BOOKS
A Jew leaves Russia
Zinovy Zinik
SHCHARANSKY: HERO OF OUR TIME by Martin Gilbert Shcharansky had hardly finished cross- ing the Glienicke Bridge when a fierce discussion was already flaring across the pages of the Israeli press. One of the contenders for the possession of absolute truth in the matter, a former Jewish activist from Moscow, argued that Shcharansky, with all his involvement in the wide range of activities concerning human rights in the USSR, was a non-kosher political person- ality: any participation by a Jew in attempts to liberalise the Soviet regime is detrimental to the repatriation movement since it damages the chances for those Jews Who just want to get out and do not want to get involved in internal Russian affairs.
Martin Gilbert is seemingly of the same Opinion, as he insists that 'the Jewish repatriation movement was not a dissident movement', `Shcharansky was never anti- Soviet' and 'the movement of which he was a part was not a subversive movement', not motivated by hostility to the Soviet Union'. The trouble is that the vocabulary • Gilbert uses here is very much subject to interpretation, since the mere intention to depart from the Soviet paradise-on-earth might constitute, as Gilbert's book itself shows quite clearly, an 'anti-Soviet', 'sub- versive' and 'hostile to the Soviet Union' stance when seen through the eyes of the Party ideologues. As the Soviet Union keeps its borders firmly shut, one might question the sober-mindedness of a person who claims that a prisoner can freely get out of the prison without breaking its internal regulations. I am not a politician. Statements of the kind I quote above proclaim a certain goodwill on the part of the Jewish move- ment and might have had a positive effect on the minds of the Soviet leadership; they might not have, but they did definitely split the entire Jewish movement, as well as the FO, from top to bottom. During the visit of yet another American senator to Moscow in the Seventies, two separate meetings with representatives of the split repatriation movement had to be orga- nised. On both occasions Shcharansky served as an interpreter, as he did for many other conflicting dissident groupings, the Helsinki Watchdog committee on human Tights and the Russian Baptist movement included. It was for this misinterpretation of his duty as a Soviet Jew that he served nine years of his 13-year prison sentence, ."d was separated from his wife in Israel for about 11 years. The intensity of fear and hatred among orthodox Soviet citizens towards the ques- tionof immigration to Israel can be illus- trated by a telephone conversation, quoted
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in Gilbert's book, between a Jewish activist and his father who publicly denounced his son for his dissident activity. 'Who is speaking?' asked the old man. 'Your son'. `I have no son.' Then who am I?"An enemy of the people'. Such pronounce- ments are reminiscent of the year 1948 which marked the beginning of Stalin's viciously patriotic drive against 'rootless cosmopolitanism' at home and his hypocri- tical support abroad for the newly created state of Israel. That year Anatoly Shchar- ansky was born. Although his grandfather was a religious Jew, and his uncle was a Zionist thrown out of the country by the young revolutionary government, Anatoly was hardly aware of the Jewish heritage of his family until he became actively in- volved in the repatriation movement 25 years later. A precocious boy from the provinces, a brilliant graduate from the most prestigious academic institute in Mos- cow he could have become one of the chosen few in the Soviet world of science.
His graduate work, however, was symp- tomatically entitled 'The application of chess end-games as examples of making decisions in situations of conflict.'
The author of Hero of Our Time regards Shcharansky's spiritual metamorphosis as a kind of shaking off of the rotten shell of Soviet ideology in which Shcharansky's Jewish soul was imprisoned. His ascent to Judaism, according to this study, was caused by the impact of the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war on Soviet citizens of Jewish origin. They became proud of their forgotten ancestral land, their resuscitated language and modern history. Six years later, in 1973, Shcharansky applied for an exit visa, thus setting off on the road to prison where he acquired, through the reading of the Hebrew Bible, the most profound understanding of Judaism. And, indeed, his letters from prison contain very moving and sophisticated interpretations of the Psalms. What can be more revealing to a person under interrogation than the following lines: 'I will take heed to my ways, That I sin not with my tongue; I will keep a curb on my mouth, While the wicked are before me.'
With all the author's stress on these aspects of Shcharansky's spiritual develop- ment as a Jew, I have to remark that there is a great distance separating a profound meditation on the subject of God from practising religion as understood by the Jewish tradition. The same intensity of religious meditation led Vladimir Bukov- sky, Shcharansky's precursor and pursuer of the same tactics in the dissident move- ment, a pure Slav by birth, to enlightened atheism; while Shcharansky's contempor- ary in the movement, like him of Jewish origin, Gabriel Superfin was converted to Russian Orthodoxy. There is also an enor- mous emotional and spiritual distance be- tween the wish to get separated from everything Soviet and a desire to settle in Israel. A sad fact is that many of the former Jewish activists eventually chose, to a certain dismay and puzzlement of the Israeli government, to settle in the States and Europe where they found, rightly or wrongly, a spiritual atmosphere more con- genial to the former Moscovites than the semi-oriental hurly-burly of Israel. The point is that the reunification of families with distant relatives in Israel was the only ostensible ground on which the Soviet authorities would accept an application for an exit permit. Anyone who wished to leave the country had to proclaim his Israeli connections and Zionist inclina- tions. For the majority of applicants the first step was to secure a fictitious Israeli uncle or aunt 'to be reunited with'; sincere belief in Zionism would come second and not always then. Everyone who wanted to leave was on the look-out for the Israeli- Jewish connections, and a joke at that time went: 'For a Gentile, a Jewish wife is not a luxury but the means of transportation.'
