Prior to the actions of Yasha Kazakov and Boris Kochubievskii, it was not accepted practice in Jewish circles to defy the authorities openly or ensure that such a challenge would be widely publicized abroad. The wave of national pride after the Six-Day War and the revulsion evoked by the Soviet position provided a sufficiently strong impetus for some activists to undertake the challenge. The emigration that began in 1968 and the support extended to the movement by the West imparted a feeling of strength to a considerably broader circle of activists.

When we were denied an exit visa in 1969, recalls Vitalii Svechinskii,[1] it seriously affected our mood. We gathered at Meir Gel’fond’s apartment in Sokolniki in Moscow to discuss whether to continue with the samizdat or start some new form of activity. At that time I was already very familiar with the democratic movement and the democrats’ self-sacrifice. I knew the Crimean Tatars [who were involved in the dissident movement in order to restore their rights in the Crimea].

The authorities dealt even more harshly with them than with the Jews….

Yes, they didn’t waste time on niceties with them—they gave it to them right in the mug, off to the punishment cell, and on to the labor camp. Who could intercede for them in the West, who needed them? I said then, mainly to Meir although Khavkin was there also but he didn’t express his opinion because he already had a visa and was getting ready to leave: “Guys, it’s impossible to continue living this way. We must emerge from the underground. We must write letters and get published in the western press.” Khavkin supported me because his whole nature was drawn to open activity.

Was this in accordance with the example set by the democrats?

It was the example of the democrats, Baptists, and others. The first one to do so was Yura Mal’tsev, with whom we were friendly. He wrote a letter in 1965: “I cannot live in this country whose government I despise.” He was immediately sent to an insane asylum but international public opinion was marshaled to get him out—demonstrations began and he was released. That was the first harbinger, in 1965.

Did you try to consult with the Liaison Bureau [Nativ]?

With what Bureau! Thank G-d they were not around then, and if they had been, then we wouldn’t have succeeded in anything. They would have said, “No, no, Israel forbids it,” and when Israel opposed us, we would have been crestfallen and done nothing. That’s it! They were not around and we were on our own. Later, when I had already arrived in Israel and spoke with Nehemia [Levanon, former head of the Bureau], he asked me, “How did you figure out not to hook up with the democrats?”

But you were connected to the democrats. You probably did not participate in their undertakings, however…

No, I did participate—following Jabotinsky’s tenets; I am his faithful and grateful pupil. According to him, we should not ignore a progressive movement. We ought to participate but within measure and we shouldn’t violate this proportionate response. There should not be a situation in which Jews constitute one percent of the country’s population but comprise 75 percent of the signatories to letters in defense of the democratic dissidents Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovol’skii, and Lazhkova.

 I said, “Guys, people are already freely expressing their opinion, Amalrik’s work has already been published (Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?), the Chronicle of Current Events is coming out although in samizdat, and Valerii Chalidze, whom I know very well, invites over all the democrats on his birthday.” Petr Iakir joked there, “Valera, if your ceiling would collapse, Russia would be spared from the democratic movement for the next decade.” Everyone was there, including Chalidze’s friend Boris Isaakovich Tsukerman. Those two physicists fulfilled the functions of lawyers. Chalidze had already produced openly a collection of samizdat with the  producer’s address, telephone, and name, and we were still playing games. It was time to go out into the open. I said, “It is disgraceful that we’re this way….” Then Meir jumped up; he couldn’t sit any longer. It was the first time that we started cursing. He yelled, “You adventurer, you want Jewish blood, you want us to get arrested, you want to cut down our movement at the root…. We just got started, we have assembled a few dozen Jews around us and you want to destroy everything.” He knew how to speak well, he raked me over the coals—it was terrible ….

But here for the first time in my life I started to object and said, “Meir, I won’t argue with you. You are right. Maybe not everyone ought to do that, but those who want to should do so. Let’s divide up: I’ll be group ‘alef’ and you will be group ‘bet.’ We won’t socialize together and if we need to communicate, then only via a public telephone or an intermediary. I shall be ‘treif’ (non-kosher) and you’ll be ‘kosher. Period.’ Khavkin supported me and we decided on this plan and dispersed. But this idyll lasted only about three months. Then everything got mixed up together.

