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

6 Journeys

The change in Masha and Volodya began slowly. That it began at all was in part a consequence of experiences private and personal: Masha’s terrifying arrest by the KGB; Volodya’s distressing encounters with anti-Semitism on the job; their gnawing awareness of the ruthless deeds of Solomon Slepak in China. And in part on account of events public and political: the demythologizing of Stalin; the candor of the Khrushchev years and the sudden poisoning of the air with the arrest and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel; the possibilities, borne by radio voices, of alternative lives for themselves and their children. The change came reluctantly at first, with considerable anxiety and hesitation. Until the final visceral change, caused by the overwhelming terror and triumph of a distant war.

The family chronicles tell of summer boat trips that Masha and Volodya often took during those Khrushchev-Brezhnev years. They went on one such trip in the summer of 1966-the year Sinyavsky and Daniel were tried and sent to labor camps for “anti-Soviet propaganda”; the year the locksmith Iosif Chornobilsky unsuccessfully petitioned the Ukrainian Communist Party for a Jewish theater in Kiev and was arrested; the same summer American Reform rabbis visited the Moscow synagogue and a youngster accompanying them became the first youth called to the Torah in forty years.

The boat they sailed on that summer was named Dolphin. Built in East Germany, it was 16.5 feet long and 5.5 feet wide and had two sails and an engine. Its wooden frame was covered with rubberized textile, and it could be easily disassembled and packed into several bags.

They sailed for two weeks along the Neringa Spit, a 75-mile length of sandbar-its width from half a mile to 2.5 miles-that separates the Kursh Gulf from the Baltic Sea. Also aboard were their friends Victor and Elena Polsky and Leonid Lipkovsky, all engineers whom Volodya had met while working in the Electro-Vacuum Factory in Moscow.

The boat took them from Klaipeda, a Lithuanian city on the Baltic, to the city of Königsberg, which the Soviets had renamed Kaliningrad, in the former state of East Prussia. They would sail for a day on the gulf side of the spit and then go ashore and make camp and put up tents and remain for one or two days, swimming, lying in the sun, fishing, picking berries. At night they built a campfire and Leonid Lipkovsky played the guitar and they sat around singing comical ditties and old Russian songs about love, the sea, nature, and long journeys, and listening to the various voices over the radio, and then quietly talking. They were a close, intimate circle of friends. In those Brezhnev days, the smaller the friendship group, the safer you were: fewer chances of running afoul of informants. No conspirators in this band of intimate friends sailing along the Neringa Spit that summer of 1966 and camping on its white dunes away from civilization, save for the three times they went into the towns on the spit for supplies, where they bought bread, sugar, pasta, and other staples.

On the gulf side nearly the entire shoreline was of white clean sand, some of it rising to a height of one hundred feet. It was exciting to slide down a high dune into the shallow water of the gulf, which was fed by the freshwaters of the Neman River. There were many fish, and they caught and fried bream and bought eels from the fishermen and cured them in smoke.

In the places where the spit widened there were forests beyond the beaches. Exploring one of the forests, they came upon the hunting lodge once used by Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Its walls had long been removed and used as firewood by people who lived nearby. Only the inlaid floor remained. All around the ruined lodge ran a wild garden with deserted stables and henhouses. Berries grew from bushes in the garden, and the Slepaks and their friends picked many and enjoyed them.

For two weeks they were connected to civilization only by radio. The men let their beards grow. On their last day of sailing the skies darkened and the wind rose, and there was a storm with waves six feet high. Arriving in the town of Zelenogradsk, they disassembled the boat and packed it away. Then they rented a small truck and drove to Kaliningrad, where they visited a barbershop. After his haircut Volodya gazed at himself in the barber’s mirror. Thirty-nine years old. Rugged, handsome, unshaven features. Grayish-green eyes; full lips; prominent, slightly curving nose. A Muscovite, urbane, intellectual, a bit too masculine, too attractive, the way Masha’s father had been. He turned to Masha and said in his throaty voice, “Maybe I will leave the beard?” Masha said, “You can try.”

The abrupt decision to let one’s beard grow. An assertion of identity, of self, to counteract growing inner uncertainty? Or an attempt to hide behind a dawning hurtful truth?

They spent the rest of the day touring the city and out of a sense of homage visited the grave of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the legendary figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. That night Volodya and his friends boarded a train back to Moscow, and Masha, who had one more week of vacation, took a train to Klaipeda and rode from there by bus to Palanga, the Baltic Sea resort town where her mother was staying with the children.

That was the last summer of the Soviet paradise for the Slepaks, the last year of servile imprisonment for many Jews in the Soviet Union.

