In the first years after the Six-Day War, experienced Zionists, many of whom had survived arrests, interrogations, camps, and prisons, played the primary role in the Jewish national revival. Influenced primarily by the creation of the State of Israel and by the Holocaust, with the subsequent intensified antisemitism, these Zionists had lost all faith in Soviet ideals and feared neither the regime nor informers. They generally did not seek to establish a formal leadership or centralized management nor did they favor rash or risky operations as they had felt on their own flesh the high price that had to be paid for such endeavors. Infinitely and uncompromisingly dedicated to the cause, they strove to transmit their passion and experience to an expanding circle of activists.

The regime had no special levers to influence such people. One could either arrest them or permit them to leave the country. Taking into consideration the prominence and authority that many of them had acquired in the West, it was simpler and “cheaper” to let them go in order to “permit the elimination of nationalistically-inclined individuals and religious fanatics who exert a harmful influence on their surroundings” as KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko explained in a written report to the CPSU Central Committee.[1]

From 1969 to 1971 the families of dozens of veteran activists from the Baltics received exit visas, including the Slovin, Garber, Valk, and Shperling families. In the fall of 1969, David Khavkin, the Moscow “Moses,” left the country. At the beginning of 1971, Vitalii Svechinskii “arrived in time for the ball” ─ that is, he arrived in the West in time to attend the First Brussels conference on Soviet Jewry. David Drabkin, Meir Gelfand, and Mikhail Zand immigrated to Israel in the spring and summer of 1971.

The fighting arena was cleared for a new generation of leaders. Three people quickly stood out among the Moscow activists: Viktor Polskii, Vladimir Slepak, and Vladimir Prestin. Aleksandr Lerner and Aleksandr Voronel later joined their ranks.

Viktor Polskii (b. 1930), who was already over forty years old at the time, possessed clear leadership qualities. Tall, sporty, and very articulate, he attracted people to himself.

Are you a native Muscovite? I asked Viktor.[2]

Yes.

And your parents, too?

No. They were from the Ukraine. My parents lived in Cherkessk, not far from Kiev, where my father engaged in business before the revolution ─ factories and real estate. The Bolsheviks took everything away. When NEP (New Economic Policy) began, my parents moved to Moscow and remained there. The family was not religious but observed Jewish traditions.

Many emigrated at that time. Why did your father remain?

Apparently, he wasn’t clever and poor enough to leave. It was primarily the poor who left, but my parents had means: they had something to lose.

How did they survive 1937?

Very quietly. They were neither party members nor leading workers. After my father was fully dispossessed as part of the de-kulakization campaign after NEP [New Economic Policy introduced in 1921 and ended with the start of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928], he became an ordinary white-collar worker, the director of some supply department, and mama worked as an accountant. They had no relations with the authorities, who had no claims against them.

Was he arrested?

Of course, but not for long, just until he handed over all his money. He paid them off.

From what institute did you graduate?

The Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute. I received my diploma on December 11, 1952.

What a date you picked! The very height of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” and the start of the “Doctors’ Plot” case.

I applied for graduate school. You can imagine how THEY looked at me. I wasn’t asked why I had applied or what I wanted; I was asked: “Who advised you to apply to graduate school?” I was the best student in my year ─ I had a diploma with distinction and before that a medal in school.

And what happened to you after that?

I was directed to the Physics Institute. My fellow students were welcomed with open arms but I was rejected. I went to clarify matters but it was useless. Then I was sent to the 88^th Scientific Research Institute. I was booted out of there even faster because the Doctors’ Plot had already started. Then it was decided deceptively to send me to Norilsk [in the far north]. I was told, “Here is a good enterprise not far from Moscow.” I was young and trusting; I signed and then when I found out what they had in mind, I said, “I won’t go.” THEY brought a suit against me. The trial was scheduled for March 26, 1953 but the “mustachioed man” [Stalin] died on March 5 and I was included in the first amnesty.

