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

7 The Visa War

On the afternoon of June 15, 1970, some days after the telephone conversation with OVIR in which Volodya was informed that his exit visa application had been refused, he and Masha were alone in the apartment when they heard the doorbell ring. Masha went to the door, while Volodya remained in the smaller of their two rooms. He heard the door being opened and called out, “Who is there?”

Masha returned to the room. “They came to make a search.”

From somewhere outside, a man said, “Please come here!”

Volodya followed Masha out of the room. In the hall near the entrance door stood five men in civilian clothes and one in a militia uniform. One of the men in civilian clothes said in a soft voice, “I am Major Nosov of the KGB.” He had on a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a tie. Under his jacket he wore a pistol. “I have a warrant to search your apartment,” he said.

“In connection with what case?” asked Volodya.

“The case of Yuri Fedorov,” said Major Nosov. He was very polite.

“What is he accused of?”

“Anti-Soviet activity,” said Major Nosov. He pointed to the man in uniform. “This is a representative of the militia. These two are witnesses, and these two are my aides. So, if you please, give us voluntarily all the anti-Soviet material that you have in your possession. Otherwise we will begin to search.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refusals from OVIR were communicated orally. If, however, one’s application for a visa had been approved, one received a postcard in the mail. On March 11, 1971, an OVIR postcard arrived for Masha’s mother, who had recently suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. “You are permitted to leave for Israel. To obtain your exit visa, you must appear at the office of OVIR with these documents.” A list followed.

Masha went to see her the following day and showed her the postcard. After a long moment of silence, her mother said she would go alone.

“The trip is difficult,” said Masha. “Will you be able to make it?”

“It’s up to God. Begin the process.”

Masha spoke with her mother’s doctor, who said the trip would kill her. Masha said it was her mother’s decision; she would go.

Volodya and Masha went about collecting the necessary documents. The only place where her mother, weak and shaky, had to appear in person was the Austrian Embassy, for her transit visa.

Four days later, Masha and her mother were in the apartment on Gorky Street; Volodya had been arrested for participating in a sit-in. They drank tea and talked about the family, about Israel. Mother and daughter were up most of the night. “I’ll heal,” said her mother. “I’ll go to Europe and America. I’ll speak everywhere about you. I’ll be a bridge for you and get you out of here.” She seemed tortured by her decision to leave. “I am not abandoning you. We will see each other soon.”

She left the country on a stretcher and flew to Israel. She settled in Jerusalem and lived on a government old-age pension until her death in the desert city of Beersheba in 1980. Masha never saw her again.

By the early 1970s non-Jewish Russian dissidents of what had come to be called the democratic movement had established clear channels of communication to the West, along which flowed a steady stream of information about their activities in the Soviet Union and the efforts by the authorities to silence them. The refuseniks began to use the channels of the Russian dissidents to communicate with the West. Lists of Jews in refusal were slipped to foreign correspondents, along with carefully documented information concerning human rights violations. The lists also appeared in the Russian dissident samizdat publication Khronika.

The Slepak family chronicles are particularly clear on the help the refuseniks received during the early 1970s from those in the Russian dissident movement. Volodya recalls the day, March 13, 1971, when Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the leading Russian dissidents, suddenly appeared at the apartment on Gorky Street, accompanied by two men. Volodya had met Bukovsky some months before and had since that time been regularly giving him information to relay to foreign correspondents. A tall man in his early thirties, with broad shoulders, brown hair, brown eyes, and a wide face with a prominent nose and cheekbones, Bukovsky had been arrested for dissident activity while still on the faculty of biology at the University of Moscow. Assuming that the Slepak apartment was bugged by the KGB, he proceeded to write on a magic slate, from which the script could be easily and repeatedly erased: “I know that I will be arrested in two or three days. The KGB agents are following me day and night, making no effort to hide. It took me about two hours to lose them so we could come to you without the KGB tail. When I’m arrested, you can be in direct contact with these gentlemen, and through them with other foreign correspondents.” One of the two men was Bob Catlin of Reuters. The other was the UPI correspondent, whose name Volodya does not now recall.

The next day Volodya met one of the correspondents-he does not remember which one, but the agreement was that all information related to one would be communicated by him to the other-and informed him that on the following day he and a group of others were going to the Supreme Soviet with a list of grievances against the Soviet Union. Volodya was arrested March 15 and given fifteen days in jail. While he was serving his fifteen days, the KGB arrested Bukovsky, who was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and an additional five years of exile.

That was the start of Volodya’s direct contact with the foreign press, the public word in the outside world, one of his weapons in the visa war. There were other weapons.

On March 15-a cold, cloudy day, with melting dirty snow on the ground-a group of about fifteen Jewish dissidents whose visa applications had been refused, arrived at the building on Pushkinskaya Street that housed the Office of the General Procurator. The entrance to the building was from the rear, which faced Sovietskaya Square. Earlier that morning, they had gone to the office of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on Mokhovaya Street near the Kremlin only to be told that their grievances had first to be presented at the office of the general procurator of the USSR. Now they waited in the receiving room of General Procurator Roman Rudenko’s office, after having informed the clerk that they wished to present their applications for exit visas, together with a number of demands: (1) that those arrested in Leningrad, Riga, Kishinev, and other cities for requesting visas to Israel be released and (2) that OVIR comply with Soviet law and send refusals in written form, stating the reasons for the refusal, the date of the refusal, and when the refusal would be terminated and the applicant free to leave the USSR.

After two hours they were told by the clerk that no one would speak with them. Spontaneously they determined not to leave and informed the clerk of their decision: They would wait until the general procurator or one of his aides responded to their demands. They sat in the receiving room until the office had to be closed. An officer of the militia arrived with several militiamen and said that if they did not leave immediately, they would all be arrested. The group refused to move.

Eventually about thirty militiamen came into the room. They removed the dissidents by force and pushed them into a bus, which transported them to the prison in the Moscow City Department of Militia on Petrovka Street. Each member of the group was separately interrogated in a small room furnished only with a table and two chairs: Your name? Your date of birth? Who is the organizer of this action? Do you personally know the people in the other cities who were arrested for their anti-Soviet activity and whose release you demanded? Do you know that their activity was inspired by foreign intelligence? Do you know any foreigners? Do you know that if you do not stop your anti-Soviet activity, you will never leave the Soviet Union? Do you know anyone in the so-called democratic movement?

Each interrogation took about twenty minutes. The members of the group gave their names and dates of birth and refused to answer the other questions or sign any statements. Instead they insisted upon their release and repeated their demands. Most stated that if they weren’t released immediately, they would go on a hunger strike. Volodya told his interrogator that he would answer none of his questions, not even about the weather, unless he was shown an official protocol accusing him of a crime.

All were put into cells, two to a cell, where they spent the night. Each cell contained two iron beds, a table with iron legs, and two benches, all screwed into the concrete floor. In the corner there was a tank instead of a lavatory. An iron door with a tiny sliding iron window sealed the cell from the outside. A high iron-barred window permitted a view only of the sky.

The next day each in turn was brought to a room where a woman in a dark skirt and jacket and a white blouse introduced herself as a judge and said, “Because of your noncompliance with the demands of the representatives of the authorities, you are hereby sentenced to fifteen days of administrative imprisonment.” That category of imprisonment was more severe than the usual kind in a local jail. It meant the prisoner did not receive a sleeping mat, blankets, or a pillow. He or she was given hot food only every other day and could be put to work cleaning yards, shoveling snow from the streets. As a rule, however, Jews who were arrested were kept separated from the others and were not subjected to forced public labor.

The members of the sit-in were returned to their cells and began the hunger strike. All were aware of revolutionaries who, during the time of the tsars, had refused food. And they knew of Gandhi. They refused all food and only drank water.

Volodya had been placed in the same cell with one of his close friends, Victor Polsky, a physicist whom he had met at the Moscow Electro-Vacuum Factory. Tall, red-haired, well groomed, Polsky was always one step ahead of the others in the group: the first to purchase a boat, the first to acquire an automobile. “Commander,” they called him. His father-in-law was a well-known professor of physics, a position that normally opened doors for Polsky but was of no avail now as he sat in the cell with Volodya, starving and counting the days.

Out of a scrap of paper they made a chessboard, coloring squares dark with burned matches. They molded chess pieces out of bread. They played all the time. Nights they tried to sleep, Volodya’s resounding snores later described by Polsky as a torture far worse than hunger.

Polsky and most of the others gave up the strike. By the thirteenth day Volodya was one of two still striking.

Masha had not participated in the sit-in. She, together with the wives of other prisoners, went to government offices to demand the release of their husbands.

The authorities did not want anyone of the group to die in jail or to look wan and wasted upon release, and so the prison doctor visited the cells and warned that if they did not end the strike, they would be fed by force. The prisoners were brought into a room where the tools of forced feeding had been laid out on a table: tubes, funnels, a device to keep the jaws apart. “We have our orders,” one of the militiamen told them. “Whether you want to or not, you will eat.” It is part of the torture for the torturer to display the instruments of torture before the one about to be tortured.

They were taken back to their cells.

One of the leaders of the group was Michael Zand, a linguist with a knowledge of ancient and modern Persian, as well as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Urdu, a strong-willed, determined man with a powerful look. On the thirteenth day of the hunger strike, he was strapped to a bed and held down by two men while bouillon was poured into a tube that had been inserted through his nose-not down his throat, because he could have bitten down on it-into his esophagus and stomach. Volodya was then told by the militia that Zand had voluntarily ceased striking, and he terminated his strike. The first food they gave him was a soup of grits and pork and beef; the sudden ingestion of fat after thirteen days of starvation permanently injured his liver and gallbladder. After two days of forced feeding, Michael Zand was put into a hospital. The others were sent home when they finished serving their prison sentence.

Volodya arrived home, weak, gaunt, joking that he had been to a rehabilitation clinic to lose his paunch. His young son Leonid remembers being proud of his father and, at the same time, feeling frightened. No one in his family had ever before had any serious conflict with the authorities. A new kind of life had begun for him and his parents.

The hunger strike and the sit-in-the latter, according to Volodya, used for the first time ever in the Soviet Union-were additional weapons in the visa war.

There was a collective weapon as well, one organized by the entire Jewish people.

