The US-USSR Trade Agreement, the Soviet Education Tax, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and the Stevenson Amendment were four important elements in Soviet-American relations in the second half of the 1970s. Dramatic developments in that period led, ultimately, to the repeal of the Education Tax, the Congressional passage of the amendments, and the collapse of the Trade Agreement. The three-year struggle for the Trade Agreement culminated in a major fiasco for theSoviet Union’s foreign policy course and, in some sense, represented a failure of the American administration. This outcome, however, boosted the forces striving to assure minimal rights to Soviet citizens, primarily, the Jews’ right to free emigration, although the results of this victory were not immediately apparent.

TheSoviet Unionreacted very nervously to the amendments, particularly the Stevenson Amendment (which limited credits to the sum of $300 million), rejecting demands for a liberalization of emigration policy as interference in Soviet domestic affairs. While the Senate was conducting discussions on the amendment and the American administration was exerting pressure on the Jewish establishment and the Israeli government, the rate of emigration was constantly increasing. After the amendment was adopted (December 1974), theSoviet Unionsharply curtailed emigration and began to tighten the screws. Over the course of a few months, Anatolii Malkin fromMoscowand Aleksandr Silnitskii fromKharkovwere convicted for refusing to serve in the army. Strict sentences were handed out to Dr. Mikhail Shtern inVinnitsaand Sender Levinson inBenderyfor “economic crimes.” Mark Nashpits and Boris Tsitlenok received long terms of exile for participating in a demonstration inMoscow, although they had participated in many before that. The Soviet regime’s harsh measures did not, however, continue for a long time.

At the same time as Soviet-American relations were complicated by the struggle over the Trade Agreement, a process of détente was underway in Europe that culminated in the signing on August 1, 1975 of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation inEurope. The process gathered strength gradually, experiencing high and low points. The talks proceeded for a long time because of the broad spectrum of issues under discussion and also because of the introduction of topics related to human rights. Issues of security and arms control were included in the so-called “first basket,” issues of scientific-technological and economic cooperation in the “second basket,” and questions of human rights and humanitarian cooperation (information, culture, education, and societal contacts) in the “third basket.” Whereas theSoviet Unionwas most interested in the first two baskets, the West showed particular interest in the third insofar as ideological confrontation and competition between the two systems in the international arena continued, although in a modified form.

As the Final Act did not possess the status of an international treaty, there was no formal obligation to implement it. In signing it, however, the states undertook political if not legal obligations to observe it.[1] Equally important, the Act entailed an uninterrupted series of meetings and talks in the framework of theHelsinki process. The next meeting of the 33 European states, theU.S., andCanada was planned for October 1977 to March1978 inBelgrade.

The Helsinkiprocess created new hope, and tension again declined. The signing of the Final Act in Helsinkiafforded new opportunities to refuseniks. The different approaches of the kulturniki and the politiki were even more evident in this context. The kulturniki sharply expanded samizdat activity and began producing periodicals. Tarbut (Hebrew for culture) began to appear in 1975, becoming the first journal after Evrei v SSSR (Jews in the USSR) of the developing cultural direction. It was followed by Nash Ivrit (Our Hebrew), starting in 1978, Evrei v Sovremennom Mire (Jews in the Contemporary World) (from 1978), Magid, Hayim, LEA (Leningrad Jewish Almanac), Evreiskaia Mysl (Jewish Thought), and others. Toward the end of 1975, a Solidarity Day with Prisoners of Zion was organized whose program included lectures and informational sheets about Jewish activists; legal seminars were conducted in various cities that prepared activists to counter the regime under the new conditions; an international symposium on culture was planned and partially implemented; a Hebrew Week was carried out; festivals of Hebrew song and Purim spiels were held, and so forth. The scale of the movement’s cultural activity seriously concerned the regime, as was manifested in its disruption of the symposium on culture in December 1976; opening a case against the journal Jews in the USSR; conducting searches; and detaining several activists in the cultural wing. At the end of 1976, there was a feeling that the regime was planning a major trial against the kulturniki.

