In another room of the embassy, the half dozen guests who had remained, Volodya and Masha among them, spoke at some length with Richard Schifter, George Shultz’s aide in human rights issues. He had accompanied Shultz into the hall, and the refuseniks in the room knew him well; it was his third or fourth visit to Moscow. Later, as the refuseniks left the protected grounds of the embassy and returned to Soviet soil, they passed under the scrutiny of many KGB eyes.
Congressman Scheuer was back in Moscow that August and again asked Gorbachev to release the Slepaks. Gorbachev said that if the Americans and Soviets signed an arms agreement, the Slepaks might be released. When Masha heard that, she thought: We are being sold like slaves, one by one, children and parents separately, each kept behind for a possible higher bid.
Suddenly, in September, one of the long-term refuseniks received permission to leave. Then others. And then Iosif Begun and Ida Nudel. For all the friends of the Slepaks, the card from OVIR, the exit visa. Only Masha, Volodya, Alexander Lerner, and a very few others were left. Masha thought she and Volodya were deliberately being separated from their old friends. To be alone in Moscow. Another exile. Interminable.
On October 13, 1987, at 2:00 p.m., the telephone rang in the Slepak apartment on Vesnina Street. Volodya wasn’t home. Masha lifted the receiver.
A man’s voice asked, “Is Vladimir Semyonovich at home?”
“No,” said Masha.
“Is this Maria Isaakovna?”
“Yes.”
“This is Deputy Chief of Moscow OVIR.” He gave Masha his name, but she has since forgotten it and it is therefore absent from these chronicles. “You are granted permission to leave the USSR. Please come tomorrow to the OVIR office to get the card with the list of documents you must bring with you in order to obtain your visas.”
Masha had the presence of mind to say, “But tomorrow is Wednesday; it is not a reception day at OVIR.”
“It will be for you. When you arrive, ring the bell. A militiaman will open the door. Tell him your name, and say that Major [another forgotten name] is waiting for you. The major will give you the card with the list of the documents you must bring when you come for your exit visas.”
Masha, stunned and disoriented, hung up the telephone. After eighteen years of waiting-that was it? A telephone call instead of the usual postcard! She had expected the heavens to part, the earth to tremble. This was so… ordinary. She sat waiting and after a while began to think she had imagined it all, had dreamed it; there had been no call.
Volodya returned. She told him about the telephone call. He refused to believe it. Finally he said, “Tomorrow we’ll go to OVIR. If they give us the card, we’ll know it’s real.”
The next day they went to OVIR. A guard let them inside. The empty building echoed with their footsteps. They felt like sleepwalkers. An official handed them the card with the list of documents they would need to bring in order to receive exit visas. Masha held the card. What they had endured for this little piece of paper!
They went over to the restaurant where a farewell party was in progress for Ida Nudel. Masha followed behind Volodya, who entered holding the card high over his head and announcing that they had received permission to leave. There was a large crowd-friends, correspondents. Pandemonium erupted Joy. Tears. Exhilaration. If Slepak is getting out, we’ll all get out! The correspondents wanted interviews.
There was much to do. They collected the many papers they needed, paid for the visas and for the loss of their Soviet citizenship. With the papers and a bank receipt in hand, they came to OVIR and got their visas. Showing the visas, they were able to book seats on a flight to Vienna. Then they went to the embassy of the Netherlands, which at the time represented Israel in the USSR, and received their visas to Israel. Their Austrian transit visas they obtained in the Austrian Embassy. All those visas enabled them finally to purchase the plane tickets they had booked.
In the meantime they were saying good-bye to all their relatives. They visited the graves of Masha’s father and Volodya’s mother. And stood in silence awhile before the grave of Solomon Slepak. They sold some of their furniture and gave away many of their possessions to relatives and to fellow refuseniks. About 150 people showed up at the farewell party in the apartment, among them Richard Schifter, aide to Secretary of State George Shultz.
Once again, by sheerest chance, in the apartment that evening was Sister Gloria Coleman, the Catholic nun from the United States who had become involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. Unaware that they had received permission to leave, she came with others to visit the Slepaks and stumbled upon the celebration. She recalls a crowded apartment filled with laughter and joy and remembers seeing Volodya, “an amazing-looking man, wonderfully well-looking, considering what he had been through, sitting there amid the reverence and respect being shown him by the refuseniks and the press. He was effusive. The whole room radiated with excitement, elation.” She went over to Volodya and introduced herself. He took her hand in both of his. She was warmed by the way he immediately engaged her, brought her into the celebration, indeed by the way the refuseniks made all who were there, including the press, part of the evening’s happiness. They did not play to the press; they involved the press as people in the drama of their lives.
The day before their departure Volodya and Masha brought their baggage to customs in the airport. Seven suitcases. They waited five hours and then stood watching as the customs agents picked everything apart. It was four in the morning when the agents were done. They had, they told Masha and Volodya, no blank forms for the baggage receipts. “But don’t worry, when you come tomorrow to check in, the receipts will be there for you.”
About two dozen people-relatives and very close friends-were at the airport to see them off. It was late afternoon of October 25, 1987. In an odd juncture of events, their son Sanya had left the Soviet Union precisely ten years before. The clerk at the counter who went through their tickets and documents could not find the baggage receipts; they would be unable to claim their baggage. To the devil with all the baggage, thought Masha, frantic. Let’s just get out of this place! The chronicles record that it was a wet, cloudy day, the air filled with a mixture of snow and rain. The Soviet aircraft was a TU-154, and the flight number was SU-263. It departed for Vienna at 8:15 p.m.
During the flight an attendant came over to Masha and Volodya and handed them their baggage receipts. They had been found on the floor of the aircraft, she said. The final knife thrust of the KGB, thought Masha.
When she and Volodya descended the stairway and stepped onto the tarmac in the Vienna airport, they were met by Ambassador Max Kampelman, head of the American delegation to the Soviet-American Disarmament Conference in Vienna. Inside the terminal waited Sanya; Senator John and Teresa Heinz of Pennsylvania; the American ambassador to Austria; Marion Wiesel, wife of Elie Wiesel; a representative of the Jewish Agency, which was responsible for the settlement of Soviet immigrants in Israel; and the Slepaks’ close friends Kirill and Irina Khenkin, who had come from Munich, where they worked for Radio Liberty, one of the stations Volodya used to bring in on his radio during his years in the forests outside Moscow, on camping trips in the Ukraine, in the apartment on Gorky Street, and as he navigated the hospital elevator through the waves of noise thrown up by the Kremlin against the outside world.
There were many journalists in the terminal. The press conference lasted about twenty minutes. As soon as it was over, the American ambassador asked Masha and Volodya to join him at his residence for dinner. They could spend the night there, in a room already prepared for them.