About eight hundred delegates from thirty-eight countries and every continent arrived in Brussels on February 23, 1971, to attend the first conference of world Jewry on the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. The idea for the Brussels conference appears to have originated in New York. Many who came were uncertain whether there even was an issue: Were there any Jewish communities or individuals left in the Soviet Union after the Stalin decades and the war?

In Brussels there were terrorist threats and rumors of bombing by KGB agents. Everywhere, heavily armed police. A recent arrival from the USSR, Vitaly Rubin, addressed the conference and told of the Soviet Jews who were seeking the community of fellow Jews. As he spoke, it became apparent that Soviet Jewry was not a distant, dying remnant without vital memory and surviving on echoes alone. A stunning realization: There were Jews who had come through the decades of terror and war! Even those sympathetic early on to the cause of Soviet Jewry had not really believed that knowing and committed Jews were still to be found in the USSR.

Also at the conference were David Ben-Gurion, old and frail, together with the scholar Gershom Scholem, the writers André Schwarz-Bart and Elie Wiesel, and a number of Soviet Jews from Israel who had suffered imprisonment in labor camps and incarceration in insane asylums before receiving their exit visas. Masha’s ailing mother, Bertha Rashkovsky, was present as well.

On the second day of the conference, a sudden telephone call came from Moscow: Thirty Jews, Volodya among them, had gathered at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, where they presented a petition requesting the right to emigrate. The conference, spurred on by that deed, set up five commissions to carry forward the struggle and explore how to influence governments, media, and university campuses throughout the Western world. There was the usual bureaucratic infighting, the recurring organizational squabbles. In the end no worldwide assembly was established, and there was no coordinated strategy for an international campaign. But the charged atmosphere of the three-day conference sent delegates home eager to continue their labors.

Nothing was said of the situation of those Soviet Jews who seemed content to remain in the Soviet Union and whose lives might be profoundly affected by the dire repercussions of a persistent international thrust for Jewish emigration.

With nearly a hundred journalists present, the Brussels conference had received much worldwide attention. Close upon the heels of the conference came an abrupt increase in Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union: 13,022 in 1971; 31,903 in 1972. Probably the Soviets were hoping to empty the country of its contentious Jews and thereby put an end to the emigration movement. But the reverse occurred. Visa requests increased. The movement grew stronger. In the last weeks of 1971 there were days when two planeloads of Soviet Jews left Vienna bound for Israel.

But the Soviet authorities were employing weapons of their own in the visa war. Suddenly, in August 1972, they levied an additional tax upon all emigrants, to cover all the costs incurred by the government for their higher education and advanced degrees. Anyone who had graduated from a university or an institute would now have to pay, in addition to all the prior fees and taxes, a further sum-a diploma tax, it came to be called-of from forty-five hundred to twelve thousand rubles.

Volodya and Masha were then earning less than two hundred rubles a month. A pair of shoes cost thirty to forty rubles; pants, twenty-five to forty rubles; a shirt, ten to fifteen rubles; a blouse, twenty to forty rubles. The diploma tax put an end to any hope they had of ever leaving the country. As it did to the hopes of the other refuseniks. Volodya knows the names of only three people-the artist Lev Sirkin and his wife, Larisa, and the surgeon Edward Shifrin-who, with the help of funds collected in the United States, were able to pay the tax and leave the USSR.

The Soviets had other weapons. It now appears that not all high government officials were of a single mind concerning the issue of Jewish emigration; some had begun to regard it as a situation that might have to be dealt with equitably. But the KGB continued its conventional strategy: surveillance, censorship of the mail, telephone monitoring, detention, interrogation, house arrest, conscription into the armed forces, blacklisting to prevent employment, menacing family members, beatings, accusations of spying for foreign powers, administrative imprisonment, exile, labor camp. Much of that arsenal was used by the KGB in the visa war against Volodya and Masha Slepak.

Sudden arrest and imprisonment were put into play in July 1974, when President Nixon visited Moscow in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East and during the long debate then raging in the United States over the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Reform Act. A frequent Soviet reaction to queries from the West about its treatment of the Jews inside its borders echoed an answer often given by the tsars: Our Jews are our business, entirely an internal matter; to presume to dictate to us how we ought deal with them is to violate our national sovereignty. Many in the West appeared satisfied with that response. In the early 1970s a similar rejoinder was introduced into the Cold War by the Americans, one involving a crucial trade agreement with the Soviets.

By 1972, with Richard Nixon in the White House and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger a main force in the shaping of American foreign policy détente had become the goal of the administration: a relaxation of the Cold War, an easing of the arms race, a hope that the Soviets might help in the negotiations that would end the American involvement in Vietnam. At the same time, détente looked good to the Soviets as well; they badly needed American help to energize their stagnant economy.

The two sides-President Nixon and Soviet Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev-signed a trade agreement in October 1972. The Soviets would receive most-favored-nation status from the United States and afterward pay off their entire multibillion-dollar lend-lease debt from World War II.

That effort to diminish the tensions of the Cold War was abruptly upset by the issue of the emigration of Soviet Jewry. Earlier that same October, Senator Henry Jackson had proposed an amendment to the Trade Reform Act, stipulating that the USSR and other Communist countries would be eligible to receive most-favored-nation treatment and trade credits if their citizens were not denied “the right or opportunity to emigrate” and if their emigration were not impeded by taxes, fines, and other charges. In January 1973, Congressman Charles Vanik introduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives. Senator Jackson and his many supporters reasoned that if emigration was a domestic affair to the Soviets, then trade was a domestic matter to the Americans, who had a right to decide with whom they would deal and under what conditions.

It is not entirely clear why Senator Jackson put forth his amendment. When he broached the idea to his colleagues in the Senate, it received the support-at first reluctant and, because of the obvious plight of Soviet Jewry, in the end quite resolute-of Senators Jacob Javits and Abraham Ribicoff, who were Jews. Some conjecture that Senator Jackson was considering a run for the presidency in 1976 and believed the Soviet Jewry issue would gain him the support of American Jews and hard-line anti-Communists and take him to the White House. Whatever the reason, he introduced the amendment on October 4, 1972, and a bruising two-year-long debate followed.

The White House and the State Department opposed the amendment, as did American business groups. George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO and a strong anti-Communist, was in favor of it, together with many conservative organizations. Strange bedfellows were formed by that controversy. The government of Israel seemed vehement against the amendment; it wanted the dissident Russian Jews to let the diplomats do their quiet work. American Jews were divided: Much of the leadership opposed it; most Jews favored it.

It was the diploma tax-established by the Kremlin in August 1972 and published on December 27 and clearly aimed at the very heart of the Soviet Jew-that incensed American Jews and galvanized the majority into supporting the amendment. The conflict was joined, with the White House on one side and Congress and most of American Jewry on the other.

Into the controversy now entered more than one hundred Soviet Jewish dissidents. Responding to a statement made on February 12, 1973, by American Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who had urged quiet diplomacy as the only effective means to further the emigration of Soviet Jews, the activists sent a collective letter in which they appealed to American Jewish leaders to support the amendment. To permit the Soviet Union to select arbitrarily who could and could not emigrate “would have a tragic, irreparable effect and would mean a complete collapse of all hopes of repatriation for many thousands of Soviet Jews.” Quiet diplomacy could work effectively, the letter said, only if it was supported by “loud diplomacy”: meetings, demonstrations, open demands, official statements, campaigns in newspapers. Volodya was among those who signed the letter.

In March 1973 Soviet Jewish dissidents were informed through an unofficial channel-possibly a correspondent or a visitor who represented the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry; Volodya cannot recall precisely-that if they wanted the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to pass Congress, they would have to send a letter insisting that they, the victims of human rights violations, firmly supported the amendment. The letter had to carry the signatures of several leaders of the Jewish movement.

The letter was written on April 10, 1973, and signed by Kirill Khenkin, Benjamin Levich, Victor Polsky, Vladimir Slepak, and Alexander Voronel, and it was sent through a tourist to Senator Jackson. On April 10, 1973, a special press conference was held by the dissidents in the apartment of Kirill Khenkin, a journalist and translator, who lived in a Stalinesque skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya. Four of the Jewish dissidents were there, and three or four foreign correspondents. Copies of the letter to Senator Jackson were distributed to the correspondents. To write, mail, and distribute such a letter meant, in Volodya’s words, “that, as we say in Russian, we took all the blows and all the fire on ourselves.” But the KGB stayed silent; it was the time of détente, and apparently the authorities did not want trouble with foreign correspondents in the heart of Moscow.

From within the ranks of the Russian dissidents, Andrei Sakharov sent an open letter to the U.S. Congress, dated September 14, 1973, in which he urged passage of the amendment: “I am appealing to the Congress of the United States to give its support to the Jackson Amendment, which represents in my view and in the view of its sponsors an attempt to protect the right of emigration of citizens in countries that are entering into new and friendlier relations with the United States… Adoption of the amendment… cannot be a threat to Soviet-American relations. Even less is it likely to imperil international détente.”

Two months later there was an opposing response from the Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev: “… it would be unrealistic to presume that under pressure from the American Congress the Soviet government will adopt a special law permitting unrestricted emigration from the USSR for all who so desire. And if the American Congress should adopt the Jackson Amendment… on this account, and should refuse most-favored-nation status to the Soviet Union, this would probably not improve but only worsen prospects for resolution of the emigration problem in the near future. Also, Soviet-American relations would deteriorate.”

Between those two letters came the sudden Yom Kippur War, which began on October 6, 1973, with a coordinated surprise attack by Egypt and Syria against Israel. In the apartment on Gorky Street, the Slepak family sat listening to Soviet radio broadcasts about Israeli provocations along the Suez Canal and the victorious attacks of the Egyptians and Syrians. Then: a day or so of silence, followed by announcements about the insidious Israelis being armed by Western imperialist powers, gaining the rear of the Egyptian Army, beginning to annihilate the civilian population. Over the shortwave radio given to the Slepaks by an overseas visitor came news of the surrounded Egyptian Third Army, of Israeli troops on the other side of the Suez Canal and within thirty miles of Cairo, of the Syrian withdrawal, of the maneuverings of diplomats.