 There’s a whole story connected with our first letter. David Drabkin wrote it in September 1969. Later he began to write well and his letters circulated at the synagogue but this first letter was awful. It was just five to six lines:

“We do not understand the Soviet regime’s reason for forcibly detaining us in this country.” He thought it was a great discovery to refer to Auschwitz. In short, we edited the letter. Drabkin made a big fuss but he corrected it.

This was the so-called “Letter of Ten.” When he left, Khavkin contrived to carry it out of the country in the picture tube of his television. Of course at that time he was frisked in a thorough manner. After an hour, when the frisk had not yet ended, I shouted to Tina Brodetskaia that all the signatories to the letter should run home and clear out their apartments [of any incriminating material]. I didn’t know at the time where he had hidden the letter. I thought perhaps it was in the buckle of his pants as we had often discussed, but he had a better idea, he hid it in the television tube. I thought that if they found the letter, they would see all our names and would go immediately to carry out searches in our apartments. Therefore we had to quickly safeguard them.

Later, when I began to tell David Khavkin what a commotion his search had caused among those who came to bid him farewell, he smiled and said unhurriedly, “I was thoroughly ‘stuffed.’ It was not only the television picture tube; I also took out the insides and stuffed a dozen condensers. They searched me for two days and didn’t find anything.”

The letter campaign was a Jewish challenge to the regime, full of passion with the authors’ signatures and addresses:

“In 1957 I was convicted because of Zionism,” wrote Tina Brodetskaia, in an open letter to Soviet leader Aleksei Kosygin. “I have not changed my views…. In the absence of Jewish schools, institutions, press, or Yiddish theater, in the absence of an opportunity to express one’s national essence or to educate the growing generation in a national spirit, the Jewish people in the USSR… are doomed to forced assimilation. I do not wish to assimilate. My aspiration is unshakeable…”[2]

On August 6, 1969 eighteen Jewish families from Georgia wrote an appeal to the UN Commission on Human Rights. It was accompanied by three notes. The first was addressed to “the friends of Anne Frank” in the Dutch embassy with a request to forward their letter to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (at that time Holland represented Israel’s interest in the USSR). The second, with a request to forward their letter to the UN, was addressed to Golda Meir. The authors also asked the prime minister to publish their letter in the press and to broadcast it in Russian on Kol Yisrael, the Israeli radio station. The third note was addressed to the Israeli UN representative Yosef Tekoa. It contained a request to disseminate their letter among all UN members and to publish it in the press with the signatories’ names and addresses. [3] The letter expressed a national religious spirit. It evidently produced a very strong impression on Jews in the West.

Our prayers are with Israel, as it says in the psalms, “Let my right hand wither, if I forget you, Jerusalem….”

There is no country that harbored Jews in which they did not show their gratitude through their labor. And what did the Jews receive in exchange?

If all lived tolerably, then the Jews fearfully anticipated other times. But if it became bad for everyone, the Jews knew that their fatal hour had come and they either hid or escaped from the country.

Those who escaped had to start all over again. And whoever was unable to escape, perished…..

And if they wandered over the face of the earth without shelter, all found a place with G-d.

And if their remains were dispersed all over the world, their memory is alive.

Their blood flows through our veins; their tears are our tears.

The prophecy has been realized: Israel has arisen from the ashes. We did not forget Jerusalem and it needs our hands….

We request that the UN Commission on Human Rights take all measures dependent on it to ensure that the government of the USSR permit us to depart in the shortest time possible…. We shall wait months and years, all our life if necessary, but we shall not renounce our faith or hope.

We believe that our prayers have reached G-d.

We know that our appeals will reach people.

For we are not asking for much—let us go to the land of our ancestors.[4]

When Golda read this letter to the Knesset, it is said that she had tears in her eyes. But she did not read it right away. Israel was following the recommendations of Nativ (the Bureau) not to publish such letters. Shaul Avigur, whose services to the Jewish state were never in doubt, was deeply convinced that any activity in support of emigration must be carried out in conditions of strict secrecy and military censorship. He considered that the best way of liberating Soviet Jews was by means of secret negotiations that had proven their effectiveness in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland in the 1950s. In 1969 Avigur retired but he continued to exert a decisive influence on Israeli policy toward emigration from the USSR.