Like all other Jews of our group, I received a free diploma [i. e., as opposed to the usual Soviet practice of assigning a place of work after graduation] and had to find work on my own. When I would phone, I was told, “Yes, Yes, come, we need specialists like that.” When I arrived, however, I would hear the same crowning statement: “Yes, you have the right specialty, but your profile is wrong.” That was our Jewish lot until there was some easing of the regime. Finally, I was accepted at the design office of the Electric Lamp factory. The head of the factory was an intelligent Russian fellow, Tsvetkov, a hero of socialist labor. He assembled an excellent design team that included a large number of Jews. They worked well and he received Stalinist prizes. When he was given a list of 700 workers to dismiss during the antisemitic campaign against the so-called “murderers in white robes” {Doctors’ Plot], he lay in the hospital ─ feigning a heart attack ─ and stayed there until Stalin died. He thus kept his Jews and later hired even more as there was a relaxation in such discriminatory practices. Unfortunately, like many Russians, he drank and died a wasteful death on the railroad tracks while drunk.

Dozens of Jews who worked in the design office found each other and began to discuss Jewish issues. In 1957 was the International Youth Festival and we chased after the Israeli delegation. That was the year of my marriage and in a year my daughter Marina was born. People began to return from the camps and we gained new acquaintances. Our Jewish consciousness began to develop.

You had not yet come across Svechinskii or Khavkin?

Not yet. However, we received literature from the Baltics. Leah Slovina would come to us; David Drabkin had a channel. We, that is, I, Drabkin, and Libkovskii translated, copied, bound, and disseminated the novel Exodus. This book transformed my mother from a woman who had been intimidated by relentless persecution into a Zionist. For me this was incontestable proof of the novel’s power to exert a strong emotional effect. Previously mama not only did not support Zionist ideas but also opposed them.

In 1969 I received my first invitation from Israel. Around this time people began to emigrate and we also prepared to leave.

I wasn’t able to apply for an exit visa before 1970 because my older brother was fatally ill with leukemia. He was an air force lieutenant-colonel and died in 1970.  In the fall of 1970 I submitted documents for a visa. Then I participated in the famous demonstration in the reception room of the Supreme Soviet on February 28, 1971. We were promised there that our applications would be reviewed and, indeed, within a week the first group, including Meir Gelfond, received permission. The next group was much larger. I think it left in October or November. Yuli Nudelman and other activists were in that group. Misha Zand left in the summer.

How was the issue of leadership decided then?

It wasn’t decided by a vote. People gained prominence in the course of events. Those who had more ideas, showed greater initiative, helped others more, composed collective letters and appeals….

When did you feel that you had become a leader?

It’s hard to say. Perhaps in 1971 or 1972.

That is, after the group of former leaders left?

Yes, Then the initiative moved to me and financial activity as well.

Did you have links with Nativ [Lishkat hakesher]?

It didn’t contact me in particular.

How did you solve the problem of aiding refuseniks who lacked means?

Misha Zand handled the public funds; when he emigrated, he left everything with me. Other people who wanted to leave money also came to me as well as those who were seeking funds in order to cover the expenses of leaving. Volodia Zarestkii, who left the Soviet Union in the fall of 1971, provided me with an uninterrupted link to Israel. As our guardian in matters of the Lishka, he accomplished great things and he deserves due credit.

I recall that many people would gather during your weekly telephone conversation with Zaretskii. This was a very important channel of communication.

Yes. I received information from the Baltics, Georgia, Siberia, and Sverdlovsk. I considered it my duty to carry out all the requests quickly and reliably.

Who became the leader after the departure of Gelfond and Svechinskii?

I think that Misha Zand became the leader but more a spiritual than operative one. After his departure this place was empty, and I filled it without a vote or elections.

Some activists considered Viktor Polskii as the leader and others ─ Vladimir Slepak (b. 1927). An open, friendly, accessible person without elitist manners, he immediately won people over. His open home in the very center of Moscow was a continual meeting place for Muscovite and out-of-town activists. Foreigners almost always gathered there and foreign journalists showed him great trust. People would sit around until way past midnight, sometime remaining overnight in his two-room communal apartment.

Volodia, where were you born and into what kind of a family?Polskii and Slepak were two different personality types. Whereas Viktor was drawn to politics, discipline, and the establishment, Voldia had an independent and warm nature and was always ready to help.