In the United States the debate over the Jackson-Vanik Amendment grew hotter. The Israelis needed the support of the Nixon administration in the war; Nixon, willing to send arms, wondered if American Jews, desirous of his advocacy of Israel, might dampen their enthusiasm for the amendment. Kissinger, who was now secretary of state, reminded American Jews that an end to the war in the Middle East required the support of the Soviets, who would balk in view of the American Jewish support of the amendment. Caught in a classic conflict between the White House and Congress, American Jewry twisted and turned uncomfortably.

The diploma tax was quietly suspended-not rescinded-in March 1974. In June, Premier Brezhnev visited the United States, presented statistics on the numbers of Jews who had emigrated from the Soviet Union, gave his word that more would be leaving in the future, and lobbied for unconditional trade credits. Later that same month, President Nixon, engulfed and crippled by the Watergate scandal, traveled to Moscow. To avoid the possibility of demonstrations or other embarrassing public disturbances during his stay, the KGB, in advance of his arrival, arrested and imprisoned dozens of dissidents in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and elsewhere-Volodya among them. Along with others, he was stripped and searched and taken to the town of Serpukhov, some sixty miles from Moscow, where he was put into a cell for fifteen days.

Two months later Nixon resigned the presidency, and Gerald Ford became president. On December 20 Congress passed the Trade Reform Act and the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The Slepak family chronicles record, in Volodya’s words, that “immediately afterward, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko issued a statement in the usual Soviet propagandistic tone: ‘We will never let anyone dictate to us.’ To save face,” Volodya maintains, “they stopped the emigration.”

But it was not the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that really angered the Kremlin and brought defeat to Soviet Jews and Americans in this phase of the visa war-the Soviets might have been able to meet its stipulations and emigration provisos-but an amendment to the Import-Export Bank bill, proposed by Senator Adlai Stevenson III. The amendment limited credits to the USSR to three hundred million dollars a year for four years-credits the Kremlin desperately needed at the time to finance, at low interest rates, its purchases of American technology. That limitation, which insulted and infuriated the Kremlin, put an end to the trade debate, and on January 10, 1975, the Soviets abruptly canceled the agreement their trade minister had signed in October 1972 with President Nixon.

Inside the Soviet Union, KGB repression of dissidents intensified. Many young men who applied for exit visas were conscripted into the armed forces. There was an increase in trials of Jewish dissidents and a decrease in emigration: from 20,628 in 1974 to 13,221 in 1975. In Volodya’s words, the Kremlin nullified its trade agreement with the United States because “the Soviets couldn’t say that three hundred million dollars was too little in exchange for the Jews.”

Still, the Kremlin needed most-favored-nation status. Also, Brezhnev wanted an arms agreement and probably felt it necessary to respond to Western criticism of his embarrassing 1976 Stalinesque crackdown against human rights activists. To the surprise of many, in that same year, 1976, the number of Jews granted permission to emigrate suddenly rose. And kept rising every year to 1979, when 51,320 left.

Volodya and Masha were not among them. Their visa war continued. But after the Jackson-Vanik Amendment it was a very different kind of war, because America was now involved.

Solomon Slepak, an old man with a bad heart and recent prostate surgery, had a weapon of his own in the visa war: silence.

His first wife, Volodya’s mother, had died after a long battle with cancer. Sanya, the older of Volodya’s two sons, adds to the family chronicles an account of how as a child he would come into the room of his grandparents, where his grandmother would be lying behind a screen, and hear her scream at him to leave because she could not bear visitors. Sometimes his grandfather would be seated at a table, reading a newspaper, the entire paper held high and open in front of him, concealing his face. Sanya remembers that his grandfather taught him to read by spreading the newspaper on the table and showing him how to put letters together to make words. Once, in another world and time, Solomon Slepak, recently arrived in New York, had learned to read English from newspapers spread on the floor, taught by his sister’s children. Often Sanya and his grandfather would go for a walk and Sanya would ask for a chocolate and they would wait on a line for an hour or longer at the candy store, and as they waited, his grandfather would tell him tales about legendary fighters for the cause of the Revolution, about stalwart workers, about young boys and their heroic deeds.

When his wife died, the Old Bolshevik married again and now lived in a small house with his second wife. From time to time he and Volodya and Masha continued to call one another and meet-until the complete separation that followed when they told him of their plans to emigrate to Israel. From then on, the Old Bolshevik would have nothing to do with his son and daughter-in-law. They would hear about him on occasion through Volodya’s cousin Anatoly.

Masha’s mother once remonstrated with Solomon Slepak. “Grandchildren shouldn’t suffer because a father and a son have difficulties between them. The grandchildren have only one grandfather. How can you bear to deprive them of their grandfather?”

And so Sanya-at times alone, at times with his little brother, Leonid-traveled by Metro and tram three or four times a year to Solomon’s house. The Old Bolshevik lived on Mashkova Street, a narrow side road in the center of old Moscow. The one-story house, inside a courtyard, was made of wood, a ramshackle affair, leaning walls, creaking floors, something out of Gogol. It had a small backyard, with flowers and bushes. A big German shepherd dog raced about, barking furiously. Redolent of poverty, the house looked shrunken and withdrawn from the outside world, forgotten by history, like the man who lived inside.

Almost always their grandfather’s wife would let them in, and they would find their grandfather seated at a large round table, writing. She was much younger than Solomon, with little education, a typical Russian commoner, from the lowest rungs of society. Always seeming agitated when the children visited, she fussed about anxiously, worked too hard at her hostessing, talked endlessly, until Solomon would say, “It’s enough, it’s enough, calm down.”

Sometimes their grandfather would meet them at the door, push the dog aside, and take their coats, happy to see them. Books and papers lay heaped on the table, together with large dictionaries, and it would take a few minutes for him to put everything away. The room was small, a couch on one side and the table in the center, and furnished in Russian peasant fashion: a clutter of ornamented pillows and a tablecloth and shelf hangings and needlework on the walls. The boys and their grandfather would sit around the table and engage in small talk. He would ask about the health of their parents. They knew not to say anything to their grandfather about their father’s activities. The old man’s wife brought them tea and preserves. In later years the boys learned that she was an alcoholic, that she often abused their grandfather, stole his money, beat him.

Leonid Slepak, slight of build, strikingly attractive, and seven years younger than his brother, spent much of his childhood in neighborhood child care centers. At times, if he was ill, his grandfather would come over to the apartment on Gorky Street and stay with him. He would bring along his work-he was always writing, translating-and sit at the living room table with his books and papers. Once Leonid kept disturbing him, and Solomon put aside his work and read him an Italian fairy tale, “Qnionhead,” translated into Russian and very popular then in the Soviet Union. How the little vegetables-onions, radishes, leeks-made a revolution and overthrew the oranges and tomatoes.

One time Solomon handed little Leonid a Russian rendering of Alice in Wonderland. In his own hands he held another copy, in English. He told Leonid to follow as he read and translated directly from English into Russian and to see if he made any mistakes. With growing wonder and delight, Leonid followed his grandfather’s flawless translation. Alice in Wonderland was the first book Leonid read in English.

The boys also went to visit Solomon in the hospital when he lay recovering from a heart attack in the fall of 1974. That time they came with their father, who brought along a gift of fruits. It was early evening, cold and rainy, no snow yet on the ground. Solomon Slepak lay in a small room with only one other bed, which was empty. That was surprising; most hospital rooms had six or ten or twelve beds. Clearly, he was in a room reserved for Old Bolsheviks.

He lay in the far left corner, and as they entered, he looked up and brusquely asked Volodya if he had changed his mind about emigrating to Israel. Volodya said no. Solomon pointed to the fruits and then to a small table and then to the door. Volodya put the fruits on the table and left the room and stood outside in the hallway. The boys came over to their grandfather and sat on his bed for a while, talking with him. Then they said good-bye and joined their father and went home.

Because the Slepak apartment was in the heart of the city, it had become by 1974 a collection point, a kind of lodgment area and operations center, in the visa war. It was down the street from two major hotels, the National and the Intourist: 15 Gorky Street. You walked past the shops to the entrance archway. To the left of the entrance was a large bookstore; to the right, a dairy products store. You went beneath the archway and turned into the courtyard. All the entrances to the apartments were from the courtyard, and the way into the Slepaks’ was through the first entrance, a wooden double door with waist-high glass panels, then another set of doors into a small foyer, where you saw the back of the elevator shaft, covered with wire mesh. You went left to the spiral staircase and up half a flight to the elevator, where you pulled open a heavy steel door and pushed through two swinging wooden doors into the tiny elevator. You pulled the steel door shut and stepped out of the way as the two doors swung back into place. Then you pushed the button to the eighth floor, rode up, opened the swinging doors and the steel door, and stepped out. You found yourself looking at two apartments, one in front, the other to the right. Number 77, the one to the right, with its brown wooden door, was the apartment of the Slepaks.

By 1974 Volodya’s name had appeared several times in the newspapers: a dissident, an enemy of the people. Most of the dwellers in the building might say hello when passing by in the courtyard or on the street but otherwise avoided Volodya and Masha. The only friends they had in the building lived on the floor below theirs, a married couple, he an architect, she an editor. Leonid’s classmates no longer visited. Sanya, now grown, lived elsewhere with a girlfriend.

Inside that communal apartment, in the room he shared with Masha-the other occupants were Leonid and a police sergeant and his wife, who lived behind their closed door and were often drunk-Volodya carefully prepared the means by which the lists of names, and the necessary accompanying data, of those requesting invitations to Israel were smuggled out to the West; tens of thousands of names went through his hands. First he bought Russian souvenir wooden dolls. He then cut the head off each doll, drilled a hole in the body, inserted the tightly rolled film negatives of the lists, glued the head back on, and gave the doll to a visitor who had been recommended by friends from abroad. The souvenir doll left the Soviet Union unconcealed in one’s baggage, a tourist’s memento. Among the Jewish dissidents, only three knew of the dolls, and only Volodya, and on occasion Leonid, handled the operation. None of the dolls was ever unmasked.

A tiny weapon, those dolls, and among the most effective.

A new weapon emerged: the Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group. The Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975 by thirty-five nations, including the Soviet Union and the United States, the former, because it wanted the international recognition given by the accords to its theretofore provisional postwar borders; the latter, because it wanted the Soviet Union to commit itself to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which called for universal freedom of expression and opinion. The agreement, three years in the making, carried no legal weight but was considered of great moral and political significance. The nations that signed the accords were to be “guided by the principle that such universal guarantees… should be firmly adhered to in their own country and elsewhere.” Of special significance to Soviet Jewish dissidents was the commitment by participating nations to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion,” and the promise to work for the reunification of families through emigration.

