Konstantin Chernenko, the general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and the last of a string of faceless Kremlin elders who had ruled the USSR and the socialist camp for the last several decades, died on March 10, 1985 at the age of 73. Soviet society welcomed the sight of the young, energetic Gorbachev, a person capable of walking normally and speaking without a prompt, at the top of the ruling pyramid. Finally, the public did not need to be ashamed of its leader.

At the time of Gorbachev’s accession, the country was already in a state of deep stagnation. The planned economy was on the skids, consumer goods were in scarce supply, and the store shelves were empty. The primary source of state income─hard currency from oil exports─declined by a third from 1885 to 1986 as a result of the sharp fall in oil prices. The Afghans learned to down Soviet planes and helicopters, thus depriving the Soviet troops of their air advantage and considerably increasing the number of casualties. The Afghan war seemed endless, and chilling rumors spread among the masses about a stream of lead caskets with soldiers’ mutilated bodies, which the authorities refused to open for relatives. On April 26, 1986, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, emitting poisonous clouds of radioactive dust that covered half of Europe. The initial failure to react officially further undermined trust in the government.

Although the USSR was one of the two superpowers at the time, the head of the socialist camp and the Warsaw Pact military organization, it lagged hopelessly behind the West, dragging the entire socialist camp, after it. Dissatisfaction grew in the satellite countries.

When he came to power, Gorbachev did not intend to dismantle the communist system. A party functionary from the agricultural Stavropol region, he himself had been nurtured by this system, and he thought he could breathe renewed life into it. New key terms entered the communist lexicon: “speeding up,” “new thinking,” “restructuring” (perestroika), and “openness” (glasnost). These beautiful slogans were introduced into a totalitarian country with a fossilized party-governmental apparatus. Hardly anyone, including to a significant degree Gorbachev himself, really understood what he had in mind.

An experienced apparatchik, Gorbachev began with an effort to strengthen his own authority. He brought in his supporters to key positions in the ruling Politburo, dismissing hostile functionaries, thus clearing the field for decisive measures. [I changed a bit]

Concerned primarily with accelerating the country’s economic development and halting the arms race, Gorbachev was least interested in Jewish issues and Jewish emigration. Inertia continued to operate in that sphere. A total of 904 people emigrated in 1986; anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish material still appeared in the media; arrests of activists continued; and the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public did not cease its activity. It wasn’t so much a matter of not getting around to dealing with those issues but more of a conscious choice: Gorbachev, as he often declared subsequently, “did not want to let such talented, industrious people leave the USSR.”[1]

At the first Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Geneva on November 19, 1985, however, it became clear that the Americans were very serious about the issues of human rights in general and Jewish emigration in particular. The U.S. position was very clear: there could not be real trust between the superpowers in the field of disarmament at the same time as the Soviets were blatantly violating the Helsinki agreements on humanitarian issues. Jewish organizations and especially the president of the National Conference for Soviet Jewry, Morris Abrams, lobbied precisely for this link. Although the second summit, in Reykjavik, was seen as a failure with regard to humanitarian issues, there was a breakthrough regarding the suggestion raised at the previous summit to start a dialogue and designate individuals to deal with human rights: the USSR agreed to form a joint group to continue discussions on that topic. The group was created in April 1987 and played an extremely important role in the democratization of the country and in creating conditions for free emigration.

The refuseniks at first reacted skeptically to the perestroika rhetoric. They had already seen waves of détente roll over their heads to be followed by another wave of repressions. Their skepticism was heightened by the lack of change in the situation as a whole during the first years of Gorbachev’s rule: emigration remained at the minimal level, activists continued to sit in prisons and new ones were arrested, and the movement continued its campaign to leave the country.

Gorbachev came to power after the most difficult and gloomy period of our struggle. Toward its end, when the prospects still remained unclear, refusenik women tried to support their husbands’ struggle and in some way to take their places in the hope that the regime would not deal so harshly with them.

