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

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 Egypt had blockaded the Strait of Tiran; the United Nations, yielding to the demands of the Egyptians, had withdrawn its buffer troops from the Sinai Peninsula; Arab nations were calling for a holy war against Israel.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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