But the Soviets, who wanted the West to honor the fixed-border guarantees in the accords, had no intention of adhering to the human rights provisions, which they regarded as mere rhetoric. To counter that attitude and the possible sacrifice of human rights by the White House for the goal of détente, Representative Millicent Fenwick introduced a bill on March 23, 1976, to set up “a commission to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Accords.” The bill passed. Congressman Dante Fascell became chairman of the commission.

At the time the bill was making its way through Congress and to the desk of President Ford, who signed it that June, Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and longtime dissident, organized a group in Moscow to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights agreements, which came to be known as the Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group.

Similar monitoring groups, stimulated by the Helsinki group but independent of it, then came into existence in other regions of the Soviet Union-the Ukraine, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia. From those groups issued a steady stream of reports on arrests, on trials, on the persecution of Pentecostalists, Catholics, Crimean Tatars, on conditions in labor camps, on the use of drugs and psychiatric treatment against political prisoners-on a vast range of human rights abuses.

Among the earliest members recruited by Orlov for the Moscow group were Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Shcharansky, and Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’swife. Orlov asked Shcharansky and Vitaly Rubin, the prominent Sinologist whose emigration requests had been turned down repeatedly since 1972, to serve as representatives of the Jewish emigration movement. That June, Rubin was suddenly granted his visa, and he departed for Israel. Volodya stepped into his place.

The monitoring groups became an indispensable weapon for Russian dissidents and Jewish refuseniks and the bane of the Soviet authorities. Yuri Orlov was told by the KGB that the Moscow group was illegal; he ignored orders to disband it. The KGB subjected the apartments of monitors to intensive searches. Orlov and Ginzburg were arrested in February 1977. Orlov was given the maximum sentence for anti-Soviet slander: seven years in a labor camp and five years of exile. Ginzburg, tried in July 1978-far beyond the nine-month limit for pretrial detention-was sentenced to eight years in the camps.

In a photograph taken some time in May 1978 outside the Lublino courthouse in Moscow, where the trial of Yuri Orlov was taking place-Orlovs wife had been made to strip and was searched by male guards before being permitted to enter the courthouse-one can see Andrei Sakharov in front of half a dozen uniformed guards. He seems to be walking past them in some hurry. Around that same time, Sakharov and his wife were photographed with Volodya. They are wearing leather jackets, and buds are growing on the bushes behind them. Volodya is sporting rather natty sunglasses. He was only days away from his own arrest.

The Helsinki Accords, which the Soviets had initially treated as the greatest moment in history since the crushing of Hitler-so elated had they been by the world’s recognition of their war-acquired territories-was now beginning to be perceived by them as a major tactical blunder. The accords had placed on the international agenda certain basic issues that affected the lives of all people: freedom of movement, the open exchange of information, family reunification. Regarded as neither rhetoric nor platitudes by the Americans, by Soviet dissidents, even by Communist parties in the West, the terms set by the framers of the Helsinki Accords had unexpectedly become a weapon directed against the Kremlin. The incessant reporting by the monitoring groups placed Soviet infractions in full view of the world and paraded the torn and tormented nature of life in the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union. Further complicating matters for the Kremlin was the fact that the direction of Jewish emigration had undergone a significant change over the years: Many were dropping out of the Israel pipeline near Vienna-to the great annoyance of the Israelis-and choosing instead to go to America. Thus many of the Soviet Unions best-educated Jews were now offering their services not only to the socialist Zionist state but also to the capitalist West. And perhaps the most ominous development of all: As if emulating the Jews, other national groups were embarking upon emigration campaigns. In 1974 Volga Germans demonstrated at party offices, where they displayed banners and placards, and staged sit-ins and hunger strikes.

In the apartment on Gorky Street, Volodya Slepak and Anatoly Shcharansky collected information on Soviet violations of human rights and sent it on to the Western countries that had signed the Helsinki Accords. Information came to them from everywhere, mostly by messenger-people traveling by train and plane, carrying lists of those harassed, searched, arrested, tried, sentenced.

Shcharansky was in his late twenties, a short, balding, feisty scientist and computer specialist, who had grown up knowing very little about being Jewish. He was bright, witty, life-loving. Anti-Semitism and the Six-Day War turned him into a dissident. He applied for an exit visa in the spring of 1973 and was refused. He married in 1974. Because his English was excellent, he served as Sakharov’s interpreter at press conferences. He was among the first to understand the value of contacts with the foreign press and had already experienced numerous collisions with the KGB, whose agents were now openly following him, standing alongside him on buses, running behind him on the stairs of the Metro, even jumping after him into the taxis he hailed; Shcharansky always insisted that they pay part of the fare.

He and Volodya worked assiduously at their task on the Helsinki Monitoring Group. Each infraction involving a Jew which came to their attention was documented and carefully confirmed. An accumulation of such cases was presented to the entire group. After lengthy discussion and further investigation, a statement was prepared containing the names of those whose rights had been violated. The statement was reviewed by the group, and numerous copies were then made on a typewriter. Every copy was signed by all the members of the group. No statement was issued if there was any doubt as to the trustworthiness of the facts it contained. Then the copies were distributed through the regular mail to the Soviet government and to each of the other governments that had signed the accords; to the other signatories through channels considered more reliable than the mail, such as diplomats, correspondents, visitors from abroad; to Khronika, the dissident publication that had ceased appearing regularly in 1972 and was now being published intermittently; and to the archives of the Helsinki Monitoring Group. Usually the group published from two to four such statements every month.

Discussions and decisions concerning petitions, open letters, and demonstrations nearly always took place outdoors-in a forest or a park. If necessity at times dictated that such discussions be held inside, the spoken word was never used. They wrote on magic slates or on sheets of paper that, as soon as the discussions ended, were burned or torn to pieces and flushed down a toilet.

Some months before Volodya became seriously involved with the Helsinki Monitoring Group, he and Masha were divorced. Early that year, 1976, they were in difficult straits. No one among the hundreds of refuseniks in Moscow was receiving notification of a change in status. Everything seemed frozen for them, except the passage of time-especially frightening in a family with a boy who would soon come of age to be drafted into the army.

Of the two sons in the Slepak family, Sanya, the older one, knew that he would not be taken because of his defective vision. He had graduated from high school in 1969, could not gain admittance into a university-“You will never be allowed to have an education in this country; we are not training specialists for Israel,” a KGB agent had bluntly told him-and he now worked at odd jobs-night watchman, restaurant waiter, train porter-unable to find permanent employment because as the son of a dissident and an active dissident himself, he was being dogged relentlessly by the KGB. But Leonid, the younger son, would soon be of draft age.

Volodya and Masha knew only too well how the Soviet Army treated the sons of those who had requested exit visas to Israel. And they were acquainted with young Jews who were refused visas for years after their army service because in response to questions by OVIR officials, they had admitted to remembering the names of their former commanding officers-a state secret, they were told, when informed that their visas would not be issued. Someone had suggested to Volodya that the entire family was being refused visas on account of his security status. In desperation, he and Masha decided, in January 1976, to try the maneuver of formal divorce as a possible means of disengaging her status, and that of their sons, from his.

They went through the divorce proceedings. Each submitted an application for divorce to a court. At a session of the court they stated that their decision had not been impulsive, had not come after a quarrel; that they had no financial claims against each other; that their only desire was to live separately; that their children were adults. The court made no effort to persuade them to change their minds and approved the divorce.

Masha then applied to OVIR with Leonid and separately from Volodya and Sanya. But they were quickly refused. An official informed her that OVIR did not believe the divorce was real, and that she would be allowed to emigrate only when permission was given to Volodya.

They remained divorced but went on living in the same apartment, hoping that OVIR might one day relent and permit Masha and Leonid to leave.

Into the apartment on Gorky Street came the news about the major counteroffensive begun by the Kremlin in its war against dissidents and visa-seekers. Early in March 1977 Volodya and Shcharansky read with astonishment an open letter in Izvestia that was a dangerous attack against the Moscow community of refuseniks. The letter had been written by Dr. Sanya Lipavsky, a man deeply respected and trusted by the refuseniks. The chronicles describe him through Masha’s eyes as a man of average height, with a bushy brown mustache, brown eyes, short graying hair, and the self-assured smile of a cat. In the letter Dr. Lipavsky wrote that he was giving up his request for an exit visa; he admitted to having been an informer for the Central Intelligence Agency and denounced several major figures in the Jewish dissident movement-among them Vitaly Rubin, Professor Alexander Lerner, David Azbel, Vladimir Slepak, Anatoly Shcharansky, Mark Ya. Azbel, and some Americans-as spies in the pay of the CIA. Some on the list were no longer in the Soviet Union. The others might soon be facing a charge of treason, for which the penalty was death. On March 12 an article in Pravda claimed that the dissidents were “supported, paid, and praised by the West.”

A few among the dissidents thought the Kremlin was giving expression to its anger over President Carter’s recent meeting in the White House with Vladimir Bukovsky, the dissident who had arranged Volodya’s initial contact with the foreign press, was soon afterward arrested and sentenced to seven years in a labor camp, and then released in 1976 in a prisoner exchange for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan Lepe. But most dissidents saw the linking of the dissident movement with the CIA as an ominous turn in Kremlin policy.

The family chronicles record that Masha was warned twice-once in their apartment by a friend of the family using the magic slate and a second time in a neighborhood park by an acquaintance-that there was a provocateur in their midst and that serious trouble awaited them all. Both times Masha informed Volodya, who said it was to be expected, there was nothing he could do about it. Masha said, “You must find out who it is.” Volodya said, “I don’t want to be bothered with that because this evil among us is unavoidable. Even if I find out and we expel him, tomorrow somebody else will take his place. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to be. I’m not going to deal with it.” Masha said, “Suit yourself; let it be on your conscience. My job was to warn you, and I fulfilled my duty.”

The serious trouble foretold by the friend now arrived. Though President Carter and the American State Department quickly denied the espionage charges, Lipavsky’s letter and the vituperative article that accompanied it were chilling. The dissidents were shocked and dismayed by his accusation, utterly bewildered by his motives. It is now thought that he had offered his services to the security organs in 1962 to save the life of his father, an engineer sentenced to death for stealing large quantities of costly fabric from a textile factory; the sentence was altered to thirteen years in prison, and in the 1970s Lipavsky entered the refusenik world as a KGB informer and provocateur.