I was born in Moscow in 1927. At the time my father, who, among other things, had previously been an army commander during the Civil War, was a TASS correspondent in Japan and China. Both my parents’ came from learned families in which their parents broke with the Jewish tradition and supported the Bolsheviks.

Where did you study?

At the Moscow Aviation Institute. I graduated in 1950, specializing in the field of radio electronics. I received a work assignment to Novosibirsk. According to the rules at that time, I had to do my diploma work there.[3] But because this was at the height of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, I received a refusal: after all, I was a Jew and had been abroad ─ even though during my childhood.

How did Zionism enter your life?

Via Drabkin or, more accurately, via his wife, who was educated in Riga in a Jewish gymnasium [academic high school] and grew up in a Jewish environment. We lacked this in Russia and therefore we became cosmopolitans. My first moment of lucidity occurred during the period of the Doctors’ Plot. I then understood that something was not right in the Soviet kingdom…it was a sick society. But nothing more than that. I was twenty-five and I was still a zealous Komsomol[4] member.

And then there was the Sinai Campaign in 1956.

I took an interest in it but nothing more. Israel was someplace far away in a fog.

And then there was the Six-Day War.

Yes, indeed! Then I understood that I had to go there. In my situation, however, nothing might come of it; it could remain a dream for my entire life. After all, from 1962 I had been working as the director of a laboratory and the chief designer of an anti-aircraft defense system for command points. Not bad, huh?

And when did you decide that you had to leave?

We decided to apply when we learned that Jews were leaving from Riga. Until then I didn’t know how it was done. And suddenly someone asked, “Do you want to meet with people from Riga who are immigrating to Israel?”

“Of course.” I thus met Mark Lapid to whom my wife Masha and I gave our data. It was November or December 1968. Then I informed my father who raised a big fuss….

…and refused to sign on his opinion about your departure?

He wasn’t even close. I said to him, “Write that you are against.” He said, “I won’t sign anything!” and that was it. He promised to do everything in his power to prevent us from leaving. Later, however, our documents were accepted without his opinion on the matter.

He severed all relations with us. I found out how he was doing via my cousin, his nephew. My brother said that my father ostensibly did not want to hear about us but our neighbor admitted that occasionally my father would come and ask permission to sit near the door and listen to his grandchildren’s voices. He was already 75 years old.

I was arrested eight years after we applied to leave. My father’s second wife related that when he learned this, he went and sat on the couch in the corner and began to rock back and forth and to mutter something in an unintelligible language. She was Russian and didn’t know this language. He didn’t eat and only drank…and three days later he died of a heart attack. For the entire three days he sat on the couch.

Volodia, how long did you work at the rank of chief designer?

Until I left work in 1969.

And in 1970 you already applied for an exit visa?

Impudent, wasn’t I? (He laughed).

Some kind of daredevil. You probably had zero access?

On the contrary, first level.[5] I was a member of a state commission for selecting the country’s anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense systems. The commission was headed by Col. General Tsyganov, the head of the country’s anti-aircraft defense headquarters. That’s the level it was. And I was the only non-party person among them.

You applied before Polskii, Prestin, and Abramovich.

A little earlier. Vilia Svechinskii, David Khavkin, and Tina Brodetskaia applied before me.

Volodia, you were a general designer of a military-oriented system. You had to have been a little crazy to submit documents right away.

I was a little crazy.

What were you counting on?

I don’t know. I left work because I decided to emigrate.

You decided and right away went for broke?

Not exactly. We got together and discussed matters. I even copied Hebrew textbooks with David Khavkin.

When?

In 1968 and 1969 by making copies of books from photos of pages. We rented a one-room apartment in which to do this. Not only textbooks. In Riga the newspaper Iton was published, and we also copied it.

Polskii and Prestin dealt with Exodus?

