The elevator could hold only four people, but five pushed themselves inside: the KGB agents, the correspondents, and Shcharansky. Volodya shouted, “I’11 go downstairs on foot,” and headed for the stairway. Squeezed tightly together inside the rickety elevator, the agents, the correspondents, and Shcharansky rode slowly down. The agents formed a phalanx with Shcharansky as he walked down the half flight of steps to the marble foyer and out into the courtyard and the street. Outside the building, numerous hands abruptly separated him from the correspondents, twisted his arms behind his back, and propelled him into the rear seat of a waiting Volga sedan, which sped away. He found himself seated between two KGB agents. The car brought him to Lefortovo Prison and the cruel cold midnight of the KGB penal system.
At about that time, a rabbi, Gerald Wolpe, who had flown from America to Eastern Europe and completed a mission to deliver vital medication to a seriously ill refusenik in Kiev, arrived with his wife, Elaine, in Moscow. There were certain people the Wolpes needed to meet, and because they knew that Volodya served as the refusenik central nervous system, the key to nearly everyone in the movement, they set out along Gorky Street, following the finger on the equestrian statue of Yuri Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, which pointed to the Slepak apartment. And found themselves in the midst of turmoil.
Inside the apartment were a number of leading-by then nearly legendary-refuseniks, including the Slepaks, Ida Nudel, and Shcharansky’s brother. Ida Nudel was furious, and when she saw the Wolpes, she shouted, “Why don’t you Americans do something?”
Volodya tried to calm her.
It took a moment before the Wolpes realized what had transpired. The preliminary charges against Shcharansky had just been issued. Among other things, he would be tried for espionage. And quite possibly receive the death penalty. The conversation that then took place was conducted on magic slates; no voices.
The great fear among those in the apartment was that no one outside the Soviet Union would know what was happening to Shcharansky. It was vital that the documents containing the charges be brought to the United States and made available to certain individuals. Somehow Shcharansky’s brother had obtained copies of the charges. Certain of the documents, many of which had already been translated into English, were given to Rabbi Wolpe, who spread them out one at a time on a deep windowsill and began to photograph them with his camera. There was no time to photograph all the documents. Volodya had rigged up a copier and was hurriedly making duplicates.
On the way to the airport, Rabbi Wolpe said to a non-Jewish woman in their tour group, “We’re trying to help some people. Could you take this film out for us?” She said, without hesitation, “Yes.” Elaine Wolpe had taped documents and copies to her underwear and skin and managed to get through customs without being searched. The film and the documents reached their intended destination in the United States.
Shcharansky spent sixteen months in solitary confinement, was tried in July 1978, and sentenced to three years in prison and ten in a labor camp.
The KGB had an especially malicious weapon in the visa war: the exit visa itself, which it used to break up dissident groups and families. In 1977 it wielded this weapon against the Slepaks.
Until he reached tenth grade in 1967, Sanya Slepak did not encounter anti-Semitism in his school, It was one of the best schools in Moscow; his grandfather, whom he loved deeply, had somehow persuaded the principal to admit him. Children and grandchildren of the Soviet elite sat in its classrooms, walked through its hallways, romped about its playground. His first sense of the abnormal in the world around him came not from contact with Jews but from the Russian friends of his parents. He remembers listening to discussions about the Stalin purges, unjustified bans on books, censorship of poets and novelists, matters cultural and intellectual rather than ethnic.
In those post-Stalin years the most gratifying aesthetic experience of many Muscovites was not the official theater or ballet but the companionship of friends: social gatherings, discussions about the latest books, about one’s experience abroad; smoky rooms, barbecues, shish kebab, Georgian dinners, Russian folk songs, the guitar, wine. Not the same apartment always, but always the same group. Those were the early years of the Moscow intelligentsia, the time of the kompanii, vividly and scrupulously described by Russians who were there, the nascent years of the democratic movement. During his year in tenth grade Sanya on occasion attended such gatherings in the company of his parents and listened to the talk. In later years, he went on his own.
Among the Russians were Jews, most of whom at first felt entirely Russian. Then, with the impetus of the Six-Day War, some of the Jews began to concentrate upon Jewish issues. And that was the start of the Jewish movement. David and Goliath, Sanya remembers thinking when he learned of Israels stunning victory, suddenly aware and proud of being a Jew. And for the first time he began to encounter the anti-Semitism in his country: in the newspapers, over the radio, in the streets.
His summer trips with his parents and their close Jewish friends began after that; before, he had spent vacations with his grandmother. Now, the sailing and hiking; the quiet talk around campfires; the study of Hebrew from the little vocabulary book Elef Milim; the ghostly voices from shortwave radios. And the slow opening out of himself to alternative worlds where Jews were not despised, slandered, maligned.
Never during all his years in high school was he called zhid to his face, but he had no close friends among the Russian students. He refused to take part in classes on Marxist-Leninist teachings. Still, because of the watchful stewardship of the principal and the teachers, no incidents marred his high school years. His classmates were polite, but aside from the cool hello, they shunned him.
He wanted to pursue studies in biology, but the KGB saw to it that no university or institute would accept him after he graduated from high school in 1969. A friend got him a job as a lab technician in a medical research institute in Moscow. He worked there for two years. The KGB arrested him for his dissident activities and kept him in prison for fifteen days, and he lost the job.
He worked at odd jobs, and for the dissident movement: liaison with foreign correspondents, demonstrations, protests, samizdat. His girlfriend, Alyona, who later became his wife, typed carbon copies of Exodus by Leon Uris; the novel, illegal in the Soviet Union, was a near-sacred text to Jewish dissidents. His entire life was now given over to dissident activity; life in Russia was a long, cold twilight of bleak waiting until they received their visas. The KGB harassed him regularly, picked him up, threatened him, at times beat him, warned him that he would never get his visa if he continued his activities. But youthful bravado pushed away fear and filled him with confidence: No harm would come to him or his family; the authorities would not dare. Too many knew about them; all the world was watching. Publicity would save them, no matter what Soviet regulations they might disobey.
He was twenty-five years old in 1977. Of medium height, with features remarkably like those of his mother: roundish face, full lips, weak eyes behind thick lenses. He led two separate lives, one with the Jewish dissidents, the other with Russians and Jews his age, the latter a purely social, nonideological group with whom he partied, got drunk. The Jewish dissidents were the wrong crowd for wildness.
In the early fall of that year the KGB called him in and offered him an exit visa. They would bring him in often, at times show him his exit visa, all filled in, his picture on it, put it on the desk in front of him, offer him the visa if he telephoned to cancel the next demonstration, agreed not to communicate with correspondents. He would refuse, and they would tear up the visa and sometimes beat him before sending him home.