised when I related her story. The KGB innovators, keeping an eye on the West, decided to try her, not for her human rights activities, but for setting her own room on fire. The smoking retiree Malva Landa had maliciously done just that. A neighbor’s room in her communal apartment was slightly damaged, much less than hers.
“We will pray for her,” said Feodor.
“Sakharov,” I said, “was ready to pay for all the damages. The authorities could also deduct the money from her pension.”
“Nothing can surprise us,” said Goretoi, and he told me about a documentary filmed when they had lived in the Far East. In one episode a group of weeping women and children was wandering the streets of Nakhodka and, as the narrator explained, “The savage rites of Pentecostals led to this mass hysteria.” The coffin behind which they were walking was not shown. The cameramen also shot in broad daylight the “secret” ritual washing of Pentecostals in the icy Pacific Ocean. They were caught red-handed while addressing their prayers to their overseas patrons, the voice said. To every politically literate schoolchild it was clear that the sect was praying for the safe arrival of American spies.
“At least in this slander there was a smidgen of truth,” said Goretoi. “Arkady Abramovich,” he continued, “you’re leading a secular, non-religious life, and maybe it will be difficult for you to understand how our prayers guide us. Many believers had heard a prophecy that Nakhodka would be a place from where our exodus would begin. It was a revelation, a divine instruction. We heard it long before we began moving, fleeing persecution, to the Nakhodka port on the Pacific.”
They started to gather there, on the edge of this world, not just because they had been wandering all over the country like gypsies—far and wide. Not just because they hadn’t found a place where they could glorify Christ without fear of prison. No, it was this prophecy that encouraged at first hundreds of them and later thousands.
I had my secular explanation for the prophecy but was not going to soil their spiritual world with my dirty boots.
Goretoi continued, “I was the presbyter, and at first we had three hundred people, large families with small children, and the old, a lot of them, living alone. We had shared with these old women everything we had.”
Feodor Sidenko was surprised that Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi was talking about such a common thing. “We always share all that God has given us, our last piece of bread and the last of the firewood.”
Goretoi smiled. “Unlike you, Arkady Abramovich may not be aware of the Christian commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”
“My neighbor is a stool pigeon,” I said glumly.
“It’s a Jewish law as well,” said Goretoi. “It’s in the Old Testament.”
I thought of Israel’s Arab neighbors, but said, “I’m ignorant and envy you.”
“It’s me who’s illiterate,” said Feodor. “I attended school for only four years, and then had to earn my bread.”
“From the KGB’s point of view you’re more educated than I. They’re afraid of your biblical armament, Feodor. Having failed to destroy the faith, they try to blow it up from inside, placing their agents in charge of all religions.”
“Therefore we don’t register our churches with the godless state,” said Goretoi.
“To the KGB you represent the regular folks, freed of official ideology, and this is a danger to the very existence of the ruling mafia.”
“What’s a mafia?” asked Feodor. “A clique?”
“A gang. You’re capable of blowing up the regime’s demonic religion with a word and leaving it without a flock. Next to you I’m like a roadside stone next to a roadside bomb.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why they sent me … to a hard labor camp … and a psychiatric prison.”
We slept little for the second night in the row—my guests continued to tell me their story. The very first list of Nakhodka Pentecostals wishing to emigrate was made by Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi in 1961 when he was forty years old; with their children, the number exceeded one thousand. At that time, I was already working at Asia Africa Today. That same year he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment and five years of internal exile in sparsely populated areas with severe climatic conditions. Two members of his church were also imprisoned. There was no mention of the emigration list at the trial—the most powerful dictatorship in the world did not know how to handle this phenomenon. I doubt if any Russian Jew at that time would have dared to raise his voice about emigration.
“Do you remember,” I asked Goretoi, “the article of the Criminal Code under which you were tried?”
“Of course, Article 227.” I heard surprise in his response. “Creation of a group harmful to the health of citizens.”
I took a copy of the criminal code off my bookshelf. “Your article is preceded and followed by articles about all kinds of sexual and deviational crimes.”
Now I clearly had Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi’s attention.
“The previous article, 226.” I read: “‘The establishment and maintenance of brothels and pimping. Keeping of dens for drug addicts. Operation of gambling dens.’ Article 228, immediately after yours, named simply and to the point—‘Production or distribution of pornographic materials.’”
Feodor Sidenko chuckled hoarsely, “So we Christians are some sort of sexual perverts.”
“Right,” I said. “Not for nothing did Lenin compare religion with a venereal disease. That’s why your Article 227 immediately states, ‘Creation of groups, under the pretext of preaching religious beliefs, causing harm to people’s health, sexual promiscuity, and involvement of juveniles in such activities.’”
