"The Gates of November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Potok Chaim)

5 The Radio in the Forest

At first Masha had wanted to be a surgeon. But she quickly realized that surgery was not for her; she had a child and couldn’t put in a surgeon’s hours. And it would not be easy for a female surgeon to find employment in a good hospital.

She began to work as a general physician, traveling half of each day about the city to treat the sick and the injured in their homes and spending the remainder of the day tending to patients in the hospital. The regimen soon exhausted her.

She considered leaving medicine. Then she learned that the hospital sorely needed a qualified radiologist and was prepared to support any staff member willing to undertake that course of study. Masha applied and was accepted. Colleagues warned her against the dangers of radiation and talked about how radiologists were always retired early because of the X rays. But she found herself fascinated with radiology, became expert at it, and soon when there were doubts in the hospital about the reading of an X ray, it would be brought to her for review.

During her years in medical school, she had watched with growing bewilderment and dread as her country began to change before her eyes, had read in its heart the deepening fury against Jews. She knew there had always been many who hated Jews; but in the past, the Soviet authorities had reined in that hostility, especially during the war. Suddenly, in the late 1940s, came the torrent of abuse at “imperialists,” “bourgeois nationalists,” “cosmopolitans,” “Zionists,” “foreign influences,” “enemies of the people”-so blatant, so venomous, and so clearly organized from above-all openly aimed at the Jews.

She remembered hearing on a number of occasions during the years immediately after the war that Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Germans were, upon their release, transported directly to Siberia. That had seemed cruel to her, sending your own soldiers away to the labor camps, repaying them like that. But one said nothing about such matters in those days, not even to the members of one’s own family. And then there were rumors that those who had been released from the camps after serving ten-year sentences were being arrested again. And in 1948, there was that business about the three thousand biologists fired from their jobs for disagreeing with the genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that he had disproved the laws of heredity and that man could easily overthrow the laws of nature and control the environment. All of that, together with the articles in journals and newspapers endlessly attacking “cosmopolitans.” Somewhat fearfully Masha had begun to wonder what was happening in her country: Why the imprisonment of its captured soldiers, the persecution of its intellectuals, the attacks against its Jews?

Then came the strange order to efface all foreign names from medical school textbooks. In one of Masha’s classes the professor lectured one day about the Blumberg Symptom in cases of painless appendicitis and said that it had really been discovered by a Professor Shchyotkin and was from now on to be known as the Shchyotkin Symptom. When, two years later, someone stumbled upon the fact that Blumberg, a professor of medicine in Odessa, was actually a Russian and not a Jew, they took to calling it the Blumberg-Shchyotkin Symptom.

The reaction of the students to the various rewritings of medical history ranged from docility to concealed contempt to anger they suppressed because it was believed there were MGB agents attending classes.

One day in April 1951, while interning in Ryazan, Masha was arrested by the secret police. The charge against her: possession of a concealed weapon. Two agents interrogated her for eight hours. “With whom are you friendly?” they wanted to know. Dismayed by the arrest and frightened by the interrogation, she still had the wits to answer, “With everyone.” “We mean among the students,” they said. “With all the students,” she said, and mentioned no names. Apparently, two students in her class had been arrested for anti-Soviet activity, and the agents wanted from Masha names they might use as witnesses against them. She was released after signing a paper that she would not leave Ryazan without MGB permission, and she spoke to no one about her arrest.

She kept away from groups, felt there was danger in being part of any coalition. Indeed, Soviet law made membership in a clandestine group a worse crime than acting alone. She had at the time only one close friend and said nothing of her arrest even to him.

The arrest had followed an MGB search of her mother’s apartment in Moscow. The agents, looking for concealed weapons, had found nothing. When Masha returned to Moscow for her June marriage to Volodya, her frightened mother told her of the search, and Masha informed her mother of the arrest and interrogation. They said nothing to Volodya.

The two students who had been arrested were tried, found guilty, and sent to a labor camp.