Yes, they worked on a typewriter. Later we got to know many Zionists. Once Izia Shmeller phoned from Novosibirsk ─ in Israel he became Izia Shamir ─  and said, “I made the acquaintance here of a girl at the KOGIZA warehouse ─ do you remember, it’s that organization that distributes books among the stores? ─ well, they got stuck with sixty copies of Shapiro’s dictionary. Do you need them?” “In a hurry,” I said. “You’ll get them but where can we get the money?” “How much is needed?” He named a sum; we announced a collection and sent him a money transfer.

For a long time OVIR would not accept my application for an exit visa. It was useless to try to get a reference from work and my father wouldn’t sign any paper. With the help of Volodia Prestin I found a job at the Geophysics Trust near Moscow. It consisted of transferring data from a seismogram into a computer-compatible form. Prestin and I worked on this. He, it’s true, mainly taught Hebrew.

After you finally succeeded in submitting documents, how did you view the situation?

I thought that would we get through all the same.

In a few months or years?

I knew that it would take more than a year but I thought that the earlier I started, the sooner I’d finish.

Why did your house quickly became the most-frequented one?

First of all, geography. We lived near from the hotels where the foreigners stayed. They would arrive at night, drop their suitcases in their rooms and come directly to me ─ even at three or four o’clock in the morning.

And within the movement?

Perhaps because of my brazenness and also because I knew some English, I would contact the correspondents.

Did you maintain relations with the general dissidents?

Vilia Svechinskii introduced me to them.

Did you sympathize with them?

Of course.

Were you yourself prepared to participate in their affairs?

Yes, but with the intention of leaving.

Did it not seem contradictory to you that you were fighting for the reformation of a country from which you intended to emigrate?

In any case I wanted to reform it, at least regarding the issue of emigration.

But the dissidents had a much broader view: democracy, human rights.

I wasn’t opposed to democracy or human rights. Now, too, I am not against that, and then it didn’t repel me.

That is, even before the Jew in you awoke, the dissident already existed?

We understood that we were in our own closed circle and had to find a way out, to connect to Israel but there was no Israeli embassy.

You did this with the help of the dissidents?

At first I gave them information to transmit to the foreign correspondents, who would dispatch it to the West. Then Volodia Bukovskii came to me and said, “I am being tailed so closely; I feel that I’ll be taken any day.” He brought with him correspondents from UPI and Reuters, saying, “Work directly with them. We wasted about three hours and were able to come without the tails.” Volodia indeed was taken two days later and I was picked up on the day after our meeting, directly at the gateway of our building, after a meeting with a foreign correspondent. But, unlike Bukovskii, I received only fifteen days. In March 1971.

In March I also received my first fifteen-day sentence in Sverdlovsk. Was any reason given for your arrest?

“Refusal to obey police orders” ─ petty hooliganism. Sanya [Slepak’s older son] went to tell Bukovskii that I had been taken. Do you remember, in those days there were such “magic slates” a children’s toy ─ you write on the plastic part and then you lift it up off the bottom and all that was written disappears. Of course there were listening devices all over Bukovskii’s place so Sanya wrote on such a plastic pad. Suddenly the door burst open and the KGB workers flew in…and the first thing they did was head for that writing pad but Sanya managed to erase it. He was detained and taken to the police station, where he was held for some time and then released but Bukovskii was arrested.

In 1971 activists began collective marches to the supreme organs of power, demonstrations, and public hunger strikes. From your point of view who stood out at that time as a leader or leadership group?

Formally there was no leadership. Moreover, we had an agreed principle among ourselves that we didn’t and would not have leaders or a formal organization. We could consult, help each other, and exchange information but we would not have an organization ─ we learned this from the Riga and Leningrad trials.

Many Jewish activists distanced themselves from general dissident activity. Lishkat hakesher objected to cooperation with the dissidents and even exerted pressure on some people.

And how!

Did they pressure you?

The guys from the establishment, “National Conference on Soviet Jewry” told me secretly that Nehemiah Levanon said about me, “His arrival in Israel is undesirable.”

Because of your dissidence?

Not entirely. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment tried their patience. The Israelis kept drumming into us that we should behave quietly.

When did the pressure begin?

