Volodya wanted to reapply immediately for an exit visa but couldn’t, because he no longer had a Moscow residence permit. Masha went with him to the local militia station to apply for the permit, and the officer in charge of residence permits said it would be necessary for them to turn in their internal passports while the application was processed. They handed him their passports.
Weeks went by. Volodya repeatedly called the officer, who said he could do nothing for them; he had sent on the application to his chiefs and was himself waiting for their decision. Eleven months after Volodya turned in the application, it was approved. Residence permit in hand, he applied to OVIR for an exit visa. The answer came one month later. Refused. The reason: “Secrecy.”
On the day he received the residence permit, indeed at the same time it was being stamped into his internal passport at the local militia station, Volodya was told to see another officer in that station. The officer warned him that because he hadn’t worked in months, he was about to be indicted and brought to trial as a parasite; he had two weeks to find a job. Volodya said that he hadn’t even been able to look for a job because he hadn’t had his internal passport, which had been taken from him in that same militia station. The officer said that was no affair of his, it was a different department.
His friends helped him find a job as an elevator operator in a hospital. Working nights, he discovered that if he halted the elevator between certain floors, he was able to penetrate the Soviet jamming of overseas radio broadcasts. He began to listen again to the voices of the West, in that way keeping himself aware of the worldwide activities of the movement: demonstrations wherever high Soviet officials appeared, at political meetings, cultural events, scientific conferences, conventions of judges and lawyers. There was continuing unrest because of the refuseniks.
At the Geneva Summit conference in December 1985-in the wake of the sudden deaths of Soviet Premiers Andropov in 1984 and Chernenko in 1985-the plight of Soviet Jewry was mentioned to the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, by President Ronald Reagan. Demonstrators hoisted placards and marched through downtown streets. Avital Shcharansky displayed a photograph of her imprisoned husband, and Jesse Jackson asked the Soviet premier about the Jews and was informed that the “so-called problem of Jews in the Soviet Union does not exist.” Such events were widely reported by the media; they filtered out of the small radio Volodya held to his ear when he stopped the elevator during the quiet moments of the night and went searching for cracks in the wall of Soviet jamming.
After a year as an elevator operator, he was promoted to the job of controller. From behind a desk in a small office, he ran the hospitals electricity, water supply, sewage, and heating systems. Problems in those systems were directed to him; he called the electricians, plumbers, repair crews.
In February 1986 Shcharansky was released, to everyone’s joy and surprise. He flew off to a tumultuous welcome in Israel.
Between 1968 and 1986, nearly 270,000 Jews, 12.5 percent of Soviet Jewry, had emigrated. But there were about 10,000 refuseniks in the USSR in 1986, among them Masha and Volodya, whose names and long struggle were by then legendary. Elie Wiesel talked about them often-to American senators, to men and women in the House of Representatives, to government officials in France, to Gorbachev.
The likelihood of freedom for the refuseniks seemed dim. Some for whom hope of release was now dead had decided to turn their efforts at emigration inward, to create for themselves and their children a new Jewish culture inside the Soviet Union, in defiance of Soviet law. Secret religious schools for children; clandestine places of prayer and study for adults; illegal lectures on Jewish history and customs; furtive Purim and Hanukkah parties; covert Hebrew songfests in forests-all in place of the efforts previously expended on petitions, sit-ins, demonstrations, hunger strikes, now regarded as futile.
The Israelis did not take kindly to such activities, thought them a yielding to the Soviet effort to stifle Jewish emigration, a waning of the refuseniks’ Zionist enthusiasm. On this matter Volodya tended to agree with the Israelis, who regarded him as one of their greatest assets.
In March 1986 he and Masha exchanged their single large communal apartment on Gorky Street for two small apartments. They moved into a six-story building on Vesnina Street, about a twenty-minute walk to the Kremlin. The woman and her son, their Gorky Street neighbors, went willingly into the second apartment in a different section of Moscow. Quite small, the apartments, but unshared, private. The Slepak apartment had two rooms, one with a balcony. And a telephone, which the KGB for some reason had not thought to shut down. On the first floor of the building were a bookstore and a hairdresser’s shop. Soon visitors were finding their way to the new lodgings, Vesnina Street 8/10, apartment 52. Volodya again sat listening, smoking his pipe, talking. And Masha served tea and sugar cookies, hovered in the background, and worried about her husband’s health.
Volodya applied again for an exit visa and was refused. The KGB tailed him constantly, arrested him several times for participating in demonstrations or for planning an action or to prevent trouble at official events like an international festival or a congress. Each time they held him for one day and sent him home.
In March 1987 a number of members of Congress met with Gorbachev in the Kremlin. One of the congressmen, James Scheuer, asked for the release of the Slepaks. Gorbachev replied, “Slepak will never leave the Soviet Union. Let’s not discuss his case.” Congressman Scheuer informed Masha and Voldya about the conversation.
One month later, in April, Masha and Volodya went on a seventeen-day hunger strike to commemorate their seventeen years of refusal. One day for each year, no food, only tap or mineral water, the strike announced in advance to the foreign press. They appeared in front of the Moscow “White House,” the parliament building, wearing placards that read LET US GO TO OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN. Many refuseniks and KGB agents watched in silence. On the fourth day they were arrested by the KGB. They thought they might be detained for ten to fifteen days; it would have been Volodya’s sixteenth such arrest in thirteen years. Instead they were brought back to their apartment and warned not to demonstrate again. Masha ended her strike that day; her health would not permit her to continue. Volodya kept at it through the seventeenth day. When he returned to his job after the strike, he learned that he had been fired. He never worked again in the Soviet Union.
That April about fifty refuseniks received invitations to a Passover Seder to be held in the Moscow residence of the American ambassador to the Soviet Union. The arrangements had been scrupulously attended to by several American Jewish women led by Sara Inick, wife of the American cultural attaché. The matzah and wine were flown in from Israel. In a large ballroom stood a dozen tables, all meticulously arranged for Passover. At each table sat a number of Americans: diplomats, press people. Ambassador Arthur Hartman and his wife greeted each person who entered. When everyone had arrived, the ambassador and his wife came over to Masha and Volodya, who had only the day before ended his hunger strike. They sat together at the same table. The ambassador put on a skullcap, and the Seder began. The refuseniks took turns reading from the Haggadah.
In the middle of the reading, George Shultz, the American secretary of state, entered the hall wearing a skullcap. He went slowly from one table of refuseniks to another, shaking hands, exchanging words, handing each person a book or memento. He recognized all the refuseniks, knew them by name, seemed awed and reverential in their presence. These activists-their names and photographs by now mythic symbols of defiance against tyranny, displayed everywhere, on placards, in books, schools, at demonstrations-were men and women who had for years defied, paid a terrible price, and were continuing to defy, a pitiless empire. Alexander Lerner was there that evening. Masha and Volodya Slepak. Viktor Brailovsky. Nahum Meiman. Iosif Begun. And many others. When George Shultz approached Masha and Volodya, he shook their hands and said he had a gift for them. His assistant handed him a photograph, which he gave to Masha and Volodya: a picture of Sanya and Leonid and the grandchildren taken at the time of the two brothers’ hunger strike in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to commemorate their parents’ seventeenth year in refusal. Shultz then briefly addressed the refuseniks. He said he and the American administration would never cease fighting for the freedom of Soviet Jewry. Then he introduced the new American ambassador; Ambassador Hartman was soon to retire. The reading of the Haggadah continued. At the conclusion of the Seder every family was presented with a box of Israeli matzos and every woman there received a red rose. Then all but a half dozen guests left.