In 1926 there were more than one thousand synagogues in the Soviet Union; in 1966, sixty-two. Each synagogue now functioned separately, fighting its own battle for survival; there was no central religious Jewish organization. Thirty of the synagogues were located in non-European regions of the Soviet Union, in which lived less than 10 percent of the country’s total Jewish population. The Oriental Jews of those regions would have fought to the death against any attempt to close their synagogues, and the authorities mostly left them alone. More important, Oriental Jews did not have the sense of Jewish nationalist consciousness that existed among Western Jews, for whom religious ideas invariably ignited the fires of nationalism. Thus the Soviet authorities fought hard against overt manifestations of religion in the ranks of Western Jews. And those Jews, largely assimilated and yielding to government harassment, had witnessed over the years the regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns, the closing of synagogues, the uprooting of institutions that might afford opportunities for assembly and separateness; had witnessed, silently until now, the gradual collapse of Judaism all around them: the absence of academies of higher Jewish learning; the suppression of the religious education of children; the gradual rise in the average age-now above seventy-of rabbis, ritual slaughterers, and circumcisers; and the expunging of all public references to explicitly Jewish contributions to Soviet life past and present. Synagogue life, controlled; a Yiddish press, dead, save for showpiece publications. Clearly, it was the intention of the government to throttle the living organism of Judaism until such time as it would indeed cease to exist, thereby demonstrating the truth of the announcement of its demise.

Astonishingly, the brutal crushing of Jewish nationalism led some young secular Jews on journeys for other forms of expression, on quests into heretofore unexplored regions of religious worship, and they discovered the noisy, blatantly public territory of Simchat Torah, the exuberant festival when Jews mark the end and the new beginning of the annual Torah-reading cycle, its fervid enthusiasms only loosely codified by Jewish law. The passion, the openness, the frenzied exhilaration. They danced; they sang; they played their guitars.

And so in the fall of 1966, only a few weeks after the sailing trip of the Slepaks and their friends, hundreds of young people gathered inside and outside the Moscow synagogue, milling about, singing, dancing, marching with the Torah scrolls, brazenly celebrating the holiday in the presence of the KGB and the militia, which had set up two huge floodlights and were photographing everyone who entered the synagogue. Also present were Elie Wiesel and a number of tourists, who then journeyed home and reported what they had seen.

The style of the KGB was first to watch and follow and then to pounce and arrest. Much of the time they did the watching openly; part of their style of terror was to let you know that you were being stalked. The Slepaks felt certain that there were no informers in their small circle of friends because no one was watching them.

Among the members of that circle were Victor and Noya Drapkin. He was an engineer; she, a biologist. They had a daughter, Vika. Victor Drapkin, who later changed his first name to David, was a tall, gray-eyed, balding man in his mid-forties, with a slightly hoarse voice and a limp from a childhood fall beneath a tram that had shorn off part of one foot, leaving him only his heel. He was a noisy, argumentative, excitable man, who despised Jewish assimilationists; from his lips the term assimiliant issued forth as an epithet. Noya, or Noemi, Drapkin-in many ways the opposite of her husband: dark-haired, dark-eyed, short, restrained-had been born in Riga, where she received a good Jewish education, the Baltic states having been acquired by the Soviet Union as recently as the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939 and not subjected to radical religious cleansing because they lay along the rim of the empire. She knew Hebrew, had experienced traditional Jewish life, and each year visited her relatives and friends in Riga, where there was a vigorous Jewish community. She had convinced her husband of the virtues of Zionism, and the two of them lost no opportunity to talk about Israel as they sat with their close friends around camphres.

Those friends, skilled engineers and scientists trained in the finest institutes in the Soviet Union, had talked during the early years of their friendship about what they thought were the real reasons Khrushchev had delivered his secret speech; about their samizdat reading; and, in later years, about the arrests and trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky; about rumors of Jews leaving from border cities of the Soviet Union to be reunited with their families in Israel. At first it was only a few Russians talking about a few other Russians, all the discourse plainly illegal. The sole reason for their interest in those outside events: curiosity. They had no wish to join any movements, not the least inclination to enter the perilous arena of party politics. In the beginning there were no activists among those friends; they were merely a few young inquisitive people who only wanted to talk.

Then, gradually over the years, inside the ambience of intimacy and safety they created for themselves, they began to widen the landscape of their curiosity, tentatively extending it at times to take in Israel, where, they understood, there were collective farms known as kibbutzim. How did the kibbutz compare with the Soviet Unions kolkhoz? the friends wondered. And they listened to the Voice of Israel, drawn from the air by the radios they carried into the forests and on summer journeys.

In the early years they had no feeling that they were anything other than Russians, no connectedness to Israelis. Only David and Noya Drapkin kept insisting that they were all part of one people. The others maintained that if they were Jews at all, they were Russian Jews and had nothing to do with Israel; but yes, wasn’t it interesting what the Israelis were trying to build, their clearly thriving collective farms, their strong citizen army, their socialist government, their open society?