It continued all the time. I remember when Congressman Vanik, the initiator of the amendment in Congress (the House of Representatives), came to visit us and begged us to write that we were against it. Jackson stood firm but Vanik was broken. We were constantly pressured from Israel. When I was told that Levanon (!) himself thought it was necessary to act quietly, and we would be brought out of the USSR by means of quiet diplomacy, I couldn’t contain myself and said on the phone to Israel that if he adheres to such an ideology, he should be driven from the leadership of the organization. At the time I didn’t even know what kind of organization.

What? They were against the Jackson-Vanik Amendment?

They were for it but they thought refyseniks shouldn’t actively advocate it.

 

Volodia Prestin (b. 1934), tall, wiry, and elegant looking, had the reputation of being an exceptionally honest and principled person. He had the nickname “the count.” The basis for this was not only his noble qualities but also his origins: his father came from a line of Russian nobility and on the maternal side his grandfather was the noted compiler of the Hebrew-Russian dictionary, Feliks L’vovich Shapiro.

Volodia, I need some clarifications about your ancestry: where and into what kind of family were you born?[6]

Mama wrote several short books; it’s all there. She wrote one about her father Feliks Shapiro, then about herself and her participation in the aliya movement, and then about her husband ─ my Russian father.

The aristocratic line comes from your father?

Yes, with regards to aristocracy, I don’t know, but they were noblemen. The counts, however, are Drabkin’s invention. At first I was teased as the count and then it somehow stuck. In my case everything started with the grandfathers ─ from the Russian and Jewish sides. From the Jewish side it was Shapiro, who wrote the famous dictionary. He was, of course, a completely unusual and very talented person.

Did you know him personally?

Yes. We lived in the same room for thirteen years.

Was your father persecuted because of his origin?

Yes.

In what year was he born?

Like my mother, in 1913.

That is, he was only four at the time of the revolution and grew up under the Soviet regime.

Yes, and they were such Komsomol members, mama especially. Father, in fact, restrained her in some matters. The Soviet regime carefully kept an eye on anyone in whom it took an interest. My father had to endure more than my Jewish stepfather, who was my father’s friend. My mother married him after my father’s death.

Did you know your father’s parents?

And how! His mother survived the blockade of Leningrad and died at the age of ninety. She studied at an institute for girls from the nobility and then in a conservatory; she used to sing at concerts. His father was one of the first radio operators in the Soviet Union. He was exiled. THEY eradicated the Russian part of my family. My grandfather married a second time ─ with Princess Khovanskaia; they were both exiled. And that was it. I don’t know anything more about them.

There isn’t even a grave?

Nothing.

What about your father?

When the war started, he volunteered for the army, what else! During the war he taught radio technology at a tank school in Moscow. He died in 1942 and was buried in the Novodevichii cemetery.

I thus lost my father rather early and even before then I didn’t really know him well. After the war we moved to Moscow, to the four-room apartment of my Jewish grandparents which my grandfather had built at one time for himself and his three daughters. I was placed in a room with my grandfather.

Was there anything special about this room?

This room was different from all the other ones in the apartment. It was full of Jewish books and there wasn’t one Russian book in it. Tall shelves extended from the floor to the ceiling, filled with Jewish books mainly in Yiddish and Hebrew.

Where did so many books in Hebrew come from?

What do you mean “from where”? Before the revolution many works were translated into Hebrew ─ Russian classics, and the works of Jewish writers were published. You can’t imagine what kind of a life there was in Hebrew and my grandfather lived this. He taught Hebrew from the start of his residence in Petersburg. In the Jewish school in Baku studies were conducted in Hebrew. This was his world and he preserved it in his room. He had only three books in Russian: Great Jews, Dubnov’s three–volume history, and the Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian.

Did this influence your development?

In some way, yes, but it’s rather difficult to formulate. I related positively to my grandfather’s activities but I can’t say that I took a particular interest in them at the time. However, from the age of ten my grandfather dealt with my upbringing. From 1945 to 1958, when I lived in that room, I was surrounded by Hebrew letters.

Did he try to teach you?

Never. Partly because of that his daughters didn’t know either Hebrew or Yiddish. My mother’s husband was Russian. Her older sister was married to a Russian. That’s how it was then. He didn’t try to exert influence in any direction.