“Where was the outrage from Christians in the West about this?” Goretoi said, shaking his head.
Three years into Goretoi’s penal servitude, when I already was a managing editor of Asia and Africa Today, Feodor was renovating the kitchen of a foreigner. Feodor called him a Japanese consul, but I doubted the diplomatic status of this Japanese man who worked at the port of Nakhodka. In his funny Russian he praised Feodor Sidenko’s work and was surprised when this Russian refused to drink Japanese vodka and had no use for the words that this foreigner had been taught by dockers. Feodor told him that his church wanted to leave Russia and was ready to go anywhere, even to Japan. The man asked him to b
ring the passports of those who wanted to leave.
What foreigner willing to help would ask for a Soviet internal passport? The next day, as a precaution, naïve Feodor brought only four passports. The Japanese passed them on to the police. Feodor and a member of his church, Vasyli Patrushev, were arrested and sentenced to four years in a hard labor camp. Today I can only guess what desperate souls owned the two other passports—my numerous recordings of conversations with the Pentecostals are gone or have deteriorated. Feodor Sidenko was single. Patrushev had a large family, and he certainly did not want to expose his children to the risk of being left without both parents.
Then, ten years later, when I had already stopped writing, but still was the managing editor of the magazine, Feodor Sidenko again intervened in high-level politics without knowing it; he had been subject to a ‘preventative arrest’ before the visit of U.S. President Gerald Ford to Vladivostok, some one hundred and thirty miles south of Nakhodka. A month earlier, in late October, Feodor saw soldiers planting fir trees along the highway leading to the Vladivostok airport. He realized that the Soviet Union was readying for something important. This planting was particularly intense near some shoddy barracks, like the ones where he had spent four years behind barbed wire. This time, Feodor was prudently locked up in the Vladivostok Psychiatric Hospital where the doctors began giving him daily shots.
“Those twenty-six days in the nuthouse were worse than four years in the camp where many were maimed while logging,” Feodor said with a sigh. “At that hospital we all were mutilated.” He sighed again. “Some kind of a poison.”
I didn’t dare ask him for details, but now for history’s sake, I wish I had.
During two days of talks, Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev made serious progress toward a comprehensive ten-year pact for curbing nuclear weapons and toward world peace. In twenty-six days Feodor’s health was undermined for life. He had no way of knowing how many people were arrested in the Far East in order to strengthen peace in the world. All Feodor knew for sure was that the fir trees planted along that highway didn’t take root, and by mid-November, a week before the arrival of Ford, they had turned yellow and crumbled. The authorities had to re-send soldiers to urgently paint branches of the dead trees a beautiful green color, pleasant to the eyes of the foreign visitors passing by. Efforts toward world peace prevailed again.
Soon I had some more guests, Pentecostals and Baptists of the same undeviating kind.
One, a Latvian and former naval officer, told me how he was discharged, while on a ship at sea, after he had a revelation and began to believe in Christ as his personal Savior. While taping his story, I could not help cracking up. “I imagine the reaction of the deputy commander for political correctness when you announced this good news!”
“He turned pale,” my interviewee replied, “and began to stutter and swear. He was afraid he could lose this good job, suitable for slackers.”
“Was the sea quiet?” I asked.
“Oh yes, it smiled,” he said.
I liked this brave mariner very much. Ruthless time has washed his name out of my memory as a lazy wave washes a drawing off the sand.
THIRTEEN
A Jewish Invasion of the Communist Sanctum
THE MORNING OF October 19, 1976, twelve Jewish refuseniks showed up at Brezhnev’s Reception Room. I was the only one who, formally, was not a refusenik because I had never visited the Visa Office and had never been officially denied an exit visa. All the others were long-term refuseniks. Already, there were more than a dozen petitioners. I asked a gray-haired woman with a black headscarf for whom she was petitioning. She sighed, “My son. Appealing for a pardon. Sentenced to be shot.”
What could I say? I asked, “Where are you from?”
“From the Far East. The Port of Nakhodka. He wouldn’t hurt a fly …”
“How long did it take you to come here?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I thought of Goretoi’s church and the Pentecostal exodus. She was from their town and maybe even had heard about these dangerous sectarians from neighbors, or had read about them in a local newspaper.
Petitioners watched with a mixture of awe and amazement as twelve Jews placed their non-kosher kefir, milk, boiled eggs, bread, and sausage on the low shining tables and sat in leather chairs meant to induce deep reverence for the head of state.
Upon release from Butyrskaya Prison. From left to right: me, Michael Kremen, and Victor Elistratov. November 5, 1976.
“Would you like some kefir or milk?” I asked her.
“They will arrest you, my dear, for such a thing,” said the old woman.