The summer of 1952, when Masha returned to medical school some months after giving birth, she was startled by a sudden message from her very close friend, who asked urgently to meet her alone. This friend was a fellow student, a non-Jew, who lived in Siberia. His father was an interrogator in a procurator’s office. They met on August 20 of that year, months before the arrest of the doctors, and he told her he had information that there was to be an action against the Jews in the near future, all the Jews would be transferred to Siberia from central Russia, and the conditions of transport would be such that half would not survive the journey. He said, “I can save you and the child. Your son is blond, and I will give him my name and take the two of you to Siberia far away from all cities,” and Masha said, “No, I will go with my own people, with my brothers and sisters.” She trusted him completely and told no one, not even Volodya. In February 1953 he came to her again and said that the final decision had been made and very soon the action against the Jews would take place, and Masha said, “I haven’t changed my mind, I can’t save myself this way,” and he said, “At least you can save your child,” and she said, “No.” She had known him for years, he was a completely honest person, and she believed him. He had come from Siberia to study medicine, was a very good student, determined to do well. He said to her angrily, “You are a weak people, spoiled by civilization, and in forty years I will be a professor.” Today he is a member of the Academy of Sciences and holds the august rank of Academician. The family chronicles do not reveal his name.

Masha Slepak then witnessed the staged meetings at the medical institute and the hospital, the cruel fulminations against Jewish doctors, the crude admissions of Jewish guilt, and asked Volodya to talk to his father, solicit from him an explanation for what was happening; after all, he was a party member, he seemed to know high party people. Why were innocent Jewish doctors the target of official rage and persecution? And then the fierce quarrel took place in the Slepak apartment. And weeks later the nine doctors were arrested and trains stood waiting and lists were being readied. The predictions of Masha’s friend from Siberia were proving true. The Soviet Union was about to rid itself of the Jews.

Using the figures in official Soviet censuses and taking into consideration the enormous difficulties in defining who precisely was a Jew in the Soviet system, we can estimate that there were a little more than two million Jews in the Soviet Union at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot.”

In 1939 the Jews had numbered about three million. One out of every three Jews perished in the war, thereby reducing them from 2¼ to around 1 percent of the total population. Jewish losses in the war were proportionately four times higher than those of the population as a whole.

Stalin’s intention was to rid the major population centers of Jews and bring to an end his perceived troubles with that arrogant people. Instead he died.

In February 1956 Khrushchev stood for about three hours before the Twentieth Party Congress and delivered a twenty-thousand-word speech, carefully prepared in advance, that exposed many of the horrors of Stalin’s rule and stunned the Communist world. There is a photograph of Khrushchev speaking behind the podium, a phalanx of microphones like blackbirds before him, and the rows of deputies, some staring, some with eyes averted, some whispering to one another. Delivered in closed session, the speech was to have remained secret-notes could not be taken; questions could not be asked; no one was permitted to leave during the reading-but it made its way to Communist parties in the West and to the CIA and the American State Department and into the offices of party officials throughout the Soviet Union. Accounts of the speech tell of dense, shocked silence in the vast meeting hall of the congress, an icy silence punctured from time to time by cries of outrage, buzzes of anger, waves of disquiet, and applause. Stalin, said Khrushchev, had moved far away from Leninist principles, had been guilty of despotism, mass terror, brutal violence, and the cult of personality. Upon his head lay the guilt of the country’s lack of military preparedness and its costly defeats in the Great Patriotic War. Kirov’s murder in Leningrad in 1934 should be looked into again, for Stalin may well have had a hand in it. A full 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934, as well as over half the deputies, had been executed on Stalin’s order. He was a cruel, bloodthirsty, and sickly-suspicious tyrant, who had slaughtered the innocent along with the guilty in his purges of the party and the army. He had deported the Volga Germans and other loyal nationalities. The “Doctors’ Plot” had been a fabrication initiated by Dr. Lidia Timashuk, and Stalin had personally advised concerning the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation, himself calling the investigating judge and telling him he was to “Beat, beat, and, once again, beat,” until confessions were obtained. It was not the party that had been at fault, said Khrushchev, but one man, its leader, Stalin, whose aberrations the party now needed to correct so that the country could once again be ruled with the same vision and effectiveness it had known in the time of Lenin. He said nothing about the party before 1934; about the innumerable peasants and nonparty people starved and slain; about the Ukrainian intelligentsia he himself had ordered killed; about his own participation in Stalin’s brutal endeavors; about the millions of prisoners still in labor camps; about the plan to climax the “Doctors’ Plot” with mass deportations of Soviet Jews.