Jews in the pay of the CIA! Jews a threat to the security of the Motherland! That was how newspapers and journals began to report it throughout the USSR. Reading the news reports and appalled by the charges, Volodya and Masha sensed the venom in the air-under Stalin, Jews had been poisoners; now they were spies for the CIA-and heard echoes of old purges and the “Doctors’ Plot.” The Kremlin’s objective was obvious: to sever all communication between the Soviet dissidents and the American government.

It was now clear that Brezhnev did not intend to let the dissidents prevail; the nettlesome Helsinki monitoring groups would be terminated. From everywhere came news of arrests and trials. It appeared to matter little to the Soviets that President Carter seemed personally concerned with human rights issues and that détente and strategic arms reduction treaties might be put in jeopardy, though as a possible gesture toward most-favored-nation status and the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, the Kremlin increased the number of nonrefusenik Jews leaving the Soviet Union in 1978 and 1979. There were disturbances in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and East Germany: Students and workers were pointing to the Helsinki Accords, demanding human rights. But in the Soviet heartland, the monitoring groups were being scythed and winnowed by arrests, trials, and harsh sentences. Near-annihilation of the human rights groups and a rise in Jewish emigration-simultaneously!

Inside and outside the Soviet Union, people watching and caught up in the visa war found the situation bewildering. David Shipler, The New York Times correspondent to the 1977-78 international Belgrade Conference, where the measure was taken of adherence to the Helsinki Accords, said, “Nobody knows all that goes into a decision to arrest and try one dissident, to let another emigrate, and to ignore a third. Unpredictability seems a hallmark of high policy, probably intended to keep activists off balance.”

A photograph shows Shcharansky and Volodya seated next to each other. Nothing in the picture tells us where it was taken. The pitiless lens reveals the stress in their faces. Worry lines in Volodya’s forehead are a weighty counterpoint to his rakish shock of thick, wavy hair and debonair graying beard; his friends had nicknamed him the Beard. In the straight, thin lines of their mouths one sees a heavy grimness and weariness. Deep shadows make caverns of their eyes. The picture was taken shortly before Shcharansky’sarrest.

On March 15, 1977-eleven days after the publication in Izvestia of the letter by Lipavsky and the lengthy article accusing Shcharansky and other Jewish dissidents of being agents of the CIA and engaging in espionage against the Motherland-Shcharansky and Volodya and Masha were together in the Gorky Street apartment. Shcharansky, whose parents lived in a town about fifty miles from Moscow, on occasion, to avoid the trouble of travel, moved in with one of his refusenik friends in Moscow. His wife, Avital, had been granted an exit visa in 1975 and was in Israel. He was now living at the Slepaks’ and could travel nowhere without the KGB all around him. His friends, aware that his arrest might be imminent, would not let him walk outside alone. It was six in the evening; he and Masha and Volodya were completing one of their weekly Hebrew lessons.

Two foreign correspondents, David Satter of the London Financial Times and Hal Piper of the Baltimore Sun, suddenly entered the apartment and announced that Mikhail Stern, a dissident Jewish physician serving a sentence in a labor camp since 1974, had been given his freedom for reasons of ill health. Shcharansky and the Slepaks, elated by the news of Stern’s release, found it a cause for celebration. The only drink on hand was a bottle of cognac. Shcharansky, after downing a toast, which turned him immediately reckless because he could not tolerate liquor, was abruptly eager to relate the good news to other correspondents, and he and Volodya wrote out a short statement. But the telephone inside the apartment had long ago been disconnected by the KGB. Shcharansky scooped up some two-kopek coins for the public telephone on the street. Followed by Volodya and the correspondents, he dashed out the door-into the arms of two KGB agents, who had been waiting in the hallway.

The elevator could hold only four people, but five pushed themselves inside: the KGB agents, the correspondents, and Shcharansky. Volodya shouted, “I’11 go downstairs on foot,” and headed for the stairway. Squeezed tightly together inside the rickety elevator, the agents, the correspondents, and Shcharansky rode slowly down. The agents formed a phalanx with Shcharansky as he walked down the half flight of steps to the marble foyer and out into the courtyard and the street. Outside the building, numerous hands abruptly separated him from the correspondents, twisted his arms behind his back, and propelled him into the rear seat of a waiting Volga sedan, which sped away. He found himself seated between two KGB agents. The car brought him to Lefortovo Prison and the cruel cold midnight of the KGB penal system.

At about that time, a rabbi, Gerald Wolpe, who had flown from America to Eastern Europe and completed a mission to deliver vital medication to a seriously ill refusenik in Kiev, arrived with his wife, Elaine, in Moscow. There were certain people the Wolpes needed to meet, and because they knew that Volodya served as the refusenik central nervous system, the key to nearly everyone in the movement, they set out along Gorky Street, following the finger on the equestrian statue of Yuri Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, which pointed to the Slepak apartment. And found themselves in the midst of turmoil.

Inside the apartment were a number of leading-by then nearly legendary-refuseniks, including the Slepaks, Ida Nudel, and Shcharansky’s brother. Ida Nudel was furious, and when she saw the Wolpes, she shouted, “Why don’t you Americans do something?”

Volodya tried to calm her.

It took a moment before the Wolpes realized what had transpired. The preliminary charges against Shcharansky had just been issued. Among other things, he would be tried for espionage. And quite possibly receive the death penalty. The conversation that then took place was conducted on magic slates; no voices.

The great fear among those in the apartment was that no one outside the Soviet Union would know what was happening to Shcharansky. It was vital that the documents containing the charges be brought to the United States and made available to certain individuals. Somehow Shcharansky’s brother had obtained copies of the charges. Certain of the documents, many of which had already been translated into English, were given to Rabbi Wolpe, who spread them out one at a time on a deep windowsill and began to photograph them with his camera. There was no time to photograph all the documents. Volodya had rigged up a copier and was hurriedly making duplicates.

On the way to the airport, Rabbi Wolpe said to a non-Jewish woman in their tour group, “We’re trying to help some people. Could you take this film out for us?” She said, without hesitation, “Yes.” Elaine Wolpe had taped documents and copies to her underwear and skin and managed to get through customs without being searched. The film and the documents reached their intended destination in the United States.

Shcharansky spent sixteen months in solitary confinement, was tried in July 1978, and sentenced to three years in prison and ten in a labor camp.

The KGB had an especially malicious weapon in the visa war: the exit visa itself, which it used to break up dissident groups and families. In 1977 it wielded this weapon against the Slepaks.

Until he reached tenth grade in 1967, Sanya Slepak did not encounter anti-Semitism in his school, It was one of the best schools in Moscow; his grandfather, whom he loved deeply, had somehow persuaded the principal to admit him. Children and grandchildren of the Soviet elite sat in its classrooms, walked through its hallways, romped about its playground. His first sense of the abnormal in the world around him came not from contact with Jews but from the Russian friends of his parents. He remembers listening to discussions about the Stalin purges, unjustified bans on books, censorship of poets and novelists, matters cultural and intellectual rather than ethnic.

In those post-Stalin years the most gratifying aesthetic experience of many Muscovites was not the official theater or ballet but the companionship of friends: social gatherings, discussions about the latest books, about one’s experience abroad; smoky rooms, barbecues, shish kebab, Georgian dinners, Russian folk songs, the guitar, wine. Not the same apartment always, but always the same group. Those were the early years of the Moscow intelligentsia, the time of the kompanii, vividly and scrupulously described by Russians who were there, the nascent years of the democratic movement. During his year in tenth grade Sanya on occasion attended such gatherings in the company of his parents and listened to the talk. In later years, he went on his own.

Among the Russians were Jews, most of whom at first felt entirely Russian. Then, with the impetus of the Six-Day War, some of the Jews began to concentrate upon Jewish issues. And that was the start of the Jewish movement. David and Goliath, Sanya remembers thinking when he learned of Israels stunning victory, suddenly aware and proud of being a Jew. And for the first time he began to encounter the anti-Semitism in his country: in the newspapers, over the radio, in the streets.

His summer trips with his parents and their close Jewish friends began after that; before, he had spent vacations with his grandmother. Now, the sailing and hiking; the quiet talk around campfires; the study of Hebrew from the little vocabulary book Elef Milim; the ghostly voices from shortwave radios. And the slow opening out of himself to alternative worlds where Jews were not despised, slandered, maligned.

Never during all his years in high school was he called zhid to his face, but he had no close friends among the Russian students. He refused to take part in classes on Marxist-Leninist teachings. Still, because of the watchful stewardship of the principal and the teachers, no incidents marred his high school years. His classmates were polite, but aside from the cool hello, they shunned him.

He wanted to pursue studies in biology, but the KGB saw to it that no university or institute would accept him after he graduated from high school in 1969. A friend got him a job as a lab technician in a medical research institute in Moscow. He worked there for two years. The KGB arrested him for his dissident activities and kept him in prison for fifteen days, and he lost the job.

He worked at odd jobs, and for the dissident movement: liaison with foreign correspondents, demonstrations, protests, samizdat. His girlfriend, Alyona, who later became his wife, typed carbon copies of Exodus by Leon Uris; the novel, illegal in the Soviet Union, was a near-sacred text to Jewish dissidents. His entire life was now given over to dissident activity; life in Russia was a long, cold twilight of bleak waiting until they received their visas. The KGB harassed him regularly, picked him up, threatened him, at times beat him, warned him that he would never get his visa if he continued his activities. But youthful bravado pushed away fear and filled him with confidence: No harm would come to him or his family; the authorities would not dare. Too many knew about them; all the world was watching. Publicity would save them, no matter what Soviet regulations they might disobey.

He was twenty-five years old in 1977. Of medium height, with features remarkably like those of his mother: roundish face, full lips, weak eyes behind thick lenses. He led two separate lives, one with the Jewish dissidents, the other with Russians and Jews his age, the latter a purely social, nonideological group with whom he partied, got drunk. The Jewish dissidents were the wrong crowd for wildness.