At the beginning of 1984, on the basis of kindergartens and refusenik schools, a women’s group under the leadership of Alla Praisman was formed. The activist women fought for the right to renounce Soviet citizenship, organized press conferences, and appealed to international women’s organizations for help. The group included Roza Finkelberg, Katia Yusefovich, Olia Yoffe, Ira Gurevich, Zhanna Litvak, Marina Kontsevaya, Zoia Kopelman and others.

A second woman’s group was organized in 1985, when Gorbachev was already in power. Initiated by Yulia Ratner, Ida Nudel, and Nelli Mai, it was called “Jewish Women for Emigration and Survival in Refusal.” The group struggled for the right to emigrate, took care of the needy, compiled lists of refuseniks, and went en masse to the Central Committee and to OVIR with prepared appeals.

Admittedly, Gorbachev knew how to make an impression on Western leaders. For decades Western democracies had been intimidated by Soviet leaders’ stern faces, harsh rhetoric backed up by nuclear might, and their indifference to human victims. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader who succeeded in eliminating this fear at the state and popular levels. People saw an open, benevolent-looking person who was prepared to take practical steps to reinforce his words about striving for peace and mutual understanding. A few months after he took over, Gorbachev replaced the stone-faced Andrei Gromyko with Eduard Shevardnadze as foreign minister.

A “Thaw” again wafted in the air. The editors-in chief of several newspapers and journals were replaced and previously forbidden books began to be published (A. Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and others). Previously forbidden films were screened and jamming of the Voice of America and the BBC was halted.

The Western public reacted favorably to the early release from prison of Anatoly Shcharansky. Undersecretary of State Richard Schifter wrote: “In February 1986, Anatoly Shcharansky was released from prison and was allowed to leave the country, but only in the context of an exchange in which the United States released a number of Soviet citizens who had been convicted of spying…. In the summer of 1986, I received a visit from a Soviet foreign ministry official, Yurii Kashlev, who told me that a new emigration law was about to be promulgated, but that was all.” [2]

Shcharansky’s release, attempts to establish a direct dialogue with activists, and the perestroika rhetoric created a sense that some deep stirrings in the Soviet system were beginning to affect the human rights sphere. In December 1986, however, when Deputy Foreign Minister Anatolii Kovalev proposed holding a conference on humanitarian issues in Moscow,[3] the refuseniks gave it the cold shoulder. At the time we didn’t believe in Gorbachev’s thunderous proclamations and thought that it would be a blatant mockery of common sense to discuss human rights issues in Moscow: after all, hundreds of thousands of citizens were not allowed to emigrate; Hebrew teachers were sitting in prisons on trumped-up charges; and students who had been expelled from institutions of higher learning, scientists, and activists were struggling for the right to leave. The refuseniks’ reply to this proposal was an intensification of the struggle.

From the fall of 1985, Richard Schifter, who had previously been the U.S. deputy representative at the UN Security Council, filled the position of undersecretary of state for human rights. The appointment of a person of that rank for the post of special undersecretary attached considerably more weight to the problem. Previously, an official from the European Division of the State Department had dealt with the issue, but it had gotten lost among a multitude of other problems.

Anatolii Adamishin, who later occupied the equivalent of Schifter’s post in the Soviet foreign ministry, later described the human rights sphere in the USSR:

The Soviet totalitarian system did not provide space for civil activity. The system had only one response to individuals who chose to act independently or who harbored thoughts that were considered harmful repression…. By the early 1950s, fifty-two million politically motivated court sentences had been meted out in the Soviet Union, six million people had been banished without sentence, and one million people had been executed…. Political repressions influenced the entire nation. The country’s leadership deemed the stability of the Soviet system more important than the rights of Soviet citizens.”[4]