As the years went by, with no abatement of anti-Semitism, some among the friends ventured to wonder aloud from time to time if they were really part of the world of Russia. And soon others began to murmur to one another about the twilight land they inhabited. No real sense anymore of who they truly were: Russians, Jews, what?

It was clear by now that the chauvinistic Slavic groups would never accept them as part of the Russian people.

They said to one another, “Even if we tell them we’re Russian, they tell us we’re Jews.” “Are we ever invited to any of their parties? And even if we were invited, would we go?” “Maybe during and right after the war, yes, we would have gone. Then there was the feeling we were all one country, one people. That was the only time I ever felt like a whole person and not one part of me Russian, another part of me Jewish. But then, after the arrest of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the shooting of the Yiddish writers, the ‘Doctors’ Plot,’ the endless articles condemning Jews-no, we wouldn’t go. The long history of anti-Semitism in this country has really turned us into a separate people.”

A friend once wondered aloud, “What if there had been no anti-Semitism at all?”

Volodya said, “Then we would have joined the country as another nationality and vanished, and my father’s dream would have come true.”

Masha agreed. There had been many intermarriages during and right after the war, when it seemed the dream was becoming real. Now, fewer and fewer.

“Why haven’t the Russians seen that?” someone murmured.

“Because they hate us too much,” said Masha.

And one day, in 1965, she suddenly and clearly saw herself and her family emigrating to Israel, an idea she had only vaguely conjured up before. She mentioned it to Volodya, who thought her impulsive, a woman, a dreamer.

And sometime during the final weeks of the summers of 1965 and 1966, one of the friends said he was going to the Simchat Torah celebration in the Moscow synagogue and did Volodya want to come along, and Volodya said it was not a good idea, the KGB and militia would be there, too, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his security clearance.

Only decades later did Volodya and Masha come to realize that their circle of friends was one of thousands like it in the Soviet Union, a society shriveled by terror and reduced to forming, by way of instinctive response, the smallest and safest communal units. Among those friendship circles were a minuscule number of the intelligentsia, which included a few of Russia’s finest writers. It was the initial battles fought by the friendship circles that prepared the ground for the later Jewish struggle, which in turn, when it gained force, helped shore up the democratic human rights movement of the dissident Russians. Those early circles were microcosms of small turbulences that would one day link up and play a major role in bringing about the sudden, reverberating implosion of one of the mightiest empires in human history.

Each of those circles, from Siberia in the east to the Baltics in the west, was detonated into action by diverse events: the horrific tales told by prisoners released from labor camps; the secret speech of Khrushchev in 1956; the show trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky in 1966; the Trial of the Four and the Soviet tanks that crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968; the constant arrests, trials, physical violence, internal exile to provincial towns, sudden loss of jobs or expulsion from institutes, long sentences in the labor camps-indeed, the near-crushing of the dissident movement in the 1970s and early 1980s-that marked the re-Stalinization policies of Brezhnev and his successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, ailing men dedicated to the entrenched old order. But each repressive effort by the regime ignited additional fires among the dissidents. No one seemed aware of it then, but inexorable events had been set in motion, eerily reminiscent of those that, starting around the turn of the century, had climaxed in 1917 with the overthrow of the tsar.

For Jewish circles like those of the Slepaks and their friends, the quickening moment was the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.

As the summer of 1967 approached, conflict in the Middle East appeared inevitable. Egypt had blockaded the Strait of Tiran; the United Nations, yielding to the demands of the Egyptians, had withdrawn its buffer troops from the Sinai Peninsula; Arab nations were calling for a holy war against Israel. It set the air shivering, the likelihood of another Holocaust befalling a large segment of the Jewish people as the world stood by, watching. But Israel was not the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Israelis, taking a page from Clausewitz’s classic work on war, struck first. Soviet foreign policy now favored the Arab cause, and the Soviet media condemned the preemptive strikes of the Israeli armed forces, told repeatedly of Arab victories, and then fell abruptly silent. Volodya and Masha and their friends tried to pick up the overseas voices on their radios and were able to catch the speech of Soviet Ambassador Fedorenko in the United Nations, a spewing forth of venomous hate against Israel and Moshe Dayan. Suddenly all the Soviet media erupted with invective toward Israel and Jews as, after the few days of fighting, the full dimensions of the Israeli victory began to become apparent. On June 15 Izvestia announced that the Israelis were killing prisoners of war and executing women and children. Magazines and newspapers compared the Israelis to the Nazis. At factory meetings, workers passed unanimous resolutions condemning the “aggression” of Israel. The very air throbbed with official hysteria directed against Jews, who were accused of being Nazi collaborators, a genocidal people. Public celebration of the Israeli victory was, of course, out of the question; a number of private celebrations by Jewish students resulted in police harassment, searches, arrests.

