The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  Svetlana Alliluyeva remained a unique and personal case for Kennan. But it was a success amid failure. None of the émigré organizations Kennan helped launch in the early 1950s ultimately played any role in the success of Svetlana’s book. More important, she refused to become a new Trotsky—a mobilizing and organizing figure for the Russian émigré community. Nor did she want to advise US foreign policy makers. She stuck to the promise she made at her press conference at the Plaza Hotel: “I’ll preach neither for communism nor against it.”15

  Svetlana may have refused to play the role of a cold warrior, but her escape had serious repercussions in the Soviet Union.

  Three weeks after Stalin’s daughter held her press conference at the Plaza, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny was called to the Kremlin. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had gathered a conference of the Politburo and announced to Semichastny in its presence that he was dismissed. The reason? He had failed to prevent