In the early fall of that year the KGB called him in and offered him an exit visa. They would bring him in often, at times show him his exit visa, all filled in, his picture on it, put it on the desk in front of him, offer him the visa if he telephoned to cancel the next demonstration, agreed not to communicate with correspondents. He would refuse, and they would tear up the visa and sometimes beat him before sending him home.

In the fall of 1977 an international conference was to commence in Belgrade, where adherence to the Helsinki Accords would be evaluated. The Slepak case was scheduled to be brought before the conference by the representative from the United States. The KGB, wanting to forestall embarrassment to the Soviet Union and, at the same time, seeing a way to break up the Slepak family, brought Sanya in and informed him that he could leave for Israel on condition that he telephone the foreign correspondents and inform them he had been given permission to emigrate. He said no, he didn’t trust the KGB; he would make the call, he said, and what would prevent them from then tearing up the visa? They sent him home.

The next morning they brought him back and said they were giving him the visa on his terms. He said he would first leave the country, and then the correspondents would be called by his father. They agreed, and gave him one week to get out.

Among the refuseniks the response to obtaining a visa was straightforward: Take it and leave. No matter the pain, the family circumstance, the cost of separation. Sanya spent part of the week lurching about in a drunken stupor. It was a very difficult time for him-difficult to say good-bye to his friends, to his family, to the apartment, to Moscow.

He called his grandfather, who said he did not want to see him. Sanya went anyway. When he entered the house, the old man was standing in front of the window, with his back to the room. Sanya sensed he did not want to be touched. He said he was leaving in a few days and was sure he would never see him again. The old man began to tremble and cry. He said, “I would understand if you were going to America. But to that fascist country! You are so stubborn.”

Sanya turned to leave. The old man said, with his back still to his grandson, “Good luck.” Sanya heard those words as his grandfathers blessing.

Hundreds of people were at the airport to see him off, most of them Jews, some his partygoing Russian friends. No elation, no dancing; a sober, quiet, sophisticated crowd. He embraced his parents. Leonid, his younger brother, was not present; a week earlier he had received his conscription notice and written a letter to the authorities saying he refused to serve in the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Then he had left the apartment and gone underground, first saying good-bye to his older brother. Sanya boarded the plane and flew to Vienna with one other Jewish family. Two days in the Vienna holding center: a Red Cross building, slanted roof, guard towers with Austrian police at the gates. In the morning a loudspeaker called out, “Achtung! Achtung!” An uncomfortable experience.

In Israel he was met by his grandmother and relatives and friends. He rented an apartment in Jerusalem, was asked by the Israeli Foreign Office to work on behalf of Russian Jewry, began to travel to conferences.

One day in June 1978 Sanya was listening to the English-language news broadcast over Radio Israel and heard that his parents had been arrested. He hurried to Tel Aviv and met with Nechemyah Levanon, an Israeli who had once played a major part in the secret Mossad operation that had brought Hebrew books into Stalin’s Soviet Union. After some while Sanya was told that the Israeli government could do nothing about his parents. Sanya’s dark sense of things was that the Israelis wanted his parents and certain other leading refuseniks to remain in the USSR because they were keeping alive the drive for emigration to Israel.

The international campaign to obtain exit visas for the Slepaks now changed direction and began to focus massively upon getting Volodya released from prison. About a year after his arrival in Israel, Sanya found himself needing to make a decision. His father had been sentenced to five years of exile in Siberia. His mother, given a suspended sentence, had gone to live with his father in a village near the Mongolian border. His brother was in hiding with friends in Moscow or elsewhere. Their lives were scattered, frozen. Sanya was twenty-six years old. The dissident years had stolen from him his university education; they had suspended and sundered his life. He was not sure what to do.

In telephone conversations with his father, he had talked about studying veterinary medicine and said there were no such schools in Israel. His father, disturbed by what he perceived to be the intent behind the words, said it would be wrong to leave Israel; Russian Jews should go to Israel, look how long they had been struggling for exit visas. But in Israel the sunlight hurt Sanya’s eyes, and the language was strange to his ears. He had begun to consider applying to universities in America.

On June 2, 1978, the Slepak apartment became a field of combat. It had been a battlefield of sorts since the early 1970s, a planning area, a headquarters, but never had there been an act of violence against people inside its rooms. During even the most heated of debates, hands were never raised. The bitterest of quarrels among the refuseniks had been settled without force inside the apartment.

The quarrel centered on the distribution of funds, and the man who helped resolve it was an American lawyer, one of the many hundreds of visitors who knocked on the door to apartment 77. Many came from Philadelphia, the hometown of the American: Leonard Shuster, Stuart and Enid Wurtman, Sheila and Dan Segal; Eileen Sussman. And from other American cities. And from Canada, France, Britain, Sweden, Denmark. And from as far away as Australia.

On a day in July 1974 the American and his wife, Joseph and Connie Smukler, came out of their hotel in the center of Moscow, walked along Gorky Street past apartment buildings and shops, turned left into number 15, and took the elevator up to the eighth floor. The wooden door to apartment 77, pieces of it jaggedly bolted together, had plainly suffered a recent smashing.

Joseph Smukler’s knock was answered by Volodya. The Smuklers had not met him before and were immediately taken by the handsome man with the deep voice and thick shock of graying hair and luxuriant beard. To the right of the vestibule in which they stood was a doorway that led to the room once occupied by Volodya’s parents and now the room in which Volodya and Masha lived; beyond were a hallway and the bathroom and water closet and kitchen, and the room of the couple with whom they shared the apartment, and that of their sons, where Leonid, then fifteen years old, lived by himself. As soon as they came through the doorway to their right, the Smuklers saw at the far side of the room a window covered with a lace curtain and, on the right-hand wall, to their astonishment, a small Israeli flag and a map of Israel. An Israeli flag and a map of Israel-in the heart of Soviet Russia!

Joseph Smukler had first heard of Volodya from the news stories of the dissidents who had signed the 1970 Letter of the 75 to U Thant requesting his support in their effort to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Volodya’s name was prominent among the signatories.

A chance encounter with a newly arrived Russian couple in a restaurant in Israel during the summer of 1973 had plunged the Smuklers deep into the travail of Soviet Jewry. The man pleaded with them to help get his brother out of Leningrad. Back in Philadelphia the Smuklers became increasingly involved with a small circle of people who were attempting to establish an organization to serve as a disciplined instrument in the growing struggle for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. They decided to travel to Leningrad the following summer and meet the brother of the man they had happened upon in Israel. They were given a list of people to see in Moscow, and on that list were the names of Volodya and Masha Slepak.

They arrived in Moscow shortly after the visit of President Nixon. To deter possible demonstrations in Nixons presence, the KGB had arrested many dissidents and scattered them to prisons dozens of miles from the city. Volodya, too, had been arrested, the door to the apartment smashed in by fifteen militiamen at eight o’clock in the morning, then the door to the bedroom broken, and Volodya hauled out of bed and taken away. Only recently released, many of the dissidents had joyfully reunited earlier that day in the apartment of Alexander Lunts, a noted mathematician and refusenik. Now some had assembled in the Slepak apartment and were quietly sitting and standing about as the Smuklers entered.

Also in the room at the time, and under the table, was Sanya’s dog, a huge 145-pound, thirty-inch-high Russian black terrier named Akhbar, which Sanya had bought as a puppy. One of the men who had broken into the apartment had threatened to shoot the dog if it was not removed to another room. Leonid had tried to slip out to call foreign correspondents and been warned that if he went anywhere near the telephone on the street, they would break every one of his fingers and he would never be able to dial a telephone again.

Previous visitors had informed Volodya of the Smuklers’ arrival: Joseph, then in his early forties; Connie, slender, quietly blond and strikingly lovely, possessed of a discerning intelligence and a sharp wit. Both were untutored in the ways of combat and survival in the visa war.

The furniture in the room was old and threadbare. Volodya directed Joseph Smukler to an overstuffed armchair. There were brief and muted introductions. Masha left the room and headed down the hallway to the kitchen. Using a magic slate, Smukler wrote, “We’re friends from Philadelphia. How can we help you?” They drew up lists: books, goods. How to get money through to them: American Jews were in the habit of writing checks for their philanthropic causes, but don’t send checks, urged the refuseniks, because the government takes 35 percent of every check. Bring in jeans instead. They were all so new at it in those early years of the visa war, before the time of organizations, movements, bureaucracies, the Helsinki Accords, the monitoring groups, the focus of the world on the issue of human rights. Quickly the warmest of friendships developed between the refuseniks and the Americans. Masha entered with tea and snacks. The dog suddenly rose, and the table shook. At one point Masha spoke quietly in Russian, and someone wrote down her words in English on a magic slate and showed them to the Smuklers: “We are doing this for the children. Not for ourselves but for the children. So they won’t have to live here.”

Back home the Smuklers became more deeply involved with the competing territories of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, an establishment organization; the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a grassroots outfit; the Jewish Community Relations Council; the United Synagogue; and others.

From the Soviet Union there began to be heard disconcerting news of a rift in the ranks of Jewish activists.

Early in 1975 Robert Toth, the Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, who had written frequently about Jewish activists on the basis of material given him by Shcharansky, wrote a disturbing piece about internecine warfare between two groups of refuseniks: bitter accusations, abuses of funds, contending ideologies. A war inside a war.

The dissension was born of a deep ideological difference: Should the refuseniks spend precious money and energy building educational institutions in the Soviet Union and educating themselves and their children while waiting to get out, or should they concentrate all their efforts on emigration and make no attempt at all to establish a community while still there? Volodya sided with the latter group; he wanted nothing to do with any sort of possible communal life in the Soviet Union.

That summer the Smuklers returned to Moscow and the Slepak apartment. Nothing much had changed, except that the Israeli flag and map had been torn from the wall by the KGB, and pale outlines marked their haunting absence. At a meeting of refuseniks in the apartment, Joseph Smukler tried to smooth over the differences and, aided by Volodya, who turned out to be an adept negotiator, to some extent succeeded. With the help of the indispensable magic slates, the factions agreed not to issue damaging statements against each other and to set up a committee that would monitor and be accountable for the spending of funds collected from overseas. Smukler assured the refuseniks of the continued cooperation of the American Jewish community.

Participating in the meeting was Dr. Sanya Lipavsky.

From February 17 to 19, 1976, the Smuklers attended the second Brussels Conference: twelve hundred delegates from thirty-two countries. They met Masha’s mother; she had been brought in from Israel to plead the cause of her daughters family. “Please do something for them,” she implored. “My children are dying.”