To this day there is no generally accepted explanation of why Khrushchev gave that speech. To consolidate his position in the party by openly opposing the Stalinist faction: Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Shepilov? To put an end to the terror and the secret police that were stifling Soviet art and culture? To make some sort of restitution to the innocent victims of Stalin’s paranoia?

About one month after the Twentieth Congress, Volodya’s superior at the Electro-Vacuum Factory asked him if he wanted to read Khrushchev’s secret speech. Volodya said, “Yes, of course.” The man said, “Go to my office. It’s on the desk. I took it from the office of the party committee.” At about that same time, the speech was read aloud to the medical staff during a meeting in Masha’s hospital. She and Volodya had known in outline much of the history related in the speech but were astonished by the details and by the fact that party leaders were now talking openly of the horrors perpetrated by Stalin.

The family chronicles relate the calm reaction of Solomon Slepak when he learned of the speech: “Stalin was certainly a great person. He did many positive things for our socialist state. Yes, he made mistakes. The party will correct them.” But one wonders about that response. The speech and the furious reaction of the Communist Chinese to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and liberalization of Soviet life, a reaction that by 1963 was to become an irreparable rift between the two centers of world communism, could hardly have brought much joy to the Old Bolshevik’s ailing heart.

By the early summer of 1957, some months after the autumn 1956 Hungarian rebellion had been crushed by Soviet troops, Khrushchev further tightened his hold on the Soviet Union when he persuaded the Presidium to oust his opponents-Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Shepilov. Then, in March 1958, Bulganin resigned as head of the government and Khrushchev took over the premiership. He was now head of both the party and the state. A self-made man, whose father had been a Ukrainian peasant, now ruled the Soviet Union: brash, hearty, overbearing, as well as cunning and devious, and schooled since the twenties in the Byzantine politics of the party.

The Twenty-second Party Congress, which met in October 1961, confirmed Khrushchev’s leadership and documented more of Stalin’s atrocities. Newspapers carried articles detailing facets of the great purge. And to the added astonishment of Masha and Volodya and countless others, the body of Stalin was removed before the end of the year from the mausoleum in Red Square, an event widely reported in the Soviet media and by the BBC and the Voice of America. And the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.

How did Solomon Slepak, then sixty-eight years old, react to the unceremonious removal of Stalin from his resting place beside Lenin? The chronicles, silent on the Old Bolshevik’s response, record Volodya’s conjecture about his father’s possible reply: “You see how the party cleans its own ranks? Even the great Stalin cannot evade the watchful eyes of the party.”

According to Volodya, as far as his father was concerned, events were moving inexorably along the correct course. The original cult of the party was now appropriately replacing the unseemly Stalinist cult of personality.

The body of Stalin was reinterred in a grave between the mausoleum and the Kremlin wall, beneath a stone and a bust of the tyrant.

Volodya and Masha began to wonder if the country had turned a corner, if life had moved onto a new plane for the people of the Soviet Union, especially for the Jews. Or was it all merely a period of political infighting, a nervous pause rather than a permanent redirection of purpose? By then Volodya and Masha, together with some very close friends, were listening regularly to the overseas broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America.

Warm weekends and summers Volodya and Masha traveled to the forests outside Moscow, where they camped with their friends amid the pines and alders and maples and junipers. Parents brought children. Each family slept in its own tent, purchased in a Moscow sports shop. Hiking, fishing, swimming, boating; gathering mushrooms and berries-much as Volodya had once done in his childhood with his father, during the thirties.