The Georgian and Russian Jews’ letters might not have been published were it not for the arrival at that time of young and energetic immigrants from the Soviet Union: Leah Slovina, Dov Shperling, Yasha Kazakov, and others advocated that Israel engage in an active and public struggle. They were not willing to stand by quietly and submit to what they considered was a destructive policy, a position that was shared by some influential Israelis. Receiving information about the situation in the Soviet Union and letters, petitions, and appeals from friends and relatives these immigrants began publicly to disclose their contents.[5]

“Shulamit Aloni broke the strict censorship,” recalls Yakov Kedmi.[6] “Some issue arose regarding certain refuseniks and we wanted to put a notice in the newspaper. Shula spoke about this from the Knesset podium, criticizing the censorship. Golda was very angry at her because of this.” After this case Golda decided to take the “disturbers of the peace” in hand and invited twenty new immigrants to a meeting with the prime minister.

In August 1969 you met Prime Minister Golda Meir. What was the reason for this? I asked the noted Riga activist Leah Slovina.[7]

Golda wanted to pacify us, we were rebellious, answered Leah.

And what did you tell her?

I don’t remember who said what; I remember what I said and everyone agreed with me. I said that it is not enough that people from abroad try to open the doors for the Jews. Soviet Jews themselves must push these doors from their side. As long as the Jews there will sit silently, nothing will happen. But the Jews won’t be able to conduct a massive struggle to emigrate if there won’t be a commotion abroad because only this hullabaloo, only this open struggle supporting them will act as their shield. But Golda said, “This is a gross error. You will provoke mass arrests there.” We didn’t agree with her evaluation. “The activists see,” I said, “that they let out precisely those who make the most noise. It mobilizes a lot of people.”

Did you succeed in convincing her?

Of course not. She gave us the example of the excellent and large Rumanian aliya that arrived on the basis of a secret agreement but was halted as soon as word of it appeared in the western press. She also said that in her opinion the Soviet Union would never permit aliya under pressure; it could be attained only via unpublicized diplomatic connections around the world. That was her position but she also did not convince us.

What prompted her three months after that meeting to change her position and to read the Letter of the Eighteen and Tina Brodetskaia’s letter from the Knesset podium?

Golda had a Jewish heart and undoubtedly the Georgian letter produced a strong emotional effect on her. Golda had a psychological trauma—many people whom she had met when she was Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union had been arrested. I think that she genuinely feared that there could be massive arrests there again. But despite her and against her wishes, this initiative on behalf of Soviet Jewry spread around the world and she was unable to stop it. The Israeli press began to publish articles and information from the foreign press. The genie escaped from the bottle and it was no longer possible to force it back in.

What do you mean by “despite her and against her wishes”?

We developed links with influential people who were willing to help us such as Ann and Yisrael Shenkar, Geula Cohen, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. They offered us their connections. When the censorship didn’t permit information to appear in Israel, we conveyed it to Europe or America. It would be printed there and then reprinted in Israeli newspapers; it was already impossible to prohibit that.

The Bureau probably went crazy?

When Yasha Kazakov and Dov Shperling went to the US in December 1969,[8] I traveled there soon after them. The Bureau suggested to the Israeli embassy in the US that we might be linked to the KGB. It recommended that an effort be made to prevent us from meeting with American Jews.

Not only recent immigrants pressured the Israeli establishment. Many activists inside the Soviet Union began to change their tactics. They perceived the Soviet regime’s vulnerable spots better than the people in Nativ and they took a risk, testing the new bounds of the possible. Realizing that activism could become an exit ticket and publication in the West an insurance policy against harsh persecution, activists began to reach out to the western media, circumventing the Israeli channel. The Bureau’s ability to control information diminished. Many of the activists’ appeals began to circulate in Israel as samizdat.

