When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (82 page)

At the beginning of May 1986, three months after his release, he embarked on a ten-day visit to the United States. All major media covered the event. Shcharansky had recuperated and was looking pudgy again. And Avital, to the great joy of their many supporters, had just announced that she was two months pregnant and would not be traveling. Every aspect of his high-profile trip turned into a tug of war between the grass roots and the establishment as old resentments bubbled to the surface. Mostly, Shcharansky settled the arguments in favor of the grass roots, though he always remained respectful of the American Jewish leaders. On his first Sabbath in New York, Avi Weiss, the activist rabbi who was also chairman of Student Struggle, invited Shcharansky to speak at his synagogue in Riverdale; it would be his first public appearance. Weiss knew that Shcharansky had already been invited to spend the same evening at Kehilath Jeshurun, the wealthy modern Orthodox congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan led by Haskel Lookstein, then chairman of the large New York Soviet Jewry umbrella organization. Weiss wanted Shcharansky by his side to boost his own ego but also to make the point that, as Weiss saw it, it was the activists who had truly supported Shcharansky and not the rich suits of the Jewish establishment. Through Avital's intercession, Weiss got his wish. Shcharansky walked into the synagogue to wild applause and took his place on the dais in a chair that had been kept unoccupied for the past nine years and over which hung a sign:
RESERVED FOR ANATOLY SHCHARANSKY, PRISONER OF ZION.
The moment was as dramatic as Weiss had hoped, and the leaders of the National Conference were denied their own symbolic coup. They were soon denied again. Morris Abram, as close to an overall American Jewish leader as existed, insisted on joining Shcharansky for his visit to the White House. Shcharansky, not wanting to alienate any one part of the movement, suggested that in addition to Abram, Morey Schapira, the president of the Union of Councils, and Weiss should be invited. Abram wanted to avoid bringing the volatile Avi Weiss to meet the president and told Shcharansky he should just go alone.

Over the next few days, Shcharansky reiterated again and again a consistent and simple message, one that was slightly more nuanced than that of activist supporters like Weiss. Shcharansky thought that both quiet diplomacy
and
public diplomacy had a place in the struggle. In an appearance before a congressional committee, he explained how this interplay worked, using himself as an example: "Exactly as it was in my case, the final exchange, my final release was reached in quiet diplomacy in exchanging of spies, but as you all understand it, it would never take place if there wasn't such a strong campaign..." First of all, he was saying, there had to be noise. But this noise was not an end in itself. It was a way to push negotiations along. Of course, this had characterized the physics of the movement from the beginning. But those who made the noise and those who negotiated behind closed doors were so invested in their own roles that they tended to ignore the importance of the other. It took a unifying figure like Shcharansky to state the obvious. He presented the threat that Jewish emigration posed to the Soviet system in very cold terms. "It's simply dangerous for this system," he told a group of editors and reporters at the
New York Times.
"It threatens the very principles on which this system is based."

His visit coincided with the annual Solidarity Sunday, which saw the biggest turnout of its fifteen-year history. Three hundred thousand people crowded into Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to see Shcharansky, dressed in a white button-down shirt and white cap, standing on a red-carpeted platform. Here he made a point of talking about not just Jewish support, but also the support of human rights activists. "As a Zionist and a Jew, I support universal justice, the call from Sinai," he said. "We must never forget Sakharov and Orlov, who raised their voices for Soviet Jewry."

Speaking to a group of a hundred American Jewish leaders, he emphasized the public protest part of his approach. And he got specific. That spring, there was talk of a Washington summit that might take place the following winter. Shcharansky wanted Gorbachev to be greeted by a massive demonstration. "While President Reagan can use quiet diplomacy, American Jews should not take this approach," he scolded the leaders. "When Mikhail Gorbachev arrives in Washington for talks, at least 400,000 Americans should come to Washington to remind the Kremlin that 400,000 Soviet Jews who have applied to leave the Soviet Union have been denied exit visas. The solidarity of American Jewry with Soviet Jewry is the brightest example that we Jews all over the world are one people." On the face of it, this seemed like a crazy proposition—and many of the leaders that day snickered under their breath or worried about Shcharansky raising expectations they could never possibly meet. The biggest rally in Washington for Soviet Jewry had been twelve thousand people—for Brezhnev's 1973 visit—and it was bound to embarrass the Jewish establishment if Shcharansky, still glorified as a hero, set an unreasonably high bar. But it was also unclear just what the objectives of such a massive protest would be. No one wanted to condemn the Reagan administration. The president and his staff were pushing Soviet Jewry harder than any of his predecessors had. Maybe they would march against Gorbachev? But he too seemed to be moving in the right direction, even challenging hard-line Communist forces in order to continue with his liberalization project. Protesting him directly might be counterproductive. Would it be a celebration of what had been accomplished? Or would a party be premature? Shcharansky's suggestion was intriguing. But these leaders would first have to understand what the point of rallying so many American Jews was.