All the Soviet presidents stared at us from the paneled walls, some indifferently, others reproachfully. She looked at our group again and was horrified. “Sorry, dearie,” she said. “I’ll move.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”
Her wide armchair remained unoccupied until a Biblical prophet with flashing eyes left his chair on the opposite side of the room.
“Aren’t you frightened by this Zionist sabbath?” I asked him.
“I’m a Jew,” he said, nervously stroking his huge raven-black beard.
“It’s written all over your face. Petitioning for an exit visa?”
“Yes. Have been for two years.”
“Lucky you!” I said. “This gray downward parted beard is Vladimir Slepak, asked for a visa eight years ago, unemployed; next to him—Victor Elistratov, refusenik of seven years standing, now a happy stoker, in the past a highly qualified engineer. Join us, and in the unpredictable future the majority of us will get permission to go; to balance this yielding to the West, it’ll be accompanied by a prison term, by my guess, for a couple of us.”
He remained silent for five minutes and then said, “My name is Isaac Elkind. I’m in.”
“You can sign our petition,” I said.
“How long can we stay here?” he asked.
“The KGB is now weighing its options. There are foreign correspondents outside, waiting for action. Otherwise, we would’ve been arrested upon arrival.”
“I overheard your conversation with that woman,” Isaac whispered. “I’m a lawyer. Several times I defended those accused of murder and never learned anything about their execution before being told to stop writing petitions for the dead.”
I leaned close to his ear and whispered, “One of us is a KGB informer. A blackmailed refusenik. Thirty minutes before entering this door, we kind of dragged the poor thing to join us.”
“Why?”
“We wanted him to be punished.”
“Who?” he said.
“We’ll tell you after this ordeal is over.”
A woman in dark business attire entered the hall and commanded in a stern voice, “Citizens, immediately leave the Reception Room of the head of the Soviet state! Otherwise, police will do what’s necessary to restore public order.”
We tried to pass our petition to her. Her face contorted with rage, and she said that we should apply for exit visa individually, not here. Thirteen men said almost in unison, “We did.”
Soon all seats along one wall were occupied by silent men in plain clothes. They did not talk. They stared at us. One guy obviously got his job for his powerful physique. Never in my life had I seen such massive shoulders and such a display of muscles visible even under his coat. All thirteen of us together wouldn’t have been able to take him on, even with clubs. I said to my comrades, “Psychological attack a la World War One. Only without marching, bayonets, and drummers.”
At 5 p.m. we saw the first uniformed man, a police major, not some lousy lieutenant. That was a good sign. He said, “Citizens, reception hours are over. Please leave the Reception Room!” The prophet Isaak returned to his chair on the opposite side of the room. We did not move. The fellows in plain clothes did not move, either. They probably hated our guts. Was it fair? They stood hungry, overworked, and sleepy—a couple had been nodding off already—protect
ing law, order, and the Motherland while these traitors were drinking Russian kefir and eating Russian sausages. Endlessly!
This peaceful coexistence lasted thirty more minutes. Every ten minutes the same major would enter the hall with exactly the same pronouncement to the same rotten “citizens.” After the third warning he returned with a new legion of plainclothes men. Each Jew was carried by two or three silent fellows to a bus parked in the backyard. Lovingly carrying the lawbreakers instead of dragging them was an unusual humanitarian action and the most humiliating to the dignity of the law enforcement rank and file. It also was a positive sign.
The foreign correspondents probably still remained on Kalinin Avenue, and once in the back, our handlers could again act in the time-tested method—they brusquely lay some of us on the asphalt before pushing us inside the bus. Finally, we all were sandwiched between the seats occupied by our guards, who were dressed like villagers. We began telling them why we came to the Reception Room. At first they remained silent. After a while they began telling us that America supported Russian Jews financially.
One guard with a neck of a wrestler turned to me and said, “If America unleashes war against Russia, Israel and traitors like you will fight against us.”
I got angry. “I’m not a traitor; look for traitors among your friends.”
Vladimir Slepak elbowed me. He didn’t know the roots of my boldness; it wasn’t boldness at all, it was a prudent calculation, a cool-headed assessment, a reckoning. I possessed a nasty state secret.
“What do you know about Jews?” I raised my voice. “Nothing. You were all brainwashed back in kindergarten!”
“I see you’re bold,” the guard smiled crookedly, “Want to receive a long sentence?”
Vladimir elbowed me again, “Don’t waste your eloquence.”
“Nothing personal,” I said. “The whole country has been brainwashed; I too was brainwashed at your tender age.”
“Shut up!” said Vladimir.
After that I changed my tune and said, “You’re a petty officer.”
Dancing on Thin Ice Page 18