Golda was traumatized by the numerous arrests of Jews in the Stalinist period. Nativ had to exercise the utmost caution: some of its workers had themselves been in the Stalinist camps in the prewar period and others had been expelled from the Soviet Union because of contacts with Jews. Moreover, in the final analysis, the Soviet regime exercised complete control over the life and security of Jewish activists. This was true. But it was also true that many Nativ workers continued to operate on the basis of Stalinist-era notions at a time when the regime had undergone serious transformations, having passed through the stages of the struggle against “excesses” of the Stalinist regime, the deideologization of Soviet society, and the constant reshuffling of the secret services and other power agencies. The period of mass repressions had passed and been subject to public condemnation and it was not so easy to revive them.

When Golda Meir read the letters of Tina Brodetskaia and the Georgian families she said:

The Soviet Union has no other alternative but to acknowledge that it has failed, after more than half a century, to silence the Jewish voice. It failed to forcibly detach millions of Soviet Jews from Jewish and Hebrew creativity. The Soviet leadership should have the courage to admit its failure and let the Jews go. We sincerely believe that the day will come when we shall witness a large wave of aliya from the Soviet Union….

We have always wanted to live at peace with the Soviet Union. We never sought to interfere in its internal affairs just as we never expected the Soviet Union to interfere in ours…. But we cannot renounce our own legitimate interests in the fate of Soviet Jewry for the sake of some doubtful friendship with the Soviet Union, a country that, by its actions in this region, has put our very existence in question.[9]

The Israeli representative to the UN Yosef Tekoa presented the letter of the Georgian Jews at a press conference in New York. The Knesset dealt with the condition of Soviet Jews at several sessions and adopted a resolution calling on the Soviet Union to permit immigration to Israel.

The Soviet Union reacted immediately to the Israeli prime minister’s speech. An overseas broadcast on November 29 declared that the Letter of Eighteen Georgian Jews was an Israeli government falsification.

The Soviet foreign press service Novosti soon changed its tune. A statement disseminated by the Soviet mission assured UN members that the eighteen signatories were continuing to work and were not subject to any harassment. At the same time the authorities in Soviet Georgia tried to force the signatories to renounce their signatures and they also warned those attending the Tbilisi synagogue that the continuation of Zionist activity would be dangerous for the Jewish community. The Georgian Jews responded to this with new appeals.[10]

A subsequent letter was known as “Homeland or death”:

One hundred days ago, the Georgian Jews wrote,[11] we already appealed to the UN with a request to help us emigrate. We wrote that each of us, having received an invitation from a relative in Israel, received the necessary forms and oral promises from the authorized Soviet organs not to hinder our departure. Each of us, expecting to leave any day, sold his possessions, including his home and was fired from work…. A year passed (for many, more than one year) and nothing has changed….

During these hundred days not one of us nor any members of our family reconsidered; we all want to return to Israel and there is no force that could stop us….

We…shall never renounce the right to live in the land of Israel for we are an inseparable part of the Jewish people, having retained its faith and traditions.

May our prayers reach your mind and your conscience, Mr. Secretary-General. We are waiting for your help, for time is passing quickly.

We do not fear anything, for alive or dead, we are children of Israel.

In September 1969 the appeal of the Moscow activists Lev Shinkar and David Drabkin was published. This was followed by a collective appeal to world Jewry from ten Moscow activists of the Svechinskii, Drabkin, and Gel’fond group. The State of Israel is the Jews’ historic and spiritual homeland, they declared, and their aspiration is to realize their legitimate right to make aliya. A second collective letter signed by 25 activists was addressed to the UN Secretary-General U Thant and the chair of the 24^th General Assembly session Angie Brooks. The authors stressed that they were unable to resolve the problem of their emigration from within the country and therefore they were appealing to the international organization on the basis on section 13B of the Declaration of Human Rights (“Each person has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to it.”).

This was followed by the Appeal of the Forty.[12]

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews streaming to their radio receivers heard all this: the letter of the Georgian Jews, Golda’s statement, Tekoa’s press conference and much more that was broadcast on Israel radio. The circle was closed: Israel spoke out loud and clear, sending an open challenge to the Soviet Union and supporting the Soviet Jews’ appeals in international bodies.