The visit to America solidified Shcharansky's position as the leader of the Soviet Jewry movement. He made a ceremonial trip to Washington—looking itchy and uncomfortable in a suit and tie, his first in more than twenty years. He picked up a Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in the Capitol, where hundreds of congresspeople—his "accomplices," he flatteringly called them—gave him a ten-minute standing ovation. He spent forty minutes at the White House with Reagan, presenting his views on the Soviet Union and the need for an interplay between public and quiet diplomacy. It was a major triumph for the Soviet Jewry movement, and an unthinkable leap for him personally. Just a decade earlier, he had been an unknown computer scientist in Moscow. Now he was lecturing the American president on how to handle the Soviets. The lecturing continued after the visit, and Shcharansky's views became sought after. Throughout 1986, he set the agenda for the movement, telling the Helsinki Commission what its minimum conditions should be before it signed a concluding document at the Vienna monitoring conference: "The reunion of families by means of Jewish emigration must take place," he told Congress. In addition, "all prisoners of conscience must be released." This became the lowest bar the Soviet Union would have to overcome in order to get what it wanted out of Vienna, including the symbolic victory of a human rights conference in Moscow.

The new emigration law did not impress Shcharansky. Speaking to the neoconservative Heritage Foundation in December 1986, a few days before the freeing of Sakharov, he called it "the most dangerous anti-emigration step of the Soviet Union since 1972, when they tried to stop emigration by taxes on education." He pushed hard, but it seemed like a calculated push, a matter of strategy more than fanaticism. By the beginning of 1987, it was impossible to ignore what was happening in the Soviet Union.

The clearest sign yet that emigration might pick up again was the panic emanating from Israel. The contentious issue of Jews dropping out once they left the Soviet Union had lain dormant since 1980—though even in those lean years, over 80 percent were still making their way to America. In the meantime, the Israeli government—now with a bit of leverage over Gorbachev—had become increasingly confident, speaking about Soviet Jewry at full volume instead of limiting itself to the subterranean whispers of the Lishka. The unsubstantiated but still strong feeling that Jews would start leaving the Soviet Union in big numbers inspired as much fear as excitement in Israeli leaders. Would any of these emigrants come to Israel? Shimon Peres, speaking in West Berlin early in 1986, ended his appeal for free emigration with this flourish: "Let those who survived move to their destiny. Let our people go—and come!" That
come
was a telling sign of Israeli anxiety.

A year later, in February 1987, new prime minister Yitzhak Shamir made this anxiety manifest. During his first visit to Washington, he stated publicly that he was going to ask Reagan to stop giving refugee status to emigrating Soviet Jews, the policy that had made the dropout phenomenon possible. Before he could bring this complaint to the Oval Office, Shultz told Shamir what he surely already knew. His hard-line position had no support among American Jews—it was even criticized by groups like the Zionist Organization of America, which reflexively backed every Israeli policy. Not to mention the Soviet Jewry organizations, which across the board reiterated that they favored free choice. Natan Shcharansky spoke for many refuseniks and activists when he said, "I have no doubt that the best place for a Jew to live is in Israel. But I don't want anyone brought here against his will." Still, Shamir, not known as a particularly couth operator on the world stage, was unrelenting. He took his argument to American Jewish audiences, telling them that he saw the American policy as an "insult." These Soviet Jews were not refugees. They had a home. He won no converts with his Zionist argument, which he must have realized denigrated American Jews as well: "Our struggle is not to change for our brethren one place of dispersion for another." Shamir left empty-handed but he was not bothered. To him this was just a start. He wanted to trigger a debate. Shamir and, presumably, his unity government of left and right were willing to risk alienating Reagan and American Jewish donors to make his point—even with just 904 Jews emigrating that year. Clearly, he believed that Soviet Jews were standing on one side of a dam that was about the break.

