In the fall of 1977 an international conference was to commence in Belgrade, where adherence to the Helsinki Accords would be evaluated. The Slepak case was scheduled to be brought before the conference by the representative from the United States. The KGB, wanting to forestall embarrassment to the Soviet Union and, at the same time, seeing a way to break up the Slepak family, brought Sanya in and informed him that he could leave for Israel on condition that he telephone the foreign correspondents and inform them he had been given permission to emigrate. He said no, he didn’t trust the KGB; he would make the call, he said, and what would prevent them from then tearing up the visa? They sent him home.
The next morning they brought him back and said they were giving him the visa on his terms. He said he would first leave the country, and then the correspondents would be called by his father. They agreed, and gave him one week to get out.
Among the refuseniks the response to obtaining a visa was straightforward: Take it and leave. No matter the pain, the family circumstance, the cost of separation. Sanya spent part of the week lurching about in a drunken stupor. It was a very difficult time for him-difficult to say good-bye to his friends, to his family, to the apartment, to Moscow.
He called his grandfather, who said he did not want to see him. Sanya went anyway. When he entered the house, the old man was standing in front of the window, with his back to the room. Sanya sensed he did not want to be touched. He said he was leaving in a few days and was sure he would never see him again. The old man began to tremble and cry. He said, “I would understand if you were going to America. But to that fascist country! You are so stubborn.”
Sanya turned to leave. The old man said, with his back still to his grandson, “Good luck.” Sanya heard those words as his grandfathers blessing.
Hundreds of people were at the airport to see him off, most of them Jews, some his partygoing Russian friends. No elation, no dancing; a sober, quiet, sophisticated crowd. He embraced his parents. Leonid, his younger brother, was not present; a week earlier he had received his conscription notice and written a letter to the authorities saying he refused to serve in the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Then he had left the apartment and gone underground, first saying good-bye to his older brother. Sanya boarded the plane and flew to Vienna with one other Jewish family. Two days in the Vienna holding center: a Red Cross building, slanted roof, guard towers with Austrian police at the gates. In the morning a loudspeaker called out, “Achtung! Achtung!” An uncomfortable experience.
In Israel he was met by his grandmother and relatives and friends. He rented an apartment in Jerusalem, was asked by the Israeli Foreign Office to work on behalf of Russian Jewry, began to travel to conferences.
One day in June 1978 Sanya was listening to the English-language news broadcast over Radio Israel and heard that his parents had been arrested. He hurried to Tel Aviv and met with Nechemyah Levanon, an Israeli who had once played a major part in the secret Mossad operation that had brought Hebrew books into Stalin’s Soviet Union. After some while Sanya was told that the Israeli government could do nothing about his parents. Sanya’s dark sense of things was that the Israelis wanted his parents and certain other leading refuseniks to remain in the USSR because they were keeping alive the drive for emigration to Israel.
The international campaign to obtain exit visas for the Slepaks now changed direction and began to focus massively upon getting Volodya released from prison. About a year after his arrival in Israel, Sanya found himself needing to make a decision. His father had been sentenced to five years of exile in Siberia. His mother, given a suspended sentence, had gone to live with his father in a village near the Mongolian border. His brother was in hiding with friends in Moscow or elsewhere. Their lives were scattered, frozen. Sanya was twenty-six years old. The dissident years had stolen from him his university education; they had suspended and sundered his life. He was not sure what to do.
In telephone conversations with his father, he had talked about studying veterinary medicine and said there were no such schools in Israel. His father, disturbed by what he perceived to be the intent behind the words, said it would be wrong to leave Israel; Russian Jews should go to Israel, look how long they had been struggling for exit visas. But in Israel the sunlight hurt Sanya’s eyes, and the language was strange to his ears. He had begun to consider applying to universities in America.
On June 2, 1978, the Slepak apartment became a field of combat. It had been a battlefield of sorts since the early 1970s, a planning area, a headquarters, but never had there been an act of violence against people inside its rooms. During even the most heated of debates, hands were never raised. The bitterest of quarrels among the refuseniks had been settled without force inside the apartment.
The quarrel centered on the distribution of funds, and the man who helped resolve it was an American lawyer, one of the many hundreds of visitors who knocked on the door to apartment 77. Many came from Philadelphia, the hometown of the American: Leonard Shuster, Stuart and Enid Wurtman, Sheila and Dan Segal; Eileen Sussman. And from other American cities. And from Canada, France, Britain, Sweden, Denmark. And from as far away as Australia.
On a day in July 1974 the American and his wife, Joseph and Connie Smukler, came out of their hotel in the center of Moscow, walked along Gorky Street past apartment buildings and shops, turned left into number 15, and took the elevator up to the eighth floor. The wooden door to apartment 77, pieces of it jaggedly bolted together, had plainly suffered a recent smashing.
Joseph Smukler’s knock was answered by Volodya. The Smuklers had not met him before and were immediately taken by the handsome man with the deep voice and thick shock of graying hair and luxuriant beard. To the right of the vestibule in which they stood was a doorway that led to the room once occupied by Volodya’s parents and now the room in which Volodya and Masha lived; beyond were a hallway and the bathroom and water closet and kitchen, and the room of the couple with whom they shared the apartment, and that of their sons, where Leonid, then fifteen years old, lived by himself. As soon as they came through the doorway to their right, the Smuklers saw at the far side of the room a window covered with a lace curtain and, on the right-hand wall, to their astonishment, a small Israeli flag and a map of Israel. An Israeli flag and a map of Israel-in the heart of Soviet Russia!
Joseph Smukler had first heard of Volodya from the news stories of the dissidents who had signed the 1970 Letter of the 75 to U Thant requesting his support in their effort to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Volodya’s name was prominent among the signatories.
A chance encounter with a newly arrived Russian couple in a restaurant in Israel during the summer of 1973 had plunged the Smuklers deep into the travail of Soviet Jewry. The man pleaded with them to help get his brother out of Leningrad. Back in Philadelphia the Smuklers became increasingly involved with a small circle of people who were attempting to establish an organization to serve as a disciplined instrument in the growing struggle for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. They decided to travel to Leningrad the following summer and meet the brother of the man they had happened upon in Israel. They were given a list of people to see in Moscow, and on that list were the names of Volodya and Masha Slepak.
They arrived in Moscow shortly after the visit of President Nixon. To deter possible demonstrations in Nixons presence, the KGB had arrested many dissidents and scattered them to prisons dozens of miles from the city. Volodya, too, had been arrested, the door to the apartment smashed in by fifteen militiamen at eight o’clock in the morning, then the door to the bedroom broken, and Volodya hauled out of bed and taken away. Only recently released, many of the dissidents had joyfully reunited earlier that day in the apartment of Alexander Lunts, a noted mathematician and refusenik. Now some had assembled in the Slepak apartment and were quietly sitting and standing about as the Smuklers entered.