The Georgians’ letter and Tina Brodetskaia’s letter were done very well. Golda read them aloud but not our letter, recalls Vitalii Svechinskii.[13] When Golda was speaking there was an air of excitement in the Knesset hall. When she read Tina’s letter, Menachem Begin shouted from his seat, “What do we need Wilner[14] for? Let’s exchange him for Tina Brodetskaia.” The Georgians’ letter was emotional, religious, and apolitical; therefore it was published. But Khavkin succeeded in sending our letter to the States, where it was published in the Jewish press and from there made its way to Posev [the Russian émigré press] and to Radio Liberty. My Roma[15] was then working for Radio Liberty in Manhattan, and when he saw my signature in his morning mail, his eyes dimmed from surprise at our daring.

How did you contact the foreign correspondents?

The Jews had episodic meetings with the correspondents. Drabkin and Khavkin somehow managed to meet them but we lacked the reliable, durable connection that the democrats had. As soon as something happened to them, it immediately became known in the West. I urged Petr Iakir, “Petia, do a good deed for the Jewish movement. After all, you’re a Jew, Petia!” “You son of a gun,” said Petia, “o.k., I’ll introduce you to a correspondent. Meet me this evening at the Maiakovskii subway station.” I came to the subway stop and saw Petia, his wife Valiusha, Viktor Krasin, of course, and a tall foreign-looking fellow in a stylish fall coat. Petia, as always, was a little tipsy. “Here, let me introduce you,” he said, pointing to me, “a Jew, their leader, and this one,” pointing to the foreigner, “Adam Kellett-Long, the representative for Reuters in the Soviet Union. I wish you success.” We walked together down Kaliaevskaia Street to the apartment where the correspondents were living.

Kellett-Long was very interested in me because he hadn’t met with any Jews yet and this was a hot topic for New York Jews and for America in general. He had already met Tatars and dissidents and evangelists, even Volga Germans but no Jews. We talked the whole way. I told him all about our movement, whether there were many young people or older ones, what was happening with regard to emigration, antisemitism, in short, about everything. He posed intelligent questions. Near his house we exchanged telephones and addresses and parted. Then we began to speak over the phone. He called me and I called him freely. Kellett-Long introduced me to the Washington Post correspondent Frank Starr and we became quite friendly. He was simply a dear person. I often visited him in America and stayed there. We did something good in connection with the well-known television interview when Soviet authorities assembled the “court” Jews—Bystritskaia, Raikin, and General Dragunskii were there.[16]

And Raikin participated?

Yes, it was obligatory; I remember how he participated. He was dragged out to the stage as if he were a marionette; he looked at the floor, mumbled something, and left the stage as if he had a heart problem. Bystritskaia sat like the heroine Aksin’ia from the novel Quiet Flows the Don, nodding her head as if she wanted to say, “What nonsense this is, what is this Israel, what is this?” It was shameful! A terrible thing! It was 1970. After that Chalidze phoned me and said, “Vilia, I couldn’t sleep all night because of you. I wrote a text. If one of you is willing to sign it, I’ll be happy.” I ran over to him and took the text. It seemed splendid to me then, and until this day I think it is an excellent text. Valera cared a lot about our safety. From the legal point of view the text was irreproachable. It became known as the Letter of the 39.

Why did he do that?

Why not, after all we were in touch; he sympathized with us a lot. He is a very intelligent person and understood very well what the Jewish movement was and what the Jews represent in the history of mankind. He didn’t need to be convinced.

We signed the letter at Drabkin’s place. He thought that I wrote it, but I didn’t want to lie and said that Chalidze wrote the letter.

To this day, I don’t know how I remained alive. Drabkin was hopping mad. He screamed that I was betraying the Jewish people, I was going to the goyim, we were again going to them for help as if they would save us! What a disgrace! He screamed fiercely. I calmed him down and said, “Look, this is a very respected person who wrote this. Thanks to such people we have raised our voice. These people set an example for us. He shares our pain and of his own will feels compelled to write a letter for our Jewish cause without asking or demanding anything but he will be happy if as many people as possible sign it—and this is his compensation—and you will still carry on with your Yid sniveling?”