Yosef Begun, the Hebrew teacher then entering the fourth of his seven-year prison term, noticed something unusual in the first weeks of 1987. For more than a year, he had been imprisoned at Chistopol, officially a punishment jail for the hardest political prisoner cases (Anatoly Marchenko had recently died there, succumbing to his hunger strike), after he'd spent time at the Perm labor camp. At the beginning of February, each of these political prisoners had been brought one by one into the office of the camp director, asked to renounce any future "anti-social" behavior, and then told they were going to be freed as part of Gorbachev's new reforms. Begun saw the prison begin to empty out. At first he refused to sign the statement committing him to a quiet life once he was released. But after negotiations that dragged on for a month, he too was put on a train and sent back to Moscow. When he left, he was the last person in Chistopol who'd been imprisoned for "anti-Soviet activity." Begun arrived at Kazan station still wearing his prison outfit, a padded blue cotton jacket over a brown jumpsuit that had his name sewn onto the chest. His wife, Inna, and son, Boris, who had traveled the five hundred miles to collect him from the prison, helped him down. Begun smiled widely. Most of his teeth were missing. Enormous square glasses sat on his face, and he had a thick beard. Even though he was fifty-five, he looked at least a decade older. Begun could hardly believe how different this Moscow was from the one he had left. Formerly a place of desolation with no way out, the signs of liberalization were everywhere, especially that winter.

Begun's release, and that of 140 other political prisoners including almost all of the Hebrew teachers and other Jewish activists locked up in the recent crackdown, was part of a wide range of initiatives announced by Gorbachev at the beginning of the year to boost glasnost and perestroika. The large-scale amnesty was the biggest prisoner release since Khrushchev came into office and emptied Stalin's Gulag. Unknown to anyone outside the Politburo, the Kremlin had also decided to stop prosecuting citizens under Articles 70 and 190, the infamous criminal codes used against dissidents and religious activists. Gorbachev hosted a glittering three-day event at the Kremlin, the International Forum for a Non-Nuclear World and the Survival of Humanity, for which he flew in and put up hundreds of Western celebrities (including Yoko Ono, Gore Vidal, and Gregory Peck). Andrei Sakharov was given a front-row seat. Gorbachev announced that the jamming of the BBC and other major Western stations would end (though stations like Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe that had purposely been established to play a propaganda role in the Cold War were still blocked). His plans for democratization made headway, and at the Communist Central Committee plenum, he won support for a proposal to have multiple candidates and secret ballots in local party elections. Even non-Party members could run. Disarmament was making progress as well. Gorbachev had decided to untie the contentious knot that had led to stalemate at Reykjavik. He said he was willing to make a separate arms deal that didn't include ending the Star Wars program, opening the way for a major arms agreement. The historical reawakening that had begun in 1986 continued apace, with newspaper and journal sales exploding. Every week brought some new revelation, slowly filling in the vast gaps of the past seventy years. "There should be no forgotten names or blank spaces, either in history or literature," Gorbachev declared.

For the refuseniks, hardened by so many years of fruitless waiting, a restrained, cautious optimism took over. In the flush of new proposals and sweeping pronouncements, a few different Soviet officials had said publicly in early March that the Kremlin envisioned anywhere from ten thousand to twelve thousand Jews emigrating that year. They wanted to resolve the longest refusenik cases. The ultimate indicator was the monthly emigration figures, which had been in the double digits since 1980. Now they were suddenly, dramatically rising. Ninety-eight left in January and 146 the next month. Then in March, nearly five hundred Soviet Jews emigrated. This was by far the highest monthly figure in more than five years. These were mostly long-standing refuseniks from the list of eleven thousand handed to the Soviets at Reykjavik. They would get calls from OVIR inviting them to come in and resubmit their applications. And then they would get permission.