East-West This Year in Jerusalem

By William E. Smith

How good it is and how pleasant

for brothers to live together!

. . . It is like the dew of Hermon falling

upon the hills of Zion.

There the Lord bestows his blessing,

life for evermore.

--From Psalm 133, Shcharansky's

favorite

The psalmbook kept him company. During the nine years he spent in Soviet prisons and work camps, most of his other possessions were taken from him. But he clung to a miniature copy of the Book of Psalms that his wife Avital had sent from Israel. In fact, he once spent 130 days in solitary confinement because he refused to allow the authorities to confiscate the book. Early last week his Soviet guards tried again to seize it. In desperate fury, the prisoner defied his captors by throwing himself into the snow. "I said I would not leave without the Psalms that had helped me so much," he later explained. "I lay down in the snow and said, 'Not another step.' " The guards scrutinized the book carefully, then handed it back. The elaborately negotiated release of Anatoli Shcharansky, one of the Soviet Union's most famous political prisoners and a symbol of the plight of Soviet Jews and human rights dissidents alike, proceeded as planned.

"Words are too poor to express this moment," the Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, declared the next night as Shcharansky arrived in Tel Aviv from Frankfurt aboard an Israeli executive jet. "Welcome, and may you be happy among us." Standing beside his darkly beautiful wife, with whom he had been reunited only a few hours earlier after an absence of twelve years, Shcharansky, 38, told the crowd of well-wishers in halting Hebrew, "There are moments in our life that are difficult to describe. This is the happiest day in our lives." His eyes glistening in the glare of TV lights, he continued, "Twelve years ago I said to Avital on our parting, 'I'll see you soon in Jerusalem.' But my way here became as long and as hard as the Galuth (the biblical exile of the Jews from Israel) because in these years the Pharaohs of our time decided to announce a new conspiracy of Jews, from Russia and other countries, against the regime. I know how strong was the hatred of the KGB, and how strong their determination not to allow this day to come. The very fact that it did come is a strong indication of the justness of our cause."

Waiting along with Peres to welcome Shcharansky at Ben Gurion Airport were a number of Cabinet ministers and politicians, together with the country's two Chief Rabbis. As the plane came to a halt and the door opened, a tall man carrying a shopping bag stepped inside. It was Mikhail Stiglitz, Avital's brother, who is an Israeli army officer. The pilot had radioed ahead that Shcharansky, who was released from the labor camp in a threadbare suit of clothes, badly needed a pair of pants and a belt to hold them up. While the crowd waited, Shcharansky changed into a pair of gray trousers brought by his brother-in-law, then stepped out onto the tarmac.

As officials came forward to shake the famous dissident's hand, the Interior Minister, Rabbi Itzhak Peretz, offered a prayer: "Blessed be thou, O Lord, who resurrects the dead." The man who in the 1970s had become a powerful voice of dissent in the Soviet Union and a bridge between Soviet Jewry and the rest of the human rights movement, stood for a moment holding his wife's hand, as if savoring his liberation for the first time. Then, smiling broadly, he acknowledged with a wave of his hand the shouts of "Tolya! Tolya!," the Russian diminutive of Anatoli.

Before his release that morning in Berlin, in an elaborately negotiated prisoner exchange, there was concern that the years of imprisonment might have aggravated his heart condition. It was known that he weighed 165 lbs. at the time of his imprisonment in 1977 and as little as 81 lbs. during a 100-day hunger strike last year. But an Israeli doctor, rushed to Frankfurt to examine Shcharansky, pronounced him fit to undertake the flight to Israel. As it turned out, the Soviet authorities not only force-fed him during the latter part of his hunger strike but during the past two months greatly increased his daily food ration, enabling him to gain 22 lbs. "It's an old Soviet custom," + he quipped. "When they produce goods for export, they put them in good covering." The balding Shcharansky, who is 5 ft. 2 in., looked slight but not underweight, pale but not ill, and very much in command of the situation. A subsequent physical examination revealed that he was suffering from a slight heart defect and a hand tremor. His doctors recommended rest and light exercise.

