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.