There now occurred inside the circle of seven families of which the Slepaks were a part a sudden electrifying collective and exhilarating awareness of power over their enemies, of life-enhancing alternatives to the degradations of Soviet life, of a triumphant goal to be fought for: emigration. For some members of the group, those thoughts still lay far below consciousness; for others, they were full-blown but remained for the time being unspoken. For all, the possibility of emigration became a permanent condition of their lives. Unlike the Russian democratic dissidents, who sought to remain and reform the system, these Jewish dissidents, and the movement they were soon to be part of, abandoned all hope for themselves within the system, cut the cord of destiny that had until then bound them to Russia, and now, with a slowly growing sense of belonging to the Jewish people, began to cast about for ways to leave the Soviet Union.

Diplomatic relations between Israel and the Soviet Union came to an end that June. The Israeli Embassy in Moscow was directed to close down. A few days later, on June 13, a twenty-one-year-old man named Yasha Kazakov-he had been raised in an assimilated home, subjected to some anti-Semitism, and had begun on his own to read books on Jewish history-suddenly decided that if the Soviet Union was breaking off relations with the state of Israel, he would break off relations with the Soviet Union. He sent a letter from his parents’ apartment in Moscow to the Supreme Soviet renouncing his citizenship and demanding what he claimed was his right to emigrate to Israel. The letter went unanswered. He then wrote to U Thant, secretary-general of the United Nations, hand-delivered the letter to the American Embassy, and was then arrested by the KGB, and interrogated at length. “You will never receive an exit visa,” he was told upon his release. “You were born in Russia, and you will die in Russia.” He continued to write letters demanding that he be allowed to leave the country, and in early 1969 he received permission to emigrate to Israel. Yasha Kazakov was the first Jew in the post-Stalin era to challenge personally and openly the Soviet regime and succeed.

Around the same time another Jew, Boris Kochubievsky from Kiev, who had applied to leave the Soviet Union in 1967, was refused. He applied again, was arrested, placed on trial in May 1969, and given three years in a labor camp. The Soviet pattern of arbitrary and capricious handling of visa applicants had been set, a roulette wheel of justice. It was to characterize the twenty-year period of the visa war.

In July 1967, following the Six-Day War, the Slepaks and their older son, Sanya, spent two weeks on the shore of Lake Tzesarka near the Lithuanian city of Vilna. Together with them were David and Noya Drapkin and their daughter, Vika; Victor and Lena Polsky and their daughter, Marina; Volodya and Lyalya Prestin and their son, Minya. They had one motorcycle, one car, the boat Dolphin, and a kayak. Each couple shared a tent. There was one tent for the two girls, and one for the two boys. They sat around campfires every night listening to overseas radio broadcasts and talking about the Six-Day War. The sons and daughters understood that what was said around those campfires and inside their apartments was never to be repeated to anyone anywhere.

After the two weeks of sailing and camping, the Drapkins and Prestins returned to Moscow, and the Slepaks and Polskys drove to Vilna and Kovno, where they visited the ghetto areas of the Nazi occupation and the site where several thousand Jews from Kovno had been murdered. They motored through Latvia, Estonia, and northwest Russia, talking often of the recent war in the Middle East and listening to the radio.

Over the shortwave radio in the course of the next year came the shocking news from the United States of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968; of riots in the streets of Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston; of troops guarding the American capital. First, President Kennedy; now, Dr. King. And in June, exactly one year after the onset of the Six-Day War, came the news of the assassination, in Los Angeles, of Senator Robert Kennedy by a twenty-four-year-old Christian Arab who had been born in Jordanian Jerusalem. Volodya and Masha and their friends wondered about the nature of American society, its stability, its violence, its future.

That summer the Slepaks and their friends vacationed on a large island in the Dnieper River about one hundred miles southeast of Kiev. The island was unpopulated; the nearest habitation was the village of Prokhorivka across the river. Once again they talked among themselves, without inhibitions. Around the campfire they listened to news over the shortwave radio: Volodya, Masha, and Sanya Slepak; Leonid and Fanya Lipkovsky; Mara Abramovich; Volodya and Lyalya Prestin and their son, Minya; David, Noya, and Vika Drapkin; Victor and Lena Polsky and their daughter, Marina. They had with them the sailboat Dolphin. In a camp about three hundred feet away was another circle of friends, dissidents who had no wish to leave the Soviet Union; the excitable David Drapkin referred to them scornfully as assimiliants. The two camps sat together around the campfire, listening to unfriendly voices over the radio, talking quietly, singing to the strains of Leonid Lipkovsky’s guitar.

From those unfriendly voices they learned, in the third week of August, that the Soviet Union and four of its Warsaw Pact allies had invaded Czechoslovakia. Communist tanks and troops had quickly and with little bloodshed shut off the hum of democratic possibilities emanating from that sovereign socialist country: an end to censorship; a candid critique of Soviet-style communism; a liberal socialism.