In the airport lounge Shcharansky received a telephone call from Ronald Reagan. In English, which he speaks well but with a pronounced accent, Shcharansky told the President, "First of all, I know how great was your role in this greatest event of my and my wife's life--the fact that I could join my people today in Israel. Second, as you know very well, I was never an American spy. But I had wide contacts with many American politicians, journalists, lawyers and other public figures . . . and that's why I know very well how deep is the concern of all of your people in the problem of human rights all over the world." The President assured the Shcharanskys that he would continue to press for the release of more Soviet Jews. He added, "I wish you mazel tov (congratulations) with all my heart."

In the welcoming speeches, Peres noted that Shcharansky was adopting a new Hebrew first name, Natan, which means "the gift." Peres said the Russian had "fought heroically alone as a proud Jew, as a man with a mission." As for Avital, who worked ceaselessly for her husband's release, Peres declared, "Avital fought like a lioness. No place was too far away for her; no person was a stranger to her; no opportunity was too small for her. No declaration ever depressed her." Shcharansky smiled as he recognized several other Soviet activists from the old days. "I'm very glad," he joked, "to speak to an audience in which my criminal contacts are so widely represented." Turning serious, he vowed, "On this happiest day of our lives, I am not going to forget those whom I left in the camps, in the prisons, who are still in exile or who still continue their struggle for their right to emigrate, for their human rights."

During his first hours in Jerusalem, Shcharansky was driven to the Old City and hoisted on the shoulders of a group of well-wishers. Suddenly the group was surrounded by a crowd of Orthodox men, bearded and wearing black suits, protesting against the Mormons, who are building a branch of Brigham Young University on the Mount of Olives. The demonstrators raised a banner ^ addressed to him: SPEAK UP FOR THE RELIGION THAT YOU SACRIFICED YOURSELF FOR. Shcharansky looked troubled as he proceeded to pray at the sacred Western Wall of the Old City. He did not appear eager to become embroiled in a religious or political controversy. When asked later to comment on the fact that any Israeli political party would be pleased to have him as a spokesman, Shcharansky parried the question, saying the Soviet Union was not a good place to learn about political parties since it had only one, "and the one party I would not work for is the Communist Party."

On Wednesday he made preliminary efforts to arrange for the immigration to Israel of his mother Ida Milgrom, 77, and his brother Leonid, 39, a request that Soviet authorities have implied would be fulfilled within a few weeks. Even though she was not able to see her younger son before his sudden departure, Ida Milgrom, who like her daughter-in-law had fought hard for Anatoli's release, was overwhelmed by the good news. Leonid was at her side. "We'll be celebrating with champagne and vodka tonight, even though they aren't so easy to find anymore," he said, referring to the government's current antialcohol campaign. A friend chimed in, "You should consider yourself lucky if champagne and vodka are your only worries."

In Israel as the week passed, Anatoli Shcharansky tried as best he could to spend some private time with the wife from whom he had been separated for so many years. As for the future, it was too early to make plans, he said. Because he has fallen far behind in his chosen field, mathematics and computer technology, he acknowledged that it would be "something of a problem" to return to his old line of work. But nobody who knew the brave, resourceful and clever young man of conscience in Moscow in former times doubted that he would find ways to fulfill his dreams.

Anatoli Shcharansky's happiest day began 2,000 miles away as a dusting of snow glistened on the stone centaurs that guard the western end of Berlin's Glienicker Bridge, where a boldly lettered sign warns passersby, YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. On the eastern side of the 420-ft. crossing, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag and the black-red-and-gold banner of the German Democratic Republic flapped in the chill breeze off the ice-clogged Havel River. Most of the time the iron span in the forested Wannsee district of southwestern Berlin is a bridge leading nowhere, unused except for the occasional official vehicle.