The most peculiar aspect of the entire Jewish movement was that the majority of activists were not Jews in the traditional Western or Israeli sense. During the long Soviet years of half-voluntary assimilation, the Jewish community, especially in big cities, became practically extinct. By the end of the Sixties in Moscow it consisted of a pathetic bunch of geriatrics speaking a mixture of Yiddish and Russian, who used to gather at the only synagogue, in Arkhi- pov street, and never failed to include the obligatory words of gratitude to the Soviet government during the Jewish religious ceremonies. They were deadly frightened when the place became a meeting point for activists in the repatriation movement and their enthusiastic sympathisers. Most of that crowd, whose parents were Party members, could hardly be called Jews in the religious sense of the word, because they were — to get down to the nitty-gritty — not circumsized and a number of them decided to undergo that risky operation through the dire circumstances of under- ground arrangements, reminiscent of hav- ing an illegal abortion.
The authorities understood little of lewishness' but the entry in the passport, an ID card to be carried at all times. Those who were officially called Jews were always regarded as 'our Jews' who had nothing to do with `not-ours', 'their Jews' — that is those who lived abroad, beyond the Soviet borders, whether in the United States, Israel or even Poland. It took years and years for the Soviet officials in the visa department of the Ministry of Interior to realise that there might be indeed some connection between, say, Stanley Rabino- vich of Brooklyn (NY) and Seva Rabino- vitch from Beskudnikovo (Moscow). Thanks to this belated realisation (promp- ted by the favourable conditions on the American grain sales to the Soviet Union, and the building of a Pepsi Cola plant on the Black Sea) thousands of those who proclaimed themselves Jews were allowed to go. Thousands of them were refused too. But they were refused not because of the anti-Semitic leanings in the state appar- atus, as Martin Gilbert implies, but first and foremost because Jews were regarded as Soviet citizens not that much different from any other ethnic minority in the Soviet Union — whether the Tartars or the Ingushes (both of these nationalities were deported en masse by Stalin to the back of beyond of the Soviet empire), Estonians or, indeed, Slays. None of these minorities would have ever dreamt about applying for emigration; those few who dared very quickly ended up in prison.
After the notorious trial of Sinyaysky and Daniel in the mid-Sixties, which was condemned all over the world, there was a growing awareness of the vulnerability of the authorities, who were seen to be sensitive about their image abroad. The founders of the Russian civic rights move- ment, such as Alexandr Volpin, were the first to stress the legality of such actions as, for example, the refusal to answer the interrogator's questions unrelated to the case. Elementary as it now sounds, it took many years for people to realise that they were doing nothing illegal by challenging the heavily biased ideological interpreta- tion to the law; that they should not fear to demand the implementation of the rights formally guaranteed by the Soviet constitu- tion, the right to leave your own country and come back, by the way! — included. It was a certain affinity between Alexandr Volpin, also a mathematician, and the young Shcharansky that prompted the lat- ter to employ, a decade later, a logician's technique during interrogation, baffling his investigators completely.
Shcharansky was imprisoned not be- cause of his Jewish origin, but because of his nature as interpreter of languages and events. In the country where unauthorised contacts with foreigners were, and still are, treated with a traditional suspicion of treason, the knowledge of foreign lan- guages, unless authorised for the sole purpose of translating English classics, is regarded as the tool of a spy. Shcharans- ky's contacts with foreign correspondents and public figures had influenced the American government to make trade agreements with the Soviet Union con- ditional on the Soviet record on human rights. No wonder that the authorities' anger was directed mainly against Shchar- ansky & Co. An interpreter of languages had become an interpreter of Soviet foreign policy, a usurper of a kind. He threatened the sanctimonious right of the Soviet government to behave with uncon- trolled liberty at home and abroad. The chief merit of this book is its detailed description of the Soviet mechan- ism for creating heroes and martyrs with the full co-operation of the western media. Ironically, its subtitle is the same as Ler' montov's classic, whose proverbial hero gave birth to the notion of the Superfluous Man in the sad history of the Russian intelligentsia. It was the defeat and disin- tegration of the civic rights movement in the Seventies, and the loss of hope for political change in Russia after Stalin which set the modern superfluous men of Shcharansky's kind on the search for roots in the past, religious traditions, yoga exer- cises and, ultimately, for a way to leap over the Iron Curtain. Gilbert provides us with a documentary pastiche composed back- wards, with the benefit of hindsight, after Shcharansky's life story has become in- tensely dyed with the Israeli white and blue national colours — thanks to the inex- haustible efforts of his wife, who became strictly religious while in Israel. Such col- ouring is probably beneficial for propagan- da purposes in the continuing fight for the release of the rest of the Prisoners of Zion back in the USSR. However, having been released from his ordeal, Shcharansky him- self ceases to be a propaganda asset and returns to a precarious existence among human beings. By simplifying the context of the story, Martin Gilbert diminishes the glory of his hero's having survived all those horrors with his mind and spirit intact.. Shcharansky will very much need tin; equipment in Israel. He has now resumed his lessons in Arabic, which he began to study in prison.
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