It was a circle of about six to ten friends: engineers, doctors, scientists. Their talk centered on new movies, books, music, concerts; on recent achievements in science, medicine, engineering, biology; on world events. They expressed to one another their astonishment that the Soviet authorities had approved the publication, in 1962, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was not so much the contents of the book that were of interest to them-they were familiar with many of the details-as the very fact of the book itself, what its appearance signaled and its worth as literature. They wondered what comparable works might soon follow.

Very much on their minds was the atmosphere of relaxation in Soviet culture that had succeeded the death of Stalin: Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel The Thaw; the rehabilitation in 1955 of the writer Isaac Babel, who had been arrested during the purges of the thirties and was thought to have perished in a labor camp; the journal and newspaper articles lamenting the stagnation of Russian literature. There was a sudden freeze on the arts following the Hungarian revolt in October 1956, but then a thaw once again, with the appearance of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the public readings attended by thousands in Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square and Luzhniki Sports Palace, where a new generation of young poets read works that openly declared rebellion against their fathers and mothers. Volodya and Masha did not attend the readings but knew of them. They were aware, too, that the authorities had finally put a stop to the readings; organizers and poets were arrested, some sent into exile and others to psychiatric hospitals.

Arrested in the late fifties for reading poetry to his friends, exiled to Siberia, and released in February 1961 was the mathematician and poet Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, whose mother was Jewish. Some of Volpin’s friends were arrested in February 1962. When they were brought to trial for “anti-Soviet agitation”-they had read their poetry to a crowd in Mayakovsky Square-Volpin tried to enter the courtroom, but was stopped by guards. The trial was closed to friends and relatives. On a sudden impulse Volpin showed the guards a copy of the new criminal code, which contained the promise made by the new Soviet leaders that henceforth trials would be open to the public and conducted with “Soviet legality.” The guards, after some hesitation, permitted him to enter.

There are those who, in retrospect, regard that seemingly insignificant event as the instant of conception for the civil rights and human rights struggle in the Soviet Union.

That same year, 1962, there appeared Anatoly Kuznetsov’s novel Babi Yar. Like the great poem of that name by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, it deals with the 1941 German slaughter of ninety thousand Jews in the ravine outside Kiev. One might have thought that the Soviets were finally acknowledging the unique dark destiny of the Jews in their midst. But then, in 1963, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published twelve thousand copies of a book called Judaism Without Embellishment by Trofim Kichko, a reworking of the turn-of-the-century tsarist police hoax known as Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jewish bankers and Zionists allied with Western capitalists in a conspiracy to take over the world. The book was studded with ugly racial cartoons reminiscent of the Nazi era.

Volodya and Masha and their friends talked at length about those events during their weekend and summer excursions in the forests outside Moscow. In the evenings they sat around a campfire, listening to the broadcasts in Russian that came from the world beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Those who planned the programs knew Russian work patterns and broadcast only in the early morning and from late afternoon into the night. Words from the world outside emerged from portable radios and drifted through the woods: news from Britain, Germany, America, Israel. Turbulent times, the fifties and early sixties: Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the American White House, Joseph McCarthy in the Senate, civil rights demonstrations in the streets; everywhere the Cold War and the armaments race; the Sinai War in the Middle East, the launching of Sputnik, the space race, the Cuban missile crisis, the growing American involvement in Vietnam. And the news from the United States seemed to be coming over the airwaves raw and uncensored, the good and the bad alike. Volodya repeatedly asked himself, What sort of country broadcasts to the world in such sordid detail its domestic turbulence, its ugly riots, the assassination of its leader? A strong and free country, he thought, and said so often to his friends.

Among his friends were David and Noemi Drapkin, Leonid Lipkovsky, Victor and Elena Polsky, Alexander Gilman, Alla Futer, Vladimir Prestin, Pavel Abramovich.

In the winters they went to the forests to ski. Again they brought their radios, listened to voices talking of distant worlds.

