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 age
nts, 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.