The small circle of friends was enraged, sobered, frightened by that news, and confirmed in their conviction that they should leave their country. Surely the death of liberal Czechoslovakia meant the end of liberal hopes in the heart of the Soviet Union as well.

Volodya and Masha and their friends returned to Moscow some days after the invasion.

On August 25 seven men and women staged a demonstration in Red Square, raising banners that read LONG LIVE FREE AND INDEPENDENT CZECHOSLOVAKIA and to YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS. They were arrested by the KGB.

Volodya did not attend the Simchat Torah celebration in the Moscow synagogue that fall of 1968. Again, the reason he gave was concern over his security clearance.

In the course of a press conference in Paris on December 3, 1966, Premier Alexei Kosygin had remarked that “as far as the reunification of families is concerned, if some families wish to meet or if they wish to leave the Soviet Union, the road is open to them…”

There is a spring 1967 photograph of Jews on a crowded platform in the rail station in Riga, men and women in their thirties and forties, with some children, starting out on the first leg of their journey to Israel. Jews were being let out, about one thousand people every year, from the southern and western Ukraine, the Baltic states, Hungary.

One day in the fall of 1968-around the time when Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States-the Drapkins informed the Slepaks and their circle of friends that a group of Jews from Riga had been granted exit visas and would soon be leaving for Israel from Moscow. Did the Moscow circle want to meet some of the people from the Riga circle when they arrived in Moscow to pick up their visas? That was how it was done: You went to Moscow from Riga, visited the Dutch Embassy for your Israel visa and the Austrian Embassy for your transit visa, had all the required documents photographed, returned to your city to collect your family, traveled back by train to Moscow with the family, then boarded a flight to Vienna. Yes, the Moscow circle did indeed want to meet with some of the people from the Riga circle.

The meeting occurred on December 25, 1968, in the Moscow apartment of the Drapkins. Over the past months the Drapkins had introduced the group to a number of former prisoners who had been in labor camps for Zionist activities. One had served a sentence of six years. The circle had listened to accounts of the camps and to plans for the reorganization of Zionist groups. Other visitors had told of meetings that were dealing with the possible beginnings of a nationwide movement of Soviet Jews and the start of a Jewish samizdat press. David Drapkin and his wife had already decided that they and their daughter would one day emigrate from the Soviet Union. In the meantime, to sever himself entirely from assimilation, he had stopped eating Russian food and reading Russian authors.

Now, in the Drapkins’ apartment, the circle talked with six people from Riga, among them a man named Mark Blum, in his late twenties, who was not returning to Riga because he was unmarried and had no family there. Instead he was to leave for Israel shortly via Vienna. Did anyone in the group wish to give him the personal data needed by the Israelis in order for them to send the official invitations that were necessary for Soviet visa applications? Names, addresses, children, dates of birth, names of parents, relatives in Israel. He would give the information to the Israelis, who would then search for the relatives. In cases of the total absence of relatives, the Israeli authorities would look into the possibility of other arrangements.

Members of the group began to write down the information.

Volodya and Masha sat looking at each other. It was late evening. The curtains were drawn against the winter gloom outside. Masha got to her feet and took Volodya’s hand, and they moved to a dark corner near a window and a desk and stood with their backs to the others.

Masha said quietly, “This is a special opportunity. Who knows when it might happen again? Are you ready to do it?”

Volodya, lost in fearful hesitation, did not respond.

Fighting back her apprehension about the consequences of their act upon their children, Masha said, “We must use this opportunity.”

And Volodya, after a brief silence, said, “Let’s do it,” and felt they had suddenly fallen into deep and icy waters.

The family chronicles record Masha’s uncertainty about what she might have done had Volodya refused. Made a further effort to persuade him, she maintains. There is a vague hint of divorce, but sober reality put that out of mind: Under Soviet law, she might have gained her visa to Israel and lost her young children to Volodya.

That evening Volodya and Masha transmitted to Mark Blum the necessary data on their family. That was the day, December 25, 1968, when three American astronauts flew around the moon, seventy miles from its forbidding surface, and one of them recited, for all the world to hear, the opening verses in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…”

The Slepaks had informed their older son, Sanya, then sixteen, that they intended to emigrate; but the younger son, Leonya, nine years old, knew nothing, and they would have to talk with him. Masha’s mother knew; she had given them her blessing, said she wanted to leave with them; indeed there was a remote possibility that she had cousins in Israel. Volodya’s father was unaware of his son’s and daughter-in-law’s intentions; he, too, would have to be told. But not immediately. First, they wanted to see what would come of the information they had given Mark Blum-who, in Israel, changed his name to Mordechai Lapid, became very devout, and in 1993 was killed by an Arab terrorist.