And when did you yourself begin to take an interest

It was a long process that found expression in the idea that I didn’t want to be ashamed of my Jewish mother.

That is, you sensed that there was something shameful about belonging to the Jewish people?

In a Russian milieu I was considered Russian and heard and saw many antisemitic manifestations. They weren’t directed at me, but I saw everything and that was nightmarish and shameful. In our courtyard I was Shapiro; people knew the entire family very well. This was normal, however, and I didn’t have any problems there; I was able to defend myself. Indeed, antisemitism gradually became stronger and some tough kid began to tease me. I dragged him along the asphalt in one case.

Was there any turning point in your life after which you felt yourself a Zionist and decided to get involved in practical activity?

After graduating from the institute in 1958, Lena [Volodia Prestin’s wife] was assigned to the Electric Lamp factory at which Polskii, Slepak, Drabkin, and Libkovskii worked. Lena fell in with this company and then also introduced me to it. I now think that she consciously shielded me from various Russian groupings. In fact, they never made sense to me.

Did you ever feel any duality? Both of your formative sides were mighty powerful.

No I didn’t. After the war I lived in a Jewish family and Jewish milieu, which was natural for me. There was no duality. Our group didn’t understand that. The question that existed was whether it was necessary to leave. Yet, it was natural that I, registered as a Russian, was in essence a Jew and the question didn’t exist for me. I immediately married a Jewess and I chose her because of that.

When did you hold your first Zionist discussions?

Real, serious ones took place rather late, when I was thirty years old. Don’t forget, it was 1964. Our son Mishka was born. We had already traveled for several years on tourist trips inside the Soviet Union.  At the time tourism was typically a way of getting away from the existing regime into a forest or wherever so as not to see or hear anything.

Did you first have a dissident attitude toward the regime?

I can’t even say that there was such an attitude or that Drabkin, Polskii, and Libkovskii were great “democrats.” Dissidence as a group concept didn’t yet exist and they were not yet Jewish nationalists. Yet there was something, perhaps not very rational, that they all understood. For example, they understood the reason why they landed at that factory and were received in a certain way. They were four or five years older than I and thus more mature during the last years of Stalinism, and they better understood the nature of the regime. I felt it more with my back than my heart. Well, there are tourists and there are tourists. Later, I realized that we didn’t become tourists by accident or accidentally wind up together. In general, I am not a tourist but every summer we traveled either to the Dnepr, the Volga or to the Baltics or the North.

Through Drabkin’s wife, who was from Riga, we had a connection with that city. Drabkin himself is a very intelligent person. In the Baltics people’s Jewish consciousness was already raised after the Sinai Campaign in 1956 whereas with us it started only after 1967. Yet by 1964 I already knew that I would go to Israel. That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? We moved forward very quickly. We already had printed material and journals. After a few trips to the Baltics, Drabkin couldn’t talk about any other topic than the Jewish question.

When did you apply for an exit visa?

In 1970. We all continued to travel together and celebrated Jewish holidays together. We didn’t celebrate any other holidays. This was even before the Six-Day War. People started to receive exit visas in 1968, after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. Whereas before the Six-Day War people were allowed to leave only on the basis of an invitation from first degree relatives such as parents and siblings, now it was permitted to go to aunts and uncles. After this I didn’t have any doubts that things would work out. Everyone immediately requested invitations from Israel.

Who was the leader in your group?

Drabkin and Libkovskii on Jewish matters. They left rather quickly. I remember Libkovskii’s agonizing about whether to leave or not. He seriously considered remaining in order to struggle for everyone else. We were very ardent then.

 

Prominent academics and scientists joined the movement at the end of 1971—beginning of 1972; among them were Aleksandr Lerner, Benyamin Levich, Aleksandr Voronel, Vitalii Rubin, and Mark Azbel. Their involvement significantly enhanced the movement’s authority and expanded its international links and support, a development that the Soviet leadership had to take into account. Scientific seminars arose in Moscow and other cities and new samizdat appeared. Scientists opened their front in the struggle for aliya and for survival during the period of refusal.