None of the Soviet shortwave radios available in shops had the frequencies needed for foreign broadcasts; to net the outside voices, one had to retune the frequency bands. With his knowledge of radio electronics, Volodya found the retuning a simple matter: Rewind some coils and change some capacitors. He did it for himself and for his friends. As more and more people began to listen to foreign stations, it became possible to find technicians who, for not a great deal of money, would unofficially retune one’s shortwave radio.

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 further 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.

Thus ended the first human rights action with placards and slogans in the history of the Soviet Union.

In the years that followed, demonstrators assembled in Pushkin Square on the night of December 5 to commemorate that first peaceful public protest. One of those present in 1966 was Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who had helped the Soviet Union develop its hydrogen bomb. He came each year for the next decade.

Volodya and Masha heard of the demonstration immediately after it took place. One day in Volodya’s institute, during a lunch break in the cafeteria, two engineers from the design bureau sat talking about the demonstration and books written by Sinyavsky and Daniel that had been published illegally in the Soviet Union or overseas: This Is Moscow Speaking, Hands, Ice-Covered Earth, The Town of Lyubimov. Someone must have overheard the conversation and informed on them. Their desks were searched; the books found. Two days later the engineers were fired.

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel-the first of many show trials that were soon to extend across the country-took place during four days of arctic cold in February 1966. Sinyavsky received seven years, Daniel five, both at hard labor-for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” a charge taken from the criminal code and used for the first time against intellectuals. The sentences suddenly made real the vision of a return to Stalinist repression. True, neither writer had been subjected to beatings, and there had been no allegations of terrorism against the state, but the price imposed for their dissent was inordinately cruel.

The arrests and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel are regarded as a watershed moment. With that event was born, in the eyes of most historians, the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. Letters began to be written, petitions signed and sent: to deputies of the Supreme Council, to the procurator general, to Brezhnev. Letters and petitions had been sent often to Stalin, who at times responded with arrest, years in a labor camp, a bullet in the brain. But in the post-Stalin Soviet Union of 1966, the Kremlin seemed uncertain at first about how to respond.

Then many of the letters were published in a samizdat edition of a work titled The White Book, which also carried newspaper accounts and an abbreviated, unofficial transcript of the trial. That brought the patience of the authorities to an abrupt end, and in 1968 four young samizdat activists, all part-time students-Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Vera Laskova, and Alexei Dobrovolsky-were arrested and accused of having smuggled the book out to the West. Their trial, which came to be known as the Trial of the Four, and the lengthy prison terms they received evoked still more letters and petitions. Protest, arrest, trial, further protest and arrest: A self-perpetuating escalation toward the doom of one side or the other, or both, had begun.

A few who signed petitions in the years 1966-1968 soon found themselves in labor camps; many signers who were party members were dismissed from the party and their jobs; nonparty people lost their positions or were transferred to minor posts; students were expelled from their institutes, artists and writers from their unions; scientists could not complete their dissertations. Those with their names on letters and petitions, once full and thriving participants in official Soviet society, were suddenly shunned, excommunicated. Still, the letters went on being written, signed, sent.

And in 1968, Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of Yuli Daniel, and Pavel Litvinov, the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, wrote a letter protesting the Trial of the Four, addressing it not only to the world inside the Soviet Union but, in a sudden departure from past practice, to the West as well. A typed draft was handed to the Reuters correspondent in Moscow and soon appeared in the foreign press. Overseas radio stations repeatedly broadcast the entire text of the letter into Soviet homes.

A cycle of communication had been established: wronged Soviet citizen to foreign press and back to ever-wider circles of Soviet citizens.

At about that same time, the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement had begun to grow in the United States. Strangely, simultaneously, in both countries, from radically opposite poles of the political spectrum, people of limited power had begun to protest against their pariah status: Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, among others, in the Soviet Union; African Americans, Native Americans, women, homosexuals, among others, in the United States. Restless, disillusioned youth in both cultures embarked upon the creation of angry countercultures. Volodya and Masha listened to the Voice of America describe riots and demonstrations; news of the escalating war in Vietnam penetrated the forest and the apartment. There were times when Volodya and Masha felt better informed about the tides of protest in the United States than about those in their own country.