Now they waited. And lived their lives on the surface as if that evening meeting had never taken place. No one shadowed them; all appeared normal in the apartment building and in the workplace. But they had moved out of the ranks of the people and were now disloyal citizens, indeed would have been regarded as near criminals in the eyes of their Russian colleagues and coworkers had their plans become known.

During the time of their waiting, the dissident movement began to grow. Individuals of extraordinary stature, honored by the Soviet government and central to Soviet life, citizens of high privilege and national pride, such as the celebrated physicist Andrei Sakharov and the noted scholar Roy Medvedev, moved into the ranks of the human rights movement. Their works entered the illicit world of samizdat publications: Sakharov’s Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, a critique of the Soviet Union’s social structure; Medvedev’s Let History Judge, an exhaustive and chilling study of the Stalinist era.

The samizdat journal Khronika was established in April 1968 by the poet and editor Natalya Gorbanevskaya: a bulletin containing only basic information, without commentary; one copy typed with several carbons, the copies handed to others for retyping, the tissue-thin sheets stapled together and passed from hand to hand. No one seems to know how many that journal reached. Volodya and Masha were among those who read it. Reports of secret trials and the persecution of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses; stories of prisoners in psychiatric hospitals, of hunger strikes, protest letters, sudden loss of jobs, searches of apartments, arrests, visa requests, prison camps. One knew nothing of the fetid corners of the Soviet house from the official media; those stories were to be found only in publications like Khronika and, later, in others, including the clandestine Jewish publications that began to appear in the 1970s.

Early in 1969, soon after Mark Blum had left for Israel with the information the Slepaks and their friends had given him, Volodya asked his father to come to the apartment for a visit. Solomon Slepak was then seventy-six years old, silver-haired, stocky, a rugged, robust-looking man, with smooth pink features and clear brown eyes that effectively concealed the difficulties he was having with his heart.

The three of them, Masha, Volodya, and Solomon, sat in the large room of the apartment. Solomon looked uncomfortable and kept glancing at his wristwatch.

Volodya told him in a quiet voice that they had decided to apply for an exit visa to Israel.

Solomon Slepak stared at his son.

Volodya said they had asked for an official invitation from Israel, and as soon as it arrived, they would send in their visa application.

Solomon jumped to his feet. “You are crazy!”

“We’ve made our decision,” said Volodya.

“You are enemies of the people!”

Masha sat silent, observing the tempest of father and son.

“Israel!” Solomon Slepak said with contempt. “I could understand if you had decided to go to America or Canada for a better life. I was in both countries, I know how people live there. But to go to Israel, to a fascist state!”

Volodya said, “We’ve made our decision.”

“I lived among Jews. I know what it is like.”

“We won’t change our minds.”

“I warn you,” Solomon raged, “we’ll be on opposite sides of the barricades!”

“We are going,” said Volodya.

“I am telling you now, I will do everything in my power to stop you!” shouted Solomon, and stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door.

Volodya remembers the reverberating air in the suddenly silent room and the fury and dread he felt as he wondered how much influence his father still had in the post-Stalin Communist Party.

The official invitation from Israel arrived in the mail in March 1969. It consisted of two sheets of paper fastened together. The first, directed to the Soviet authorities, was from the woman who claimed to be a Slepak “relative”; the Slepaks, official inquiry had revealed, were without true relatives in Israel. It stated the names, addresses, and dates of birth of the Soviet citizens who were her “relatives,” the precise nature of the “family relationship,” and an assurance of providing for them. The second sheet of paper was a statement from the Foreign Ministry of Israel, certifying the signature of the inviting “relative,” joining in her request, and guaranteeing that those invited would be given citizenship after their arrival.

The invitation was the core element in the tortuous visa application process they were about to undertake: the key to the exit door of the Soviet Union and the entrance door to Israel. Looking at it closely, Volodya saw that his and Masha’s names were replete with egregious spelling errors that could not be corrected. He was dismayed. They would now have to wait for a second invitation.

Volodya knew that all letters from abroad, before being delivered, were opened and read by the authorities. It was only a matter of days until the KGB informed the head of the institute that engineer Slepak was planning to emigrate. He would be fired immediately. He now needed to find someone else who was emigrating to Israel. More months would pass before the second invitation arrived. To apply for the visa, he needed kharakteristika, references from his place of work. He would have to tell people with whom he had worked for years that the references were to be directed to OVIR, the Department of Visas and Permissions, for an emigration visa. How mortifying it would be to have to ask for kharakteristika from his current place of work after being fired because of the KGB report. The institute chiefs would subject him to a barrage of meetings filled with derisive talk, humiliating questions, degrading accusations.

He decided to leave his work at the institute, find a simpler job, and ask for kharakteristika from there.

