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.