Drabkin consented and, I think, signed first. And another 38 people signed. It worked out well. The next day we met Frank Starr near the old Moscow circus. We went down the steps and into the circus courtyard so that if I succeeded in conveying the letter to him, it would be in his hands, not mine. Frank, after all, had immunity—he couldn’t be stopped on the street and frisked. The correspondents understood this very well and at meetings they would propose, “Well, quickly, give it to me and then we’ll talk.” I arranged my own press conference for Frank and explained everything.

We also sent a copy to Leonid Zamiatin, the Soviet spokesman, but he, naturally, did not respond to us. We therefore considered ourselves free to publish it everywhere possible. Frank glanced over the letter, evaluated its worth, and said, “Onward, fellows, stand firm.” Marik El’baum and I left, grabbed a taxi and spent one and a half rubles of public money on this matter. Usually we were not such spenders but we didn’t know whether or not we were being followed, and it was easier to check in a taxi. We verified that no one was following us.

In the morning Esther Isaakovna Eisenshtadt phoned me, “Vilia, I listened to our letter! How could it be? After all, it seems like I just signed it and it is already being broadcast on Radio Liberty…it’s a kind of a miracle.” “They have a speedy way of sending things,” I said, “teletypes….”

The letter was addressed to the director of the USSR Foreign Ministry’s press department and said, in part:

We are among those Jews who persistently express our desire to immigrate to Israel and receive invariable refusals from the official Soviet bodies.

We are among those Jews who have often sent open declarations about this to the Soviet press but those letters were never published.

We are among the Jews who were not invited to the March 4 press conference and who were not asked to express their views.

We…are ready at any moment, even by foot, to set out to the State of Israel; we appeal to you to afford us the opportunity to speak at a press conference in front of Soviet and foreign journalists with the following statement:[17]

The purpose of the press conference [of March 4] was to demonstrate that its participants achieved a prominent position in society despite their Jewish origin, but that was all that they were able to prove because their Jewish origin does not mean that they retained a spiritual link with Jewish national culture. Undoubtedly every Jew has the right to any degree of assimilation; we, however, do not want to lose our national distinctiveness and our spiritual link with our people.

We pay homage to the sons of the Jewish people who accepted torture and death in the name of preserving national distinctiveness; for the Jewish nation was preserved thanks to them. We are proud of our people, who over millennia of suffering retained their religion, language, culture and national characteristics and we are proud that this people now found the will to revive the State of Israel and defend it….

The arguments offered at the press conference in support of an anti-repatriation policy are not even worthy of discussion.

We shall insist on our right to determine our fate, including the choice of citizenship and country of residence. We are capable on our own of evaluating the potential difficulties awaiting us connected to military occurrences or the change of climate or social order….

The Jewish people experienced considerable persecution and suffering, many malicious or well-meaning campaigns for assimilation, and it managed to retain its distinctiveness.

We believe that now, too, the Jews will not respond to the anti-Israel campaign with renunciation but, on the contrary, their pride in their people will be reinforced and they will proclaim, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Moscow, March 8, 1970

David Drabkin’s signature on the letter was indeed the first. It was followed by the signatures of Lev Freidin, Boris Shlaen, and Dora Koliaditskaia. Among the signatories were Tina Brodetskaia, Vladimir Prestin, Vladimir and Mariia Slepak, Leonid Libkovskii, Vitalii Svechinskii, and Iosif Kazakov. The signature of the noted democrat, poet, and mathematician Iulius Telesin concluded the list. It was number forty. The Letter of 39 was thus really a Letter of Forty but Telesin’s signature was added after the letter had been sent abroad.

It was an era of petitions, continued Vilia Svechinskii. Next was the Letter of 25; then there were letters from Riga, Kiev, Kharkov, and Vilnius. Then Meir Gel’fond phoned me, berated me in prison-camp style, and said afterwards  “What are you doing, you are robbing me in the most scoundrelly way, I remained alone.”

We met and decided that the epoch of samizdat had ended and an open struggle would begin, at least on the level of the printed word.