The politiki continued to increase pressure on the Soviet Union by collecting information on emigration, the situation of refuseniks and prisoners ofZion, organizing aid to the needy, initiating marches to Soviet institutions, organizing demonstrations, and preparing analytic reports for the West. In the first half of 1976, two member of this group, Vitalii Rubin and Anatolii Shcharansky, took part in the formation of theHelsinki groups that took upon themselves the monitoring of human rights observance in theSoviet Union.

Of course, as mentioned earlier, a clear boundary between the groups did not exist and, in the case of some activists, it was hard to assign them to a particular group.

Volodia, what led you to change the strategy of the aliya struggle after you took over the leadership from Polskii? I asked.[2]

Several things. First, based on numerous replies that I received from refuseniks in various cities, I gradually drew up a table in which one column indicated a person’s place of work, another his profession, and a third ─ how much time he remained in refusal. I showed the table only to a few people. This was the first time it had been done and it revealed a very interesting picture. Up until the end of 1974, we had assumed that months separated us from our departure; therefore, it was not worth undertaking major initiatives. In November 1974, it became clear that the Jackson-Vanik Amendment would not help us in the immediate future, and, evidently, we faced many years of refusal ahead. We thus had to consider how to proceed further in this completely different situation. Second, up until the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, we kept trying to open the door. In 1974, I concluded that the door was practically open. The reservoir of motivated people capable of overcoming the obstacles of applying had been exhausted. Third, theHelsinkiprocess in August 1975. Until then theSoviet Unionhad talked about security and economics and managed to avoid such a “petty matter” as human rights. And now it was theHelsinkiprocess and human rights! That opened new possibilities. We thus opted for the cultural symposium.

The Jewish community consisted of prisoners of Zion, refuseniks, and the rest. Only we refuseniks were free ─ the former were imprisoned and the latter were not yet ready. We had to prepare a program for each group. For the two million we began to publish the journal Tarbut. This was an illusion, of course, with the number of copies produced.

It was important for me to do something for the prisoners, particularly because there were many new refuseniks who did not know the “Leningradhijackers” or, in general, those who had been imprisoned earlier. On December 24, 1975, the anniversary of the verdict in the Leningrad Trial, we therefore organized an evening of solidarity with the prisoners ofZionat the apartment of Feliks Dektor. This subsequently became a tradition that continued for several years. Our desire to inform people about the prisoners turned out not to be so simple a task because not everyone was willing to share information. An information sheet, however, served the purpose well. It indicated where a prisoner was currently located, where he had been earlier, and the formal charge against him or her. We distributed many of these sheets. We set up a room and hung photographs. Feliks Dektor manifested strength of character and courage ─ the house was surrounded by the KGB. That first evening, which later became known as Solidarity Day with Prisoners of Zion, had great moral significance.

With the help of refuseniks, legal seminars were organized throughout the country. We switched from demonstrating with our feet to mental work, utilizing the democratic dissidents’ experience for our goals. A legal group or seminar appeared in almost every city. The seminar leaders were replaced every few months as they received exit visas.

Many perceived this as a trampoline.

It turned out that the majority of the leaders went to America but that’s unimportant.

What was your attitude toward neshira?

I didn’t fight with them, and not because I was for neshira. I was, of course, actively opposed, but I thought that at first something had to be changed inRussia if possible.

Did you already have great hopes then for culture?

Well, yes, should we send people by force to Israel? The journal Tarbut, after all, was a symbolic matter. Well, how much could we encompass? We needed to do something that would be noticed. Thus we arrived at the idea of a symposium.

