Monday, January 07, 2008

Confessions - Part 6

The Soviet Union was still an under-developed country. This fact hit me as we arrived in Moscow - an unusually shabby capital. I was staying in the modern "Rossiya" hotel - a huge monstrosity of a hotel. Notwithstanding its size (reputedly 5,000 rooms) each floor had its "concierge" - checking you in and out.
The room was quite respectable - but no air conditioning in the sweltering heat of the hottest summer ever on record. A pall of smoke hung above the city. I assumed it was fashionable pollution. But after several days I was told it was due to a huge forest fire burning 150 km south of the city. Although it was plain to see, it rasped one's eyes and nose, it was apparently not reported in the newspapers until several days later when a small item appeared, as I was shown, saying "our gallant firefighters have brought under control . . . ".
I waited for a day to acclimatize myself and then made contact. I took a bus laid on for the Congress to the University. I walked for a long way to find a telephone booth overlooking Gorki park. (The Soviet authorities don't want too many telephones - the more there are the more taps needed.) I made several calls, and several contacts. That evening I met Victor Yachot at Karl Marx Square.
Victor was a young engineer, who had applied to emigrate to Israel 18 months before. After due ceremony at his place of work, replete with anti-semitic remarks of the vilest forms, he had been thrown out of work, but had not, of course, been granted permission to emigrate. I asked him to take me to see Professor Levich. He took me through the marble halls of the Moscow subway. Such a spotless contrast to the grime of the London Underground I knew so well. He told me, openly and loudly, how it had been built by slave labor, and how hundreds of thousands of human beings, under commissioner of Public Works Kruschev, had toiled to their deaths down there. He said he normally preferred to walk rather than take this subway, erected on the crushed bones of humanity. He had a strong personality.
He took me to Levich's apartment on the fashionable Leninsky Prospect. Benjamin Levich was a corresponding member of the USSR National Academy of Sciences, and a physicist of international repute. As such he was one of the most eminent of those who had applied to emigrate to Israel. The Soviet authorities would naturally be reluctant to release someone who had risen to such a level in their hierarchy, but was still a prisoner within their perfected order. We shook hands warmly and he drew me quickly into his book-lined, cluttered study. One of the first things he did was write on a slate on his desk, "there are good devices here, be careful". So while we exchanged pleasantries, we also exchanged comments on a small pad. Each piece of paper was retained for final destruction (torn or burnt and flushed down the toilet, as per instructions - Victor thought it was a good joke, but the Levich's were serious enough). They had applied the previous April to leave. All the family - Tanya, Benjamin's charming wife, a translator, his oldest son Alexander, an architect and Yevgeny, an astrophysicist at Moscow State University, and their wives, Valentina and Janna.
Things were bad for them. Professor Levich had been dismissed from his position as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Electrochemistry of the National Academy of Sciences. He was still a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences, this required a two-thirds vote for expulsion. He was supporting his family of six people on a stipend from the USA and royalties from his books. I met Yevgeny, who struck me as a very bright young man. It was explained to me that he had a condition from childhood usually referred to as ulcerative colitis, and high blood pressure. For this reason he had been given exemption from military service. Now, however, the authorities were attempting to reverse themselves, even though at 26 he was several years past the normal age for conscription. That was the main threat, since once he was in the Red Army how could the family leave - and for how long would they keep them on the pretext of "State Security".
I asked Professor Levich if he could get for me a list of scientists and other technically qualified people who had applied to emigrate. He showed an understandable reluctance, lists of people in the Soviet Union could mean an organization and that could mean serious trouble. But he said he would see what he could do - given also the circumstances that several were out of the city due to the oppressive heat. In fact, Yevgeny was leaving on a vacation with his wife and another couple in two days time. I bade them good-bye and Victor took me almost all the way back to the hotel.
The following day, after elaborate precautions I met another contact, who turned out to be a friend of Victor's and so we both went off to meet him too. Then they took me to meet Vladimir Slepak, one of the elders of the movement to emigrate - a "vatik" he and his family had then been waiting four years and they are still in that purgatory. Slepak's telephone had long since been cut off, so he was at another friend's house, where he was to receive a call from England. We went up dark flights of stairs in a dingy apartment block, a contrast to the comparative luxury of the Levich's. Big forbidding iron doors. The very top one opened to our knock to reveal a sharp, energetic little man, Vladimir Zaslavsky, one of the few biologists awaiting emigration (most are physicists or engineers). There with Vladimir Slepak and his wife, we had a pleasant evening and conversation. In the midst the telephone rang and it was Greville Janner, member of Parliament and Chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee for Soviet Jewry, on the line for Slepak. I too had a word with Janner and mentioned the coincidental fact that here we were talking from London to Moscow and our fathers had been neighbors in the East End of London. He asked me to obtain photographs of "our friends there," since they had spoken often, but lacked that personal bond conferred by the sight of a recognizable and unique human face. I promised to do so, thinking of a friend who was attending the conference and who as usual had a magnificent camera with him. Naturally, I assumed flash equipment would be necessary to take their portraits indoors. Finally, five of us left Zaslavsky to his old American magazines, arranging to meet the next day to take the photographs.
The next day I couldn't make contact with any of them. Finally I got through to Victor Yachot, and he told me abruptly that Yevgeny Levich had been arrested while driving to vacation, outside the city, that they did not know where he was, and that I should call back later. He rang off. It sounds so natural now to describe it that way, but then, for me it was like a bombshell. I had met him so recently, and now he had been "snatched", I couldn't help but worry that it had been my meetings with them that had precipitated this.