Then Frank Starr introduced me to an astonishing person, the correspondent of the Norwegian paper Aftenposten blat Per Hege, who became my friend. Later he visited me in Haifa and stayed at my place. At one time he got into trouble because he got caught sending Solzhenitsyn’s material to the West. At that time there was a rule that if the correspondent of any newspaper was expelled as “persona non grata,” then that newspaper was not permitted to have its representation in Moscow. They would punish the newspaper, which, as we know, is a commercial enterprise. But Per somehow was not expelled from the USSR and he forwarded hundreds of sheets of material to me. The problems of Soviet Jewry became well known and there was an inflation of petitions; housewives began to write letters of protest about how they were insulted or that they had a granddaughter in Israel and hadn’t seen her for a long time…. And he took it all, the poor guy.

When did the regime start pressuring?

Sometime in April I was going to work at Moszhilproekt [the state architectural design office], which is near the Lubianka prison on Kuibyshev Street. I was on a trolleybus and turned around—there was the familiar mug of Iakir’s KGB tail; Petia once pointed him out to me. I thought to myself that this time, apparently, he’s after me. I looked out the window: a series of Volga cars was following the trolley—four—tailing but not demonstratively. They accompanied me up to my place of work. When I went out to dine, they were still waiting there. In the evening they accompanied me home—that is, round the clock tailing. Then I came down with the grippe and stayed home for three days. When I left the house to go to the clinic, a woman was following me. This continued for two and a half months until June 15, 1970 when they arrested the fellows in connection with the airplane hijacking plot. I met with Per Hege during this time that I was being tailed. I managed to break away from them with the help of a few tricks in the subway. I exited at the Mayakovsky station and my handsome Per was standing there in striped red and white gaiters, a beret on his head, and some crazy jacket. He was visible a kilometer away. “Per, you fine fellow, in general…you really stand out!” I said. “Why are you embarrassed?” responded Per smiling. “I was being tailed but I managed to get away,” I said. “Well, all in vain,” smiled Per, “look over there, they followed me all the way.”

I look and see a KGB agent standing openly and brazenly looking at us with his car waiting there. “Your belly is really protruding!” noted Per, who didn’t stop smiling. “Well, yes,” I answered somewhat anxiously, ”I’m completely stuffed. Let’s get into the car fast.”

We got into the car and he headed for the Belarus train station while I unloaded all my material and put it under the seat. The tails were following us. The light was red but Per continued on the red across the entire Belarus Square while the tails were hesitant to run the light and stopped. Driving very fast, he went to Dynamo where he made a right turn and tossed me into a snowdrift. I ran to my friends to drink coffee and he proceeded on with all the material. I remember that in general he was a big adventurer, my Per; sometimes my heart simply skipped a few beats.[18]

Those labeled “the Jews of Silence” by Elie Wiesel thus began to acquire a voice, gradually gaining confidence and strength. This voice of protest evoked a broad response in the West among those who were fighting for Soviet Jews’ emigration. Freedom of emigration and the cultural rights of national minorities had long been a generally accepted norm in the enlightened world; therefore, information received from activists harmed the Soviet propaganda campaign abroad and frequently put the Soviet leaders in an awkward position.

No one at the time could predict the consequences of these actions for the activists themselves: would it become a lucky ticket for emigration or a cause for retribution against those who disturbed the peace, or perhaps they would encounter a blank wall. In any case, the transition from underground samizdat to open protest was difficult to stop.

The Jews became bolder about signing collective declarations. The small stream quickly turned into a powerful torrent of appeals, letters, petitions, and declarations. They went from every corner of the Soviet Union to Israel, international organizations, the American Congress, and political and social figures in the West. Even when sending appeals to official Soviet bodies (the general prosecutor, the interior minister, the administrative organs of the Central Committee, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the general-secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, and so forth), the activists took care that copies of the documents reached the West. Sometimes this was the sole point of the appeal. The torrent gathered strength together with the growth of emigration and public support from abroad.

The largest petition that reached the West contained the signatures of 1185 representatives of families (4056 people). It was addressed to the UN Secretary-General U Thant and the UN Commission on Human Rights. The signatories were from Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Bukhara, Tashkent, Leningrad, Moscow, the Ural regions, and Siberia. It was sent out at the very height of the First International Conference in Brussels devoted to the struggle to free Soviet Jews (23-25 of February 1971).

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