Also in the room at the time, and under the table, was Sanya’s dog, a huge 145-pound, thirty-inch-high Russian black terrier named Akhbar, which Sanya had bought as a puppy. One of the men who had broken into the apartment had threatened to shoot the dog if it was not removed to another room. Leonid had tried to slip out to call foreign correspondents and been warned that if he went anywhere near the telephone on the street, they would break every one of his fingers and he would never be able to dial a telephone again.
Previous visitors had informed Volodya of the Smuklers’ arrival: Joseph, then in his early forties; Connie, slender, quietly blond and strikingly lovely, possessed of a discerning intelligence and a sharp wit. Both were untutored in the ways of combat and survival in the visa war.
The furniture in the room was old and threadbare. Volodya directed Joseph Smukler to an overstuffed armchair. There were brief and muted introductions. Masha left the room and headed down the hallway to the kitchen. Using a magic slate, Smukler wrote, “We’re friends from Philadelphia. How can we help you?” They drew up lists: books, goods. How to get money through to them: American Jews were in the habit of writing checks for their philanthropic causes, but don’t send checks, urged the refuseniks, because the government takes 35 percent of every check. Bring in jeans instead. They were all so new at it in those early years of the visa war, before the time of organizations, movements, bureaucracies, the Helsinki Accords, the monitoring groups, the focus of the world on the issue of human rights. Quickly the warmest of friendships developed between the refuseniks and the Americans. Masha entered with tea and snacks. The dog suddenly rose, and the table shook. At one point Masha spoke quietly in Russian, and someone wrote down her words in English on a magic slate and showed them to the Smuklers: “We are doing this for the children. Not for ourselves but for the children. So they won’t have to live here.”
Back home the Smuklers became more deeply involved with the competing territories of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, an establishment organization; the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a grassroots outfit; the Jewish Community Relations Council; the United Synagogue; and others.
From the Soviet Union there began to be heard disconcerting news of a rift in the ranks of Jewish activists.
Early in 1975 Robert Toth, the Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, who had written frequently about Jewish activists on the basis of material given him by Shcharansky, wrote a disturbing piece about internecine warfare between two groups of refuseniks: bitter accusations, abuses of funds, contending ideologies. A war inside a war.
The dissension was born of a deep ideological difference: Should the refuseniks spend precious money and energy building educational institutions in the Soviet Union and educating themselves and their children while waiting to get out, or should they concentrate all their efforts on emigration and make no attempt at all to establish a community while still there? Volodya sided with the latter group; he wanted nothing to do with any sort of possible communal life in the Soviet Union.
That summer the Smuklers returned to Moscow and the Slepak apartment. Nothing much had changed, except that the Israeli flag and map had been torn from the wall by the KGB, and pale outlines marked their haunting absence. At a meeting of refuseniks in the apartment, Joseph Smukler tried to smooth over the differences and, aided by Volodya, who turned out to be an adept negotiator, to some extent succeeded. With the help of the indispensable magic slates, the factions agreed not to issue damaging statements against each other and to set up a committee that would monitor and be accountable for the spending of funds collected from overseas. Smukler assured the refuseniks of the continued cooperation of the American Jewish community.
Participating in the meeting was Dr. Sanya Lipavsky.
From February 17 to 19, 1976, the Smuklers attended the second Brussels Conference: twelve hundred delegates from thirty-two countries. They met Masha’s mother; she had been brought in from Israel to plead the cause of her daughters family. “Please do something for them,” she implored. “My children are dying.”
There was more bureaucratic wrangling. Conflicts broke out between the establishment organizations and militant student groups. No overall goals were set by the conference; no international directions established. The movement to save Russian Jewry had pretty much begun as-and now looked to be remaining-a loose gathering of grass-roots organizations.
Connie Smukler traveled often to the Soviet Union during the 1970s, frequently saw the Slepaks. The apartment teemed with visitors from abroad. From Philadelphia alone, after briefings from the Smuklers and others, came a hundred or more people each year, at times four a week. They got off their planes, checked into their hotels, and walked up Gorky Street to the apartment. We’re friends from Philadelphia, greetings from so-and-so, what can we do to help you? They brought jeans, goods, magazines, books, photographs, messages, good wishes, and information about strategies, demonstrations, conferences. Volodya sat smoking his pipe and listening patiently, at times dozing. Masha seemed always to be in the kitchen, preparing tea and cakes.
Joseph Smukler’s name was among those listed as agents of the CIA in the letter by Lipavsky printed in Izvestia. The day the letter appeared was March 4, 1977, but the date on the newspaper was March 5, the anniversary of the death of Stalin. An error? An ominous warning of sorts? All on the list had attended the 1975 meeting in the Slepak apartment, when peace had been made between the warring refusenik factions.
Joseph Smukler applied for a tourist visa to the Soviet Union in 1977 and was refused. The reason given was that he was an agent of the CIA. He was turned down repeatedly until 1988.
A little more than a year after Shcharansky’s arrest on March 15, 1977-he was still being held in Lefortovo Prison, still under interrogation, still awaiting trial-fighting broke out in the Slepak apartment between the Slepaks and the KGB as new and different weapons came into use in the visa war.
By the spring of 1978 the longest-standing and probably best-known refusenik not yet arrested was Volodya Slepak. His and Masha’s refusal dated to 1970. He was now generally regarded as the leader of the Jewish dissident movement in the Soviet Union.
There were still many long-standing well-known refuseniks then, among them Ida Nudel, an economist. She was in her late forties, about five feet three inches in height, vigorous, with dark eyes and hair and a loud voice. She lived in the southern part of Moscow not far from Ryazansky Prospekt. Her sister had received an exit visa, but Ida Nudel had been refused since 1971 because of the claim by OVIR that she knew state secrets. She fought endlessly to aid dissidents who were in prison and to get herself out of the country. She was repeatedly harassed, arrested; her apartment, scoured; her body, searched. After the appearance of the Lipavsky letter in Izvestia and the arrest of Shcharansky, she had commented that Soviet Jews were now being accused of spying in the Soviet Union, “only because an accusation of having murdered a Christian boy would be completely ridiculous in a country of atheists.”
In that spring of 1978 a NATO summit, a discussion concerning the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, was to take place in Washington. On May 26, some days before the summit, Masha Slepak and Ida Nudel and twenty-three other Jewish women signed and sent a letter to Premier Brezhnev in which they stated that they planned to stage a demonstration outside the Lenin Library on June 1, International Children’s Day. They would be accompanied by seventeen children and intended to display banners decrying their illegal detention in the USSR.