Gorbachev thought that excessive political repressions were holding back popular initiatives. In October 1986, at a session of the Politburo, he told the KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov: “It is necessary to free political prisoners from jails. They are there for saying the words that I, as the Secretary General, am speaking today.”[5] The first serious sign of the new trends was the release of Andrei Sakharov from exile in Gorky. Not only the release itself but the way that it was done was important. The head of the government personally phoned Sakharov and informed him that henceforth he was free and could return to Moscow to engage in scientific work. This happened on December 16, 1986.[6]

On January 1, 1987, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a decree on the procedures for entering and departing from the USSR. On the following day, over eighty refuseniks turned to the head of the government, Nikolai Ryzhkov, with objections to the new law. Their demands included permission for reunification with more distant relatives, permission for repatriation to their historic motherland, and the reducing of the cooling off period for those who were refused on grounds of secrecy.[7] Refuseniks and Jewish movement activists continued their struggle without paying attention to Gorbachev’s perestroika rhetoric as long as it did not yield real results. In January 1987, only 91 people left the USSR on Israeli visas.

Starting in January 1987, however, the rising tide of perestroika activity began to affect our spheres. On January 16, Yurii Kashlev, head of the department on humanitarian and cultural issues in the foreign ministry, declared that the USSR had begun an intensive review of the sentences of prisoners who had been arrested for anti-Soviet activity. He also spoke about the introduction of a more liberal definition of familial ties that would lead to a sharp increase in the number of visas issued in the framework of family reunification.[8]

On January 27, 1987, at a Central Committee plenum devoted to personnel issues, Gorbachev advanced a series of revolutionary proposals. The first was to turn the CPSU into a normal political party, that is, to free it of the mass of economic, military, scientific, and other matters that called for professional, not political leadership. Second─appoint nonparty citizens to leading posts. And third─what had been unthinkable under Soviet conditions─hold elections with several candidates for each spot instead of confirming a single chosen candidate.

On February 10, 1987, Gennadii Gerasimov, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, announced that 140-150 prisoners had been pardoned by the chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet on the basis of the decrees of February 2 and 9, and another 140 cases were under review.[9] One must give Gorbachev his due: he demanded not only the release of political prisoners but he also attained an end to harassment of citizens on the basis of notorious political articles and subsequently, in 1989, the elimination of these articles from the criminal code. The well-known human rights activist Yurii Shikhanovich was released on February 6, 1987; on February 20, Yosif Begun, who was serving his third sentence, was released, to be followed by Vladimir Albrekht and Yosif Zunshain (March 6), Yosif Berenshtein (March 16), Vladimir Lifshits (March 17), Valerii Senderov (March 18), Yakov Lenin and Mark Nepomniashchii (March 19), Leonid Volvovskii (March 20), Yulii Edelshtein (May 5), and others. They were released early and for us, the release of every prisoner of Zion was a holiday. With their liberation, we began truly to feel the atmosphere of perestroika. It was a tuning point.

On February 12, 1987, the newspaper Vechernaia Moskva reported that OVIR had begun reviewing refusenik cases and everyone except for refuseniks with real security clearance─Vladimir Slepak, Aleksandr Lerner, Yulii Kosharovskii, Yulian Khasin, Natasha Khasina, Valerii Soifer, Lev Sud, and Yakov Rakhlenko─would receive exit visas.

Perestroika began to accelerate. A resolution was adopted to withdraw “a limited contingent of Soviet troops” from Afghanistan; a law was adopted “On Individual labor activity” that permitted the establishment of joint enterprises and cooperatives with the participation of foreigners; the restoration of original names to Russian cities began[10]; and in the summer of 1987, for the first time, alternative elections to local councils were held in many election districts.

Our movement did not hesitate to take advantage of the signs of the unfolding Thaw. New refusenik groups, seminars, and initiatives in the sphere of Jewish culture appeared; contacts with Western public and political figures were raised to a new level; and the legalist wing of the movement acted more assertively. Without understanding where it was heading, the country veered in the direction of intensifying perestroika processes.