There was more bureaucratic wrangling. Conflicts broke out between the establishment organizations and militant student groups. No overall goals were set by the conference; no international directions established. The movement to save Russian Jewry had pretty much begun as-and now looked to be remaining-a loose gathering of grass-roots organizations.

Connie Smukler traveled often to the Soviet Union during the 1970s, frequently saw the Slepaks. The apartment teemed with visitors from abroad. From Philadelphia alone, after briefings from the Smuklers and others, came a hundred or more people each year, at times four a week. They got off their planes, checked into their hotels, and walked up Gorky Street to the apartment. We’re friends from Philadelphia, greetings from so-and-so, what can we do to help you? They brought jeans, goods, magazines, books, photographs, messages, good wishes, and information about strategies, demonstrations, conferences. Volodya sat smoking his pipe and listening patiently, at times dozing. Masha seemed always to be in the kitchen, preparing tea and cakes.

Joseph Smukler’s name was among those listed as agents of the CIA in the letter by Lipavsky printed in Izvestia. The day the letter appeared was March 4, 1977, but the date on the newspaper was March 5, the anniversary of the death of Stalin. An error? An ominous warning of sorts? All on the list had attended the 1975 meeting in the Slepak apartment, when peace had been made between the warring refusenik factions.

Joseph Smukler applied for a tourist visa to the Soviet Union in 1977 and was refused. The reason given was that he was an agent of the CIA. He was turned down repeatedly until 1988.

A little more than a year after Shcharansky’s arrest on March 15, 1977-he was still being held in Lefortovo Prison, still under interrogation, still awaiting trial-fighting broke out in the Slepak apartment between the Slepaks and the KGB as new and different weapons came into use in the visa war.

By the spring of 1978 the longest-standing and probably best-known refusenik not yet arrested was Volodya Slepak. His and Masha’s refusal dated to 1970. He was now generally regarded as the leader of the Jewish dissident movement in the Soviet Union.

There were still many long-standing well-known refuseniks then, among them Ida Nudel, an economist. She was in her late forties, about five feet three inches in height, vigorous, with dark eyes and hair and a loud voice. She lived in the southern part of Moscow not far from Ryazansky Prospekt. Her sister had received an exit visa, but Ida Nudel had been refused since 1971 because of the claim by OVIR that she knew state secrets. She fought endlessly to aid dissidents who were in prison and to get herself out of the country. She was repeatedly harassed, arrested; her apartment, scoured; her body, searched. After the appearance of the Lipavsky letter in Izvestia and the arrest of Shcharansky, she had commented that Soviet Jews were now being accused of spying in the Soviet Union, “only because an accusation of having murdered a Christian boy would be completely ridiculous in a country of atheists.”

In that spring of 1978 a NATO summit, a discussion concerning the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, was to take place in Washington. On May 26, some days before the summit, Masha Slepak and Ida Nudel and twenty-three other Jewish women signed and sent a letter to Premier Brezhnev in which they stated that they planned to stage a demonstration outside the Lenin Library on June 1, International Children’s Day. They would be accompanied by seventeen children and intended to display banners decrying their illegal detention in the USSR.

On the first day of June the women assembled with their children in five apartments. All were immediately placed under house arrest by the watching KGB and prevented from leaving. The women proceeded to hang their banners over the balconies and displayed their placards from the windows. Suddenly there were militiamen and KGB agents everywhere, guarding rooftops, requisitioning adjacent apartments, forming a crowd in the street below each of the five buildings. In one of the apartments the women set up placards bearing the Star of David, with one displaying the clearly visible words VISAS TO ISRAEL. The KGB agents tried to smash down the door, but the women fought back and the KGB withdrew. From an adjoining apartment a KGB officer, swinging a long stick, tore down the Star of David and the placard. In other apartments KGB agents stormed the doors, fought their way through the women and children, used their fists and long poles with nails to rip the placards away from the women.

At Ida Nudel’s apartment KGB agents confronted a heavily barricaded door and a balcony covered with slogans. As quickly as their poles removed the slogans, Ida Nudel replaced them. They broke her windows with a wrench tied to a rope. She was still inside the apartment when they left at the end of the day.

That same morning, Masha Slepak, needing to walk her little dog, Chuka, discovered she could not open the apartment door. Olga, Leonids girlfriend, was living in the apartment at the time. Her Russian father, a naval captain, had died when she was three; her Jewish mother had gone off somewhere, having abandoned three-year-old Olga and her little sister to their grandmother, who had raised them in a town outside Moscow. Olga banged on the door, shouting that she had to walk the dog and go to work. KGB agents opened the door-they had roped it to the stairway-and let her out. She walked the dog, returned, and left. The door was again roped shut. Masha locked it from the inside as well. Alone in the apartment now with Volodya, Masha said in a sudden flush of barely controlled anger, “I cannot endure this humiliation!” She wanted to go out to the balcony facing Gorky Street and demonstrate from there.

Volodya agreed.

They took a sheet, and with a pencil wrapped in cotton and dipped in paint, Volodya wrote on it, LET US GO TO OUR SON IN ISRAEL. They went through the hallway to their sons’ room. Outside on the balcony each grasped a corner of the sheet. Together they lifted and suspended it over the ledge.

It was a warm, sunny day. The streets were crowded with Muscovites on their way to work. It did not take long for a large crowd to gather. KGB agents in the neighboring apartment tried to tear down the banner with a long pole, but Volodya seized the pole and broke it. The crowd began to number in the thousands, and traffic came to a halt.

From the apartment above, someone poured a kettle of boiling water on Volodya, scalding his head. KGB agents on the street below cheered as the water splashed Volodya. He wrapped a towel around his head, and he and Masha went on displaying the sheet. Shouts rose from the crowd: “Hit them!” “Call the executioners!”

In their eighth-floor apartment, Volodya and Masha heard pounding on the wooden door. Volodya rushed to lock the door to their sons’ bedroom. KGB agents smashed the apartment door to pieces with axes and then hurried through the hallway and broke down the bedroom door and rushed inside and tore away the banner and quickly conveyed Volodya and Masha down the elevator to the courtyard and the street to a waiting prison van that brought them to a militia station in Moscow.

In the station they sat together for a while on a bench and then were separated. Volodya was taken to another militia station and put in an underground cell that measured about ten feet by seven feet. A small barred window at ground level, an iron door with a peephole, and a little door within the larger one through which food could be pushed into the cell. The floor was of wood, one section raised for a sleeping area. No pillow or mattress. Water and bread for food. On the third night he was put in a prison van with criminals. Inside the van were two round metal chambers, each with a single seat, that served as isolation areas, a jail within a jail. Volodya was ordered inside one of the chambers, and the curved door banged shut in his face. He was taken to Butyrskaya Prison, where he was told to remove his clothes. With the others, he was searched. Papers were then filled out for each man: name, date of birth, reason for arrest. Showered, dressed, they were taken to a room and each given a mattress, pillow, blanket. Volodya was delivered to a cell in which he found six others, one of whom was soon removed. Six iron plank beds in two levels; a table with two benches, all screwed into the floor; a sink; a lavatory pan in a corner. The men wanted to know why he was there. He said he had staged a demonstration. The men said, “On Gorky Street?” He said, “Yes.” They said, “We heard all about it,” and introduced themselves to Volodya.

Meanwhile, inside the militia station, Masha, now separated from Volodya, was asked to give up her internal passport and then interrogated. Your name, date and place of birth, where are your children? why did you go out to the balcony? At first she closed her eyes and refused to respond. By Soviet law the accused has the right not to answer. She was told, “Come with us,” put into a van, and delivered to another militia station, where she was given a tin cup and placed in an empty cell. A concrete floor and a narrow wooden rise for a bed. No pillow or mattress. A small barred window, the glass painted white and barely letting in the last light of the day. Light shone in from the corridor through the small ventilating hole above the cell door. After a while she heard the sound of knocking and tapped her cup on the wall in response. She then put the mouth of her cup to the wall and her ear to the bottom of the cup and learned there were three men in the adjacent cell. They asked who she was and why she was there. She cupped her hands around her mouth as she directed her words to the wall and told about the demonstration on Gorky Street. She put her cup to the wall and heard them say that they already knew about it. The guard came to her cell and said in a kindly tone, “It is forbidden to knock on the walls and to speak to the other prisoners. Better for you not to do it.”

The next day she began to experience pain in her stomach from the bread and water and sugar they fed her. The bread was black bread gone unsold in the shops and grown hard or moldy, then collected, ground into powder, sprinkled with water and yeast, and rebaked. She was interrogated twice each day during the next two days. Thinking she would make things easier for Volodya, she said it was all her idea to write the words on the sheet, to hang the sheet from the balcony. The pain in her stomach grew worse. A doctor was called. She was put into a van. It was night, and the van made several stops, each time loading and unloading prisoners. Masha, seated in an isolation chamber, listened to the two guards talking about her: She was wearing jeans, and they thought she was a lesbian. They stopped next to a van. Guards were shouting, “Faster, faster,” and suddenly she heard the heavy, easily recognizable breathing of Volodya, who was being brought into her van, an especially egregious administrative error; people involved in the same crime were never to be transported in the same van. She cried out, “Volodya!” and heard her husband respond, “Yes, it’s me.” She said, “I took everything upon myself,” and he shouted back, “You are foolish; don’t say another word.” The guards yelled, “Shut up! One more word and you’ll be beaten!”

The van brought them both to Butyrskaya Prison. Volodya and the other men were taken inside. A moment or two later Masha followed, under guard. She found herself inside a hall as immense as a railroad station, with a domed ceiling and tall arched walls. Many doors led off the hall. In front of one door she saw a pile of men’s shoes and immediately recognized Volodya’s sandals among them. She was placed inside a tiny holding cell that had no light. Needlelike protrusions studded its concrete sides so one could not lean against the walls. After a half hour she was brought into a room with small benches and tables divided by glass partitions. Moments later, seated at one of the tables, with an interrogator behind the partition, Masha was again asked her name, place and date of birth, the reason she had staged the demonstration, who had put her up to it. She said she could not respond, the pain in her stomach was too severe. The interrogation continued. After some while the interrogator pointed to a large metal door in which there was a smaller door. Masha went out through the smaller door into a courtyard. From there a van took her to the militia station in her district, where she was asked to sign a statement that obligated her not to leave Moscow. She was then allowed to go home. They did not return her internal passport until some days later.