Thus it was that, in September 1964, they knew nothing of a man named Iosif Chornobilsky, a locksmith from Kiev, who handed a woman visitor from Detroit a statement claiming that the Soviet Union hated Jews “with a wild anti-Semitic hatred” and was crushing “the rights of Jews in their education and work.” The statement, translated, was published in the Detroit Jewish News. After obtaining a number of signatures, in 1966, on a petition requesting a Jewish national theater in Kiev-rejected by the Ukrainian Communist Party-Chornobilsky was arrested. In the file the KGB had on him were copies of his statement in the Detroit Jewish News, letters to his sister in Israel, accounts of his meetings with tourists, and a list of books he had received about Israel.

Nor were Volodya and Masha Slepak aware of the few Jews in the Soviet Union who were attempting to revive the study of Hebrew: Rachel Margolina-Ratner, Felix Shapiro, Michael Zand, Hillel Butman, Zev Mogilever, and others. Nor did they know that American Jewish organizations, at the urging of the activist theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and a few others, had begun to waken to the reality of Soviet Jewry’s suffering. Moshe Decter, an advocate for Soviet Jewry since the 1950s, organized a Conference on the Status of Soviet Jewry, which was held in October 1963. In the years that followed, the issue of Soviet Jewry began to appear with increasing frequency on the agendas of Jewish and non-Jewish American organizations, institutions, newspapers, the halls of Congress. Rallies were held at which U.S. senators spoke: Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits urged the Soviet government to abide by its own constitution and grant the Jews their lawful rights. Catholic clergymen, labor leaders, and others joined in the protest. The Soviet government, mindful of world opinion, reacted in 1965 by ending its economic persecution of the Jews, rescinding its prohibition against the baking of unleavened bread for the Passover festival, and permitting some Jews to emigrate.

In the meantime a bridge of tourists was slowly being built between Western Jewry and the Soviet Union. American rabbis journeyed to Moscow. In 1965 Rabbi Israel Miller of New York City headed a delegation of Orthodox Rabbis and addressed the aged congregants of the Moscow synagogue in Yiddish, an event without precedent. In the summer of 1966 a group of American Reform rabbis visited that same synagogue, and the young son of one of the rabbis was called to the Torah to recite the blessing. Astonishment and tears filled the eyes of the old worshippers; it was the first time in forty years a youth had taken part in a service.

A vague, confused reawakening of identity seemed to be taking place among Jews in the Soviet Union; so some tourists reported when they returned home. They reported, too, on vague and distant stirrings: the unusually frequent borrowing of certain books, like Hebrew-Russian Conversation, often found in the reading rooms of institutes for Oriental literature; the constant perusal, with the help of a Hebrew-Russian dictionary (ferreted out of an old pre-Revolution private library? or left behind by a Mossad agent?), of the official Communist Party Hebrew newspaper Kol Ha-Am (“Voice of the People”), published daily in Israel and available in Moscow’s Lenin Library; the use of those books and newspapers by pensioners to learn Hebrew so they could then teach the language to the young. But in truth, only a few old and young Soviet Jews were part of that reawakening in the early and mid-sixties. A very few.

Volodya and Masha Slepak knew nothing of those embryonic cultural stirrings. Though listening frequently to foreign radio broadcasts and made uneasy by anti-Semitism and the apparent re-Stalinizing policies of the Brezhnev government, they were still to all appearances exemplary Soviet citizens-Masha a highly respected radiologist in an urban hospital; Volodya a skilled, prominent engineer in highly secret defense work that at times took him to strategic air bases and radar installations; their two sons in a superior special English school.

Less than a year later the shortwave radio was to bring into the apartment and the forest news of distant events that ultimately caused Masha and Volodya Slepak to transform their lives.