It was here, on Feb. 10, 1962, that the downed American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, walked past Soviet Superspy Rudolf Abel while heading west across the bridge. In June 1985, 25 Western agents were traded here for four East bloc spies imprisoned in the U.S. Ever since rumors began circulating early this month that Shcharansky might soon be included in such a prisoner exchange, it was assumed that the famed Soviet dissident would take the same route to the West. But there were endless snags. Among the most controversial: even though Shcharansky was convicted in the Soviet Union on trumped-up charges of engaging in espionage for the U.S., should he be part of an exchange that involved eight other people, including several convicted spies?

With some deft behind-the-scenes bargaining, most of the problems were settled by early last week. Unresolved until the event actually took place was U.S. and West German determination that the release of Shcharansky be physically separated, by at least a short interval, from the spy exchange at the bridge. At a few minutes before 11 last Tuesday morning, the diminutive figure in fur hat and baggy clothing emerged from behind two vans parked at the middle of the bridge. "No Wall!" Shcharansky shouted to bystanders with a smile as he strode across the 4-in.-wide line at the center of the span that marks the barrier between East and West. Then he asked, "When will I see my wife?" Replied one of the Americans: "If all goes well, you'll have a pleasant surprise in Frankfurt."

That Shcharansky had at last been freed, as a reflection of slightly improving relations between Moscow and Washington, was due in large part to the unrelenting efforts of his wife Avital. The Shcharanskys had been separated since the day after their 1974 wedding, when Avital emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel, convinced that Anatoli would be permitted to follow within a few months. After his conviction in 1978, she devoted her life to securing his release. Jimmy Carter pursued the case, and so did Ronald Reagan, who discussed it with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit meeting last November.

Another Soviet dissident, Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov, restricted since 1980 to the closed city of Gorky, is at least as well known as Shcharansky. But the Soviets have always claimed that Sakharov, a physicist who once worked on the Soviet nuclear-bomb project, could never be released. As recently as two weeks ago, Gorbachev said flatly in an interview with the French Communist newspaper L'Humanite that Sakharov "is still considered to be in possession of state secrets and cannot leave the U.S.S.R." Whether the Soviet position is valid or not, the Kremlin seems determined to stick to it.

The case of Shcharansky, a 1970s activist who often met with American journalists and other Western visitors but had neither scientific nor intelligence information at his disposal, proved to be more negotiable. On Jan. 10, when two U.S. Congressmen, Benjamin Gilman of New York and Tom Lantos of California, visited East Berlin and expressed concern about Shcharansky to East German Lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who had played a crucial role in previous exchanges, Vogel surprised the Americans by telling them he had been given a "mandate" by the Soviet and East German governments to arrange the release.

Shcharansky felt for almost two months that something was about to happen. On Dec. 26 he was moved, without explanation, to the camp hospital, where he was given vitamin injections and medicine for his heart. Once before, in 1984, he was transferred to the same hospital, provided with proper medical treatment, strengthened with a good diet, and then taken to visit his mother and brother. Again this time, as he gained weight from a diet that included meat and even butter, he assumed that he was being fattened up for another visit.

But last Monday morning, as he was reading from the work of the German author Friedrich Schiller, Shcharansky was told to take off his prison uniform and don civilian clothing. Escorted by four KGB agents, he was then flown to a Moscow airport and put aboard another plane, which took off immediately. "Judging from the sun," he said later, "I concluded that we were flying toward the west. I was pleased because it seemed I was leaving the Soviet Union." When he asked the KGB agents where they were heading, one replied that he was authorized to say Shcharansky was being deprived of his Soviet citizenship because of his "bad behavior" and was being handed over to the U.S. as an American spy. In reply, Shcharansky said he was glad that, 13 years after he had made known his wish to give up his citizenship and leave the Soviet Union, the authorities were granting his request.

As he left the Soviet plane in East Germany, the KGB agents merely pointed him toward a waiting limousine and told him to go to it. Once Shcharansky was inside, a German security man told him he was in East Berlin. "For every Jew, the word Berlin evokes mixed feelings," said Shcha ransky. "But for me, at this time, it is the most wonderful place." The next morning he was driven to the Glienicker Bridge, together with the three West German spies who were to be exchanged along with him. Two and a half hours later, he was reunited with a tearful Avital in Frankfurt.