In the meantime I was attending the scientific conference at the University and touring Moscow like the other tourists. As well as renewing friendships with western scientists at the conference, including my camera-toting friend, from Toronto. Finally I learned that somehow Yevgeny had been able to get word to his parents that he was being held at a military hospital usually reserved for higher officers (the class system in the Soviet Union is very rigid). They and a group of other "refuseniks" had gone there and created a scene. In addition I was told that news items of the arrest had appeared in the western Press and over the radio. Benjamin Levich was able to meet with a senior administrator (probably KGB, the secret police) and insisted that they either bring charges or release his son. His son had refused to sign anything and insisted on knowing what charges were being brought against him. He was told that he would receive excellent medical treatment here in Moscow if he signed his cancellation of exemption of military service. If he did not he would be conscripted anyway and sent to Siberia. Finally, they relented in the face of the inevitable publicity and released him to his waiting family and friends, but he had to report the next morning.
That night I went to see the Levichs and they were clearly very shaken by the experience. I asked if I could be allowed to help, and in view of the presence of a distinguished gathering of Western scientists in Moscow at that very moment suggested that Benjamin Levich meet with some of them if it could be arranged - and tell them how his son had been dragged from his car, beaten and driven off to detention in the very same city; and now the harassment was to continue. It was agreed, and he sat down and began to compose a letter of protest to the International Congress of Biophysics, and I said I would call him the next day.
One significant point I remember from that night was his taking a book of Soviet law in his hand and saying in effect "with sufficient knowledge of this we may yet out-maneuver them". Under the random terror practiced by Stalin the things that they had done that day would have been so unthinkable as to incur immediate execution. Now it was the knowledge of their fate in the West which in large measure protected them in their unequal struggle with the post-Stalin Soviet authorities. It reminded me of the speech of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's "A Man for all Seasons", of erecting a thicket of laws to protect himself from the devil.
The following day, Saturday, I approached three eminent scientists of my acquaintance and explaining the situation asked if they would meet with Professor Levich. They were John Edsall, Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard University, Harold Scheraga, Professor of Biochemistry at Cornell University and Shneior Lifson, Scientific Director of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. All three willingly agreed, and we met that afternoon in a restaurant adjoining the Rossiya Hotel. Levich and his wife Tanya told the story of Yevgeny's arrest, and continuing harassment (he was required to report each morning for interrogation), and also handed them a handwritten letter which was addressed to the Congress and protested his own exclusion from it. Of course, this contradicted all the rules of non-discrimination under which international scientific organizations are supposedly governed. John Edsall, a wonderful human being and one of the leading American biochemists, agreed to hand it to the Secretariat of the Congress, of which he was a member. Naturally, we hoped that Soviet knowledge of this concern for the Levich family would act to protect Yevgeny. Nevertheless such is the nature of Soviet society that whenever the waiter came by the Levichs would modulate the conversation.
While the Levich matter was going on, other activities occupied my attention. On Saturday (Sabbath) morning I went with a group of Jewish scientists to the Moscow synagogue on Arkhipova Street. There I met Victor Yachot, Vladimir Slepak and several others. I was also intrigued to meet a group of young high school students who were learning Hebrew together (an Ulpan) - although this was a "dangerous" activity. A dispute had arisen over obtaining Hebrew books. As Victor Yachot pointed out, while these young people were very idealistic, they had not yet committed themselves to migration to Israel, and as such no single one of them could be trusted. It was best therefore if each group went its own way, since the authorities would be glad to have a potential case of distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda (in the form of Hebrew books) to bring against those who had applied to emigrate in their already precarious position.
One American couple collected some interesting stories outside the synagogue, which included close contact with this particular group of high school students, and also a tragic story from an old man named Kreisky about his son being imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital. (later efforts confirmed his story, and eventually the old man was allowed to emigrate and after much pressure his son was released and allowed to follow him.)
We then met Slepak and the others, now including Alexander Voronel. This personable and modest man had made important contributions in the field of critical phenomena. We met in Red Square on a bright sunny afternoon, and instead of taking the photographs in a secret indoor setting, we simply sauntered down to the Moskva River and, with a typical Russian electrical Power Station as a background, took their pictures.
The following day, Sunday, several people were invited to Voronel's apartment for an informal seminar. This was a purely scientific gathering, which those ousted from their jobs and not able to practice their science, including even exclusion from libraries, were in the habit of holding on Sunday afternoons. With the Congress in progress from which they were excluded it would be an important gesture if some Western scientists attended.*
[* This type of "rump" session was enlarged the following year with about 50 people who were attending the International Magnetism Conference in Moscow in July 1973, and subsequently led to the organization of a unique conference set for July 1974 which unfortunately coincided with President Nixon's visit to the USSR. All the conference organizers were arrested and held for several weeks and the conference was quashed.]
I promised to ask several colleagues, and so on Sunday afternoon a group of us took taxis to Voronel's apartment, where we met several more of the scientist-refuseniks. We heard an introduction from Benjamin Levich followed by a seminar on the organization of Israeli Science by Professor Lifson. Since these people had committed their lives to inclusion in Israeli science they eagerly listened to what for most Western scientists would have been a pedestrian subject, but for them was a glimpse of a tantalizing unknown.

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