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.