Almost unanimously, the friends of Anatoli Shcharansky, while rejoicing at his release, agreed that it did not mean the Soviet Union had changed its attitude toward dissidents. "I am overjoyed that Tolya is a free man, after so many years of suffering," said Naum Meiman, 74, a retired mathematician in Moscow. Like Shcharansky, Meiman was an early member of the Moscow branch of the Helsinki Watch Group, whose aim was to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki human rights agreement. Adds Meiman: "But his release is not a victory for us because we are now further away from reaching the goals Tolya fought for than when we struggled together." Similarly, Soviet Exile Lev Kopelev, 73, who now lives in West Germany, describes Moscow's release of Shcharansky as "a diversionary tactic," rather than a harbinger of a more liberal human rights policy. Of the eleven founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, which was disbanded in 1982, only two, including Meiman, have managed to avoid either prison or exile.

Nor has the status of Soviet Jews improved. At present there are in the Soviet Union between 10,000 and 15,000 "refuseniks"--Jews who have applied for permission to immigrate to Israel and have been refused. The refuseniks live on the edge of society, many of them deprived of their former positions and forced to take menial jobs while hoping that their luck will change. A vastly larger number, estimated by some observers at 400,000 out of a Soviet Jewish population of about 2 1/2 million, have taken a tentative first step toward making an application to leave, and many more would doubtless do so if they thought they had a chance of succeeding. Last year only 1,140 Soviet Jews were permitted to leave, as compared with 51,320 in the peak year of 1979. So far this year just 79 have been given exit visas, indicating that there has been no significant change in emigration policy. Emigration for most other Soviet citizens is virtually impossible.

Despite Gorbachev's denials, many dissidents remain in prisons or work camps. Perhaps the most famous, after Sakharov, is Physicist Yuri Orlov, 61, leader of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, who was found guilty in 1978 of "slandering" the Soviet state. Others, many of them Helsinki Watch alumni, include Ivan Kovalyev, his wife Tatyana Osipova, and a Russian Orthodox priest, Gleb Yakunin. Anatoli Koryagin, who became a prominent figure in the controversy over Soviet abuse of psychiatry because of his refusal to diagnose several activists as insane, is in a labor camp. Iosif Begun, a Hebrew teacher and Jewish activist, was sentenced in 1982 to seven years in a labor camp and five in exile. Anatoli Marchenko, one of the first of the dissidents, was only 19 when he was thrown into a labor camp, where he became a writer. Arrested six times in all, he was at one time assigned to the same camp as Shcharansky.

Soviet Jews tend to trace the government's hostility to a centuries-old tradition of anti-Semitism. But much of it derives from Moscow's almost paranoid fear of the disintegration of the Soviet empire. If Jewish nationalism can pose at least a theoretical threat to the Soviet Union, what about the nationalist tendencies in Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and the Ukraine? And what of the other religious groups, such as the Baptists, the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Pentecostalists, whose members are being thrown into prison in increasing numbers as "hooligans"? The answer has always been repression. Thus the release of a prominent prisoner like Shcharansky becomes a shrewd diplomatic tactic, suggesting to the West that the Soviet Union is seeking closer relations while obscuring the real situation at home.

Shcharansky was coldly realistic on that score. "The usual practice for the Soviet authorities, whenever they make a concession, is to follow it up with repression against those who could take advantage of it," he said last week. "I'm afraid that my release can be used to tighten up on other Jews in the Soviet Union." But for the moment he was preoccupied with his personal deliverance. "I often dreamed of my arrival in Israel and my reunion with my wife," he said, "and the dreams always had the same ending--I woke up. Now the dream has lasted three days, since the moment I was taken from the KGB prison in Moscow. I am still afraid I will wake up."

With reporting by Roland Flamini/Jerusalem and John Kohan/West Berlin, with other bureaus