A day or so after he had received the invitation from Israel, he handed the deputy director of the institute a statement to the effect that he wished to leave his job and, according to the rights granted him by law, would no longer come to work after two weeks.

The astonished deputy director asked, “Why?”

Volodya said he had found a new job.

The deputy director asked, “What job? Where?”

Volodya said he preferred to keep that information to himself.

The deputy director asked, “Would you stay if you were made head of the department and given a higher salary?” The head of a department was normally in charge of three to five laboratories.

Volodya said, “No.”

Two weeks later he gave up his job.

He asked his friends to find him a new job, and after a short while obtained work in one of the offices of the Trust Geophysica, which was involved in oil prospecting and was mapping the strata of the earths crust in certain regions of the Soviet Union. Small explosive charges would be set off at a depth of five to eight feet. Located around the charges at distances of two or three miles were devices that would record onto magnetic tapes the oscillating waves that rolled through the earth. By comparing the frequencies of those waves, one could obtain a picture of the earths crust in the area of the charges. Such comparisons could be made only by a computer, but the signals on the tapes were in analog form, which a computer could not read. Volodya’s job was to design an electronic instrument that could transform analog signals into digital ones, which computers could read and analyze.

The office of the Trust Geophysica was near the Povarovka Railway Station on the Moscow-Leningrad railway, a half hour train ride from the Leningradsky Railway Station. The work paid considerably less than what he had been earning at the institute.

About six months later, while walking along a street in Moscow, Volodya met one of his former colleagues from the institute and was told that one month after he had left the job, there had been a meeting in the institute of all the party members and heads of departments and laboratories. The sole topic of the meeting was Volodya Slepak and his plans to emigrate to Israel. In the course of a furious speech against Volodya, the party secretary had said, “How blind we were not to see that among us was a traitor, an enemy of the people!”

Masha retained her job as a radiologist because her chief received no instructions to dismiss her. He was an upright man and would not fire her on his own even though he knew that she intended to emigrate. Besides, there was a dire need in Moscow for radiologists.

David and Noya Drapkin submitted the necessary documents to OVIR, requesting permission to emigrate. In April 1969, about the time that Volodya gave up his job at the institute, David Drapkin received a call from OVIR and was told that his request had been refused.

“There are too many of you Jews,” the OVIR official said over the telephone. “We will not let you leave; we will finish you off here.”

Volodya’s new job at the Trust Geophysica began in June. Because he had no vacation coming to him, he and Masha and Sanya remained in Moscow that summer. The weather was hot; the air dusty, brown. Some weekends the Slepaks went with friends into the forests. And listened to the news over the radio. That was the summer two American astronauts walked on the moon. In Moscow the political atmosphere was portentous with neo-Stalinist resonances after a year of increasing repression and the surprise overpowering of Czechoslovakia the previous summer. Leonid Slepak, then ten years old, spent his vacation in a Young Pioneers camp.

A man from Leningrad, Sasha Blank, an old friend of the Slepaks’, emigrated to Israel that August, carrying with him the data for a second invitation. Many were being refused visas at that time because according to the OVIR officials, those sending the invitations were not “close” relatives; hence Masha’s mother had asked Sasha Blank to find an Israeli woman about fifty years of age, who was to claim in the invitation that she was her daughter. Masha’s mother had contrived a lengthy story to tell the emigration officials about how during the Civil War she had suddenly fallen ill with typhus and fainted on a train; after having been removed from the car, she woke in a station to find her daughter gone. The amulet the daughter had worn around her neck all through the years had finally led to her mother.

The same August that Sasha Blank left for Israel carrying with him Volodya and Masha’s data and the story of Masha’s mother’s “daughter,” eighteen Jewish families from the Soviet region of Georgia took the astonishing step of sending a petition directly to Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir, with the request that it be forwarded to U Thant. The petition solicited his backing for their constantly thwarted attempts to emigrate to Israel. “It is incomprehensible that in the twentieth century people can be prohibited from living where they wish to live,” read the petition. “We will wait months and years, we will wait all our lives, if necessary, but we will not renounce our faith or our hopes.”

The petition, which seemed to signal the start of a mass movement, was read to the Israeli Knesset and presented by the government of Israel to the United Nations as an official document. News of the petition filtered into the major cities of the Soviet Union: Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Riga, Vilna, Odessa, Kiev. More petitions and letters followed, from individuals and groups, addressed to the United Nations, to Soviet Premier Kosygin, to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to President Zalman Shazar of Israel. For years we have suffered humiliation, the letters and petitions said; we have the right to request a new home in a land of our choice.

Volodya and Masha, barely aware of those letters, had no notion that they were becoming part of an expanding horizon of opposition to tyranny. But with his job at the institute now lost, Volodya knew that he no longer needed to be concerned about his security clearance. And so that fall, for the first time in their lives, he and Masha and their sons walked from the apartment on Gorky Street to the Moscow synagogue on Arkhipova Street, where they became part of a multitude of Jews celebrating Simchat Torah.