The following morning she went with her brother to see Sakharov and informed him of what had happened. Sakharov’s mother-in-law, Ruth, Elena Bonner’s mother, was there. She said she knew about the prison that was the size of a railroad station; she and others had been there before. Sakharov said he had no doubt Volodya would be put on trial. Masha asked, “What should I do?” Sakharov said, with infinite gentleness, “You must be strong.”

Some days later, Ida Nudel was arrested in Trubnaya Square during a demonstration, and on June 21 was sentenced to four years of exile. On the very day of her trial Volodya was tried for malicious hooliganism in a different court. Walking along a corridor to the courtroom, he saw with surprise, through the windows, a crowd assembled outside. A huge crowd. Solidarity with him and Masha after their balcony demonstration.

He had been assigned an attorney, a man named Popov, who was a member of the Communist Party and seemed to be an honest person. At the start of the trial Volodya took the floor and said that he was grateful to attorney Popov, who had helped him prepare for the trial; then, addressing the judge, he asked permission to defend himself, in accordance with such and such paragraphs of the Judicial Code of Procedure. The judge granted his request.

The courtroom held about forty seats for the public, all of which had been taken early by KGB men in civilian clothes. There was a table for the prosecuting attorney and one for the defense, a large table for the judge, a small one for the secretary. Two guards stood near the defendant; a third guard, at the entrance door. Not one of Volodya’s friends or family was permitted inside; they were told the courtroom was full.

Masha was not at the trial but in a hospital, undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer.

Volodya, defending himself, argued that freedom of speech was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. He talked about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the inviolability of the home.

The trial lasted one day. Found guilty of malicious hooliganism, he was sentenced to five years in exile.

Masha learned of the sentence as she lay in the hospital, listening to a small radio given her by a friend. She closed her eyes, feigning sleep, her temples throbbing and the words “five years” echoing inside her head. Through her terror and grief she wondered where Volodya would be sent and what would now happen to her. They were technically still divorced, and the authorities might not let her accompany him as his wife. But they might let her go as his companion, and perhaps if she, too, were sentenced to exile, they might send her to his place of exile. But that was so naive. The court never fulfilled the defendant’s request for a place of exile.

Strange, how the patients in the room kept staring at her.

A young night nurse who was Jewish later whispered to Masha that everyone in the hospital had been told to keep an eye on her because she was an enemy of the people.

A man in a white coat, a doctor, a smirk on his face, suddenly bent over her. He said Volodya had received five years in exile.

The next morning she was told they were planning to do a serious invasive test on her, and she ate breakfast, making the test impossible. The head doctor summoned her and said brusquely that they intended to do all the necessary tests and she should make no further attempt to obstruct their efforts.

In the evening Masha’s brother, Zalya, and Sanya’s girlfriend, Alyona, came to visit. She asked them to bring her clothes the next day. Alyona arrived early, left the clothes in the room, and walked out. Masha donned them and started from the hospital. The woman in the next bed hurried out of the room toward the nurses’ station. Alyona and Zalya stood waiting for Masha outside the hospital building. They made it through the front gate and took a taxi to the apartment.

Masha spent the following days going from one government office to another, trying to find out where Volodya was being exiled, without success.

She went to see him in Butyrskaya Prison. Huge stone walls covered with moss. An enclosed courtyard. Bushes, the lawn recently mown, no flowers. A sad medieval castle look. She carried a parcel containing a plastic coffee mug, butter, a loaf of white bread, sausage, cheese, cookies, cigarettes, onions, garlic cloves, tea, a few apples; a sports suit, cotton socks, a sweater, handkerchiefs, a pair of heavy shoes. The mug, the tea-removed by the guards with no explanation. The shoes and sweater-out. It’s summer now, not time yet for winter clothes. Not before October.

She was given permission to speak with Volodya. They sat in a room with a glass partition between them and communicated through phones, a guard nearby. Volodya wore a blue jacket and looked pale, exhausted, his beard long, his hair graying. She said, “You need a haircut.” He said, “No, it’s all right; this way it’s warmer.” They talked about the appeals court, her coming trial, her intention, if she was sentenced to exile, to request that she be sent to wherever Volodya was going. They spoke about Leonid. The minutes flew by. The guard shouted, “The meeting is over!” Volodya stood, waved his hand, smiled, and walked out of the room.

The court of appeals upheld Volodya’s sentence. Masha went to visit him again in Butyrskaya Prison and was told he had been sent the day before to the transit prison near the railroad tracks. He had begun his journey into exile.

For her trial in the last week of July, Masha wore a skirt and blouse and brought along a backpack containing a toothbrush, a bar of soap, a change of clothes, a coffee mug, some cheese. Friends helped her put together a statement to the judge in which she said that she knew the decision of the court had been predetermined and she would not participate in the hearing. She waived the right to be represented by a court lawyer. The small courtroom was crowded with strangers. The charges against Masha were read aloud. Malicious hooliganism. Masha asked for permission to read her statement and then came forward and placed the statement on the dais before the judge. In response to a question by the judge, Masha responded that she refused to participate in this court hearing. The judge told her to be seated. The prosecuting attorney, a blond-haired woman, gave Masha an odd look. To every question put to Masha by the judge, she gave the same response: “I refuse to participate in this court hearing.” There were murmurs of annoyance from the audience in the court: “Who does she think she is?” “What way is that to show respect for a judge?” The people in the audience were militiamen dressed in civilian clothes; to Masha’s eyes, thugs cut from the same mold. She noticed a familiar face, the woman from the apartment above the Slepaks who had poured boiling water on Volodya’s head, who later testified that the demonstration had indeed blocked traffic on Gorky Street. The judge asked Masha if she agreed with that testimony. Masha said, “I refuse to participate in this court hearing.” The hearing went on for more than an hour. To the judge’srequest that she make a statement, Masha responded by rising and saying, “I refuse to participate in this court hearing and waive the right to a final statement.”

The court was then recessed for a half hour. When it resumed, the prosecuting attorney addressed the judge. Reading from a sheet of paper, she stated that all in the courtroom could clearly observe that Citizen Slepak had fully understood and denounced her act of hooliganism, and now, considering her wholehearted plea of guilt and her repentance for what she had done, it would be possible to sentence Citizen Slepak to three years in a labor camp-here a pause before continuing-and to place her on probation. The prosecuting attorney then sat down. Clearly, she had read a speech written for her before the trial by someone who had not anticipated Masha’s silence.

The judge read the sentence: three years in a labor camp, with probation. The sentence could be appealed within seven days. The trial was over. Masha and her friends were overjoyed at the outcome.

Volodya and Masha believe that her sentence was suspended because of her poor health and also because there was nothing to be gained from imprisoning her; the Kremlin authorities had isolated Volodya and knew that Masha would want to follow him into exile.

Now Masha lived in the apartment with Olga, Leonid’s girlfriend. The police sergeant and his wife had left two years before the balcony demonstration. In their room now were a middle-aged woman who was a postal clerk and her teenage son; they had been given a telephone of their own and warned not to let the Slepaks use it or it would be disconnected.

Masha’s family was shattered. Leonid in hiding to avoid prison for refusing to be conscripted, moving from apartment to apartment in Moscow or journeying by train-not plane; you had to give your name and show your internal passport when you traveled by plane-to friends he could trust in Leningrad and Vilna and Armenia. Sanya in Israel and traveling often to Europe and England and the United States under the sponsorship of the Israeli Foreign Office and Jewish organizations, to meetings and conferences, where he spoke to small groups of influential people and large crowds, pleading his parents’ cause, raising funds. And Volodya traveling by railroad with other prisoners under tight guard to his place of exile. None of the officials with whom Masha met could tell her his final destination.

At the end of August, Solomon Slepak, who had spent the summer in a small country house outside Moscow with his second wife, returned home. Astonishingly, he knew nothing of what had transpired with Volodya and Masha and was informed by his nephew Anatoly of Volodya’s arrest and sentence. He suffered a heart attack.

Solomon’s Russian wife later told Masha and Leonid that the old man spent the last days of his long life seated on the sofa with his hat on his head, swaying slowly back and forth and mumbling words in a language she could not understand. Masha thought the old man might have been praying in Hebrew.

Solomon Slepak was eighty-six years old when he died on September 2, 1978. Two days later he was buried in a Moscow cemetery reserved for party members only two ranks below those interred in the Kremlin wall. Volodya doesn’t know and can’t even conjecture who might have authorized his father’s burial in that cemetery. Present at the funeral were relatives, a few friends, and a representative of the local Communist Party committee. The representative delivered a brief speech. KGB agents hovered in the background. The coffin was nailed shut.

After being petitioned by Masha some days before, a high official of the Interior Ministry, acting in compliance with Soviet law, had approved her request that Volodya be allowed to attend his father’s funeral, on condition that while in Moscow he not visit with refuseniks or speak to correspondents or meet any foreigners.

Four days after arriving in his village of exile, Volodya received a telephone call from Masha: His father was dead. She added that she had obtained permission for Volodya to return to Moscow for the funeral. Volodya, shaken and profoundly sad, told himself: What a tragedy. He never understood me, and I’m not sure I ever understood him. His communism turned everything upside down. But he was my father. At the regional office of the militia, Volodya procured the necessary papers and returned by bus and plane to Moscow. He arrived in time for the funeral.

His father’s Russian wife, mortified and outraged by Masha’s arrest and by Volodya’s arrest and exile, would have nothing to do with them. She regarded herself as a patriotic Soviet woman and refused to let Volodya have his father’s personal papers. Years later, after her death, Volodya tried to obtain the papers through the children from her first marriage. But they had thrown everything away. Volodya was left with nothing of his father’s library, nothing of the Old Bolshevik’s letters, manuscripts, notebooks, the intimate record of his lifetime of work for the party.

Masha had requested and was granted leave to accompany Volodya into exile.

On September 8 they set out on a 5,000-mile journey to a village in Siberia that lay about 150 miles south of the city of Chita and some 200 miles from the region of China where Solomon Slepak, sixty years before, had fought as commander of a Bolshevik partisan division during the Civil War.