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.