They would not enter the synagogue, avoided contact with the rabbi and state-hired officials of the Jewish community, all of whom, they had been told, were under the control of the KGB. One of their friends, David Chavkin, had brought along a self-made amplifier with two powerful speakers, a tape recorder, and cassettes. Jewish music resounded through the street. Volodya and Masha were caught up in the tumult and enthusiasm of the huge crowd, thousands of people. Militia stood along the rim of the crowd, and everyone there knew that KGB agents in civilian garb were among the crowd-some may even have been participating in the singing and dancing-but no one seemed to care. The celebration lasted until midnight.

The Slepaks went often to that synagogue from then on, on Sabbaths and festivals. They never entered but stood on the street with friends and other dissidents, watching the crowds grow from year to year.

In late 1969 dissidents from Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga met and decided it was now time to initiate collective letters of protest to the authorities and make them public. That was the first clear move toward organized open confrontation with the regime. In early 1970 Jewish dissidents in Riga issued the Jewish samizdat bulletins Iton Aleph (“Newspaper A”), and Iton Bet (“Newspaper B”), a few copies on poor paper in Russian, the first independent public voice of the embryonic movement: an interview with Golda Meir; an article about the Israeli Army; a passage from a book about the 1943 uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis; the texts of letters to government officials by Soviet Jews voicing their right to emigrate; the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

The second invitation to Israel arrived in the Slepak mailbox on a day in January 1970-from a different “relative.” This time the names were correctly spelled. Volodya and Masha went to the OVIR office for the necessary application forms and to learn from instructions posted on the walls how to complete the forms and what accompanying documents they were required to submit.

It took them nearly three months to assemble all the necessary documents. The application form alone was six pages in length. It asked for your name, address, date and place of birth, place or places of work for the past five years, were you a member of the Communist Party or Komsomol, had you ever lost your membership and why, your nationality, names of your closest relatives, had you ever been abroad, where when why, who among your relatives had been abroad with you, had you ever before applied to leave the USSR, when, were you refused, why, who in your family was now applying with you, what country did you intend to enter, who in that country was your relative, why and from where did the relative leave the USSR, list all your communications with that relative, when did you receive the most recent communication, how did you discover where that relative was living, explain why you wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

Together with the application, you needed to submit to OVIR: your autobiography; the invitation from the relative in Israel, certified by the Foreign Ministry of Israel; the kharakteristika from your job, stating that it was addressed to OVIR specifically for a visa application and signed by the director of your place of employment, the party secretary, and the chairman of the trade union committee; a certificate, also specifically directed to OVIR, from the office running your apartment building regarding your status as a resident of Moscow and the condition of your domicile; a signed statement from your parents, if alive, about how they looked upon your desire to leave the country and whether they had any financial or other claims upon you, with their signatures certified either at their places of work or by the office of their apartment building; certificates of birth and, wherever applicable, of marriage, divorce, parents’ death; copies of diplomas; four photographs; two blank postcards with your home address; receipt from the bank certifying your payment of the special tax for the exit visa application; internal passport, military record, trade union card, work book, pension card.

Sometime in March 1970 Volodya telephoned his father and asked if he would write and sign a statement about how he felt concerning his son’s wish to leave the country. He explained that he needed the statement to complete his visa application documents.

“I will never write or sign such a statement!” shouted his father. “Do not call me again! I will have nothing to do with an enemy of the people!” And he hung up the telephone.

After repeated failed attempts to obtain the statement, Volodya decided to include with the documents an affidavit written and signed by him and certified by a notary to the effect that his father had refused to take part in the visa application process.

That same month Volodya requested from his chiefs at the Trust Geophysica the kharakteristika he needed for OVIR. They agreed, on condition that he resign from his position. It was three months before he found another job.

By the time Masha and Volodya completed gathering all the documents, everyone at Masha’s place of work and in their apartment house knew that they were applying to emigrate from the country.

On April 13, 1970, Volodya and Masha boarded a dark blue city minibus on Alexander Pushkin Square, one block from their apartment, rode to Pokrovskiye Vorota, and then walked a block and a half to the OVIR office on Kolpachny Pereulok, where they submitted their visa application for emigration to Israel.

An official from the Ministry of the Interior checked the documents attached to the application form for proper stamps, signatures, and answers. Pausing over Volodya’s statement regarding his father’s refusal, the official insisted on the need for a statement from his father.

Volodya said it was impossible. His father was an Old Bolshevik; he would never write and sign such a statement. Why wasn’t Volodya’s own statement to that effect sufficient?

After a moment the official yielded. Gathering up the application form and the documents, he said tersely, “You will be informed about the decision.”

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.