 

The Second World Conference in Brussels

At the initiative of the Liaison Bureau, the Second World Conference on Soviet Jewry took place in Brusselsfrom February 17-19, 1976. Like the first one, which was held five years earlier, it was designed to consolidate international support for the aliya struggle, to determine basic priorities in the rapidly changing circumstances, attract worldwide public attention to the disastrous situation of Soviet Jews and the sharp curtailment of emigration, and to mobilize new forces for the struggle within and outside of the Jewish world. In the course of the preceding five years, many new forces had joined the movement and the experience acquired in that period needed to be absorbed and analyzed.

On the one hand, the international situation had changed significantly. The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was signed on August 1, 1975 and ratified by theSoviet Unionon September 18 of that year. The Act’s special attention to human rights raised certain hopes in the Jewish world: human rights ceased to be the internal matter of theUSSRand could be discussed in the context of theHelsinkiaccords.

On the other hand, on November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly, with the active assistance of theSoviet Unionand the Arab bloc, adopted a resolution that defined Zionism as a form of racism. Despite the absurdity of this resolution, it was understandable that the Soviet Union desperately needed it to subvertIsrael’s status as a legitimate homeland for the Jewish people, especially for Soviet Jews. Soviet propaganda immediately began working at full force. Viewing the situation as rather threatening, the Liaison Bureau began to mobilize forces in the international arena. This time the world conference was prepared literally in a few months.

The Soviet Unionmanaged, although less energetically than in 1971, to fire off its usual propagandistic salvos. On February 2, the Soviets published a nine-page document in the U.S.entitled “Soviet Jews Today: Facts and Figures”. It asserted that Jews were not discriminated on the basis of nationality in the USSRand that many who had emigrated wanted to return. The following day, Foreign Minister Boris Shumilin published an article in the New York Times contending that an honest emigration process operated in the USSR and that the level of refusals constituted only 1.6 percent of applicants. A press conference of seven Soviet Jews who had returned from Israel to the Soviet Union was held on February 6. Four days later, a press conference was organized in Brussels for four Jews who requested to return from the U.S. On February 16, Aron Vergelis, editor-in-chief of the Yiddish journal Sovetish Heimland, held another press conference. Also timed for the conference was the granting of exit visas to a small group of activists that included Ilia Piatetskii-Shapiro, Dmitrii Ramm, Leonid Koshevoi, Vladimir Wagner, Ilia Rubin, and Aleksandr Lunts.[3]

A day before the opening of the conference, a group of seventy activists gathered near the Central Committee of the CPSU. Six of them ─ Vladimir Slepak, Viktor Brailovskii, Yuli Kosharovskii, Anatolii Shcharansky, Vitalii Rubin, and Vladimir Lazaris ─ were received by Albert Ivanov, director of the division of administrative organs of the Central Committee. Vladimir Obidin, director of the All-Union OVIR was also present at the meeting. The refuseniks spoke about the absence of a law on emigration and the change in the civil status of potential emigrants (exclusion from academic institutes with a subsequent call-up to the army or dismissal from work). Ivanov confirmed that all existing restrictions on emigration would be retained and young men who had served sentences for refusing to serve in the army would again be called up for army service.

The Second Brussels Conference opened in this context with 1200 delegates from 32 countries assembling in the Palais des Congrès. Golda Meir was chosen as the honorary president of the conference. Others who attended included Menachem Begin, then leader of the Knesset opposition and American congressmen Rev. Robert Drinan, Joshua Eilberg, Hamilton Fish, Edward Hebert, Peter Peyser, and Senator Frank Church.

The American legislators’ presence added special significance to the personal message of U.S. President Gerald Ford, who expressed the American people’s solidarity with the efforts of the conference participants to advance human freedoms.[4] The Israelis sent a representative delegation to the conference that included a significant number of new repatriates.

Aleksandr Feldman, an activist from Kievwho at the time was a member of the Israeli Public Council for Soviet Jewry, told me about the repatriates’ participation in the Israeli delegation.[5]

There were about 150 delegates, of which about a third were new olim. We chartered an entire airplane.

Do you remember which repatriates participated?

Of course; after all, Yosef Yakobi and I determined quotas in the Public Council for the participation of various groups ─ scientists, organizations of olim from different places, and former prisoners ofZion. I can’t name them all but among them were Emanuel (Alik) Diamant, Anatolii Gerenrot, Meir Gelfond, Viktor Polskii, Sasha Voronel, Emil Liuboshits, Rafael Nudelman, Eva Butman, Silva Zalmanson, David Maayan, Lea Slovina, Melik [Mikhail] Agursky…. Sasha Voronel spoke as did Hillel Butman’s wife Eva.

Complaining that the Ministry of Absorption and the government had failed in absorption, many repatriates prepared a démarche. They wanted the Jewish organizations that gave the money for absorption to control the way it was spent.

Wendy Eisen, a Canadian activist, recalls the entrance of the olim:

 

On opening night … a group of former Soviet Jews, some of whom had arrived from theSoviet Uniononly days before, entered the room. Twelve hundred men and women stood at their seats and welcomed them with thunderous applause.

…“We greet you from distant Russia,” began the opening message to the delegates. “The situation of Soviet Jewry has become drastic today, demanding an equally drastic response. … We appeal to you to help us in our cause. If we are fated to give our lives to the cause, then we are ready.”[6]

 

What impression did the Congress make on you? I asked Aleksandr Voronel.

You know, a rather powerful one. I didn’t expect Jews to have such power in the world arena. Something not very pleasant happened to me on a personal level there. On the eve of the conference, I was warned by the istaely secret service that someone from Russia was trying to contact me and I should be careful. On the day that I left, Nelly (Voronel’s wife, Yu. K.) received a postcard from a Moscow acquaintance, a writer and somewhat strange person of Romanian origin. He wrote that, completely by chance, he was given leave to go to Brussels and he hoped to meet me. She brought this postcard to the secret service and called me. For the first time after Moscow I had the feeling that I was being followed ─ you know, as if your feet are tied. This sensation didn’t leave me all during the conference. Only later on did I understand that, perhaps, it was not the Russians but our Shin Bet that was following me. This writer appeared: “Sasha, hello, what a joy, what good fortune…” I immediately introduced him to a representative of Nativ (the Liaison Bureau); he began to converse with him and… they understood each other very well and whispered to each other the whole time.

Did you speak?

Yes. I was assigned to give a lengthy report telling about the strivings and ambitions of Russian Jews. When I showed it to a Nativ worker, Yakov Yanai, he looked it over and said with a smirk, “Of course this is fine. The Jews will be satisfied that they have such an intellectual leader. But don’t expect anyone to understand you.” In the report I expressed the idea that to some degree the Zionism of Russian Jews evolved from dissidence, that it is almost a continuation of the pre-revolutionary liberation movement. The backward Russian people were willing to tolerate the despotic regime but the Jews were not. Nehemiah was terribly afraid that I, like Shcharansky, would link up with the human rights movement, and we agreed that I would not speak about that directly but it would be clear from my report.

A Christian delegation of 120 people arrived at the conference. They prepared an appeal to the Christian conscience of the world. “We Christians, meeting at the Second Conference in Brussels, are aware of the situation of our fellow Christian brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the persecution of our Jewish brethren is unique in all respects and is more severe than what the Christian community is subjected to. We appeal to our church to make 1976 the year of a new Exodus and solidarity with all believers in the USSR.”[7]

Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League, appeared at the conference but the guards quickly led him out of the building and handed him over to the Belgian police, who expelled him from the country. “It turned out,” I was told by a participant at the conference, David Maayan, “the basis for that was an ultimatum presented by the American delegates: ‘If he will be there, then we won’t be.’”

Did you speak? I asked Maayan (Chernoglaz).

Look, at that conference, I was more of an exhibit item than a participant; I had arrived just half a year before it opened. At one session, however, I described the situation in camps and prisons. I was asked about the food rations ─ how many calories, what people ate and what they didn’t. The mayor ofBrusselsorganized an evening party at his residence and Vitia Boguslavskii plied us well with drinks. He had arrived earlier and already oriented himself to the situation.

Enid Wurtman, an activist from Philadelphia, recalls:[8]

 

The American delegation was the largest, including 370 delegates, some of whom were not Jewish. The Afro-American leader of the civil rights struggle, Bayard Rustin, was with us. He was already rather old, and he entered the hall leaning on a cane. He went up to the podium and performed “Let my people go,” a song based on a Biblical subject that was almost the hymn of Afro-Americans. The hall was excited. Eva Butman and Silva Zalmanson gave a heartrending appeal to free their husbands, Hillel Butman and Eduard Kuznetsov, and also all the others who had been convicted in the Leningrad Trial. Golda Meir enlivened the audience when she declared that she was ready to go out on the street together with the demonstrators from “The35.”She was dressed all in black like they were at their demonstrations. On the last day of the conference, the “35”assembled near the royal palace with five year-old Yigal Knokh, son of the prisoner of Zion Leib Knokh. Yigal presented Fabiola, the queen ofBelgium, with thirty-five white roses as a sign of gratitude toBelgiumand its government.

 

The kulturniki and politiki sent different messages to the conference. The former wrote about culture ─ the depressing situation in which any attempts by refuseniks to revive elements of spiritual life, to teach Hebrew, and produce independent journals were regarded as a crime by the regime. They appealed to the conference to strive for permission for Hebrew teaching; the publication of books on the history, culture, and religion of the Jewish people; and the publishing of journals and other works in Russian. At the same time, it was stressed that the development of Jewish culture was in no way regarded as a substitute for aliya to Israel. The signatories included Vladimir Prestin, Veniamin Fain, Pavel Abramovich, Viktor Brailovskii, Mark Azbel, Yosif Begun, Vladimir Wagner, Vladimir Kislik, the brothers Isai and Grigorii Goldstein, and others.[9] My signature is also there.

The politiki prepared an impressive analytical report in which they called for the continuation of an uncompromising struggle for emigration. It was signed by Aleksandr Lerner, Aleksandr Lunts, Vladimir Slepak, Dina Beilina, Natan Shcharansky, Ida Nudel, Vitalii Rubin, and Eitan Finkelstein. The American “Union of Councils for Soviet Jews” published it on February 2, 1976 and presented it at the conference (the politiki had fcomplex relations with the establishment and therefore chose that way). In its nine sections the survey raised the issues of unjustified refusals; the use of army service to pressure activists; legal and extra-legal harassment; and anti-Zionist propaganda. The section on prisoners of Zion presented meager details that had been obtained from places of imprisonment: the beatings of Yakov Vinarov in prison, Lev Roitburd’s deprivation of a meeting and canteen privileges, Leib Knokh’s transfer to Vladimir prison for three years as punishment for his hunger strike, and so forth. The case against the journal Jews in the USSR was considered separately: no one had been charged but almost everyone who was interrogated was threatened that at any moment he could switch from being a witness to a defendant. “We are convinced,” stressed the authors of the survey, “that the material in the survey explains the real reason for the decline in the level of Jewish emigration.”[10]

The declaration of the conference was read out at a festive evening on February 19. It contained an address to Soviet Jews as members of a large Jewish family linked by a common historical fate.

The conference of 1976 helped to consolidate forces in the new circumstances of the Soviet Jewry struggle. It attracted the attention of the world media to the problem of the rights of the Jewish national minority in theUSSR.

Demands for the freedom of development of Jewish culture and religion had been raised in the West long before the cry “Let my people go” became the slogan of the First Brussels Conference. That demand resounded with new force at the Second Brussels Conference. Along with it, another slogan was adopted: “Let my people know” and more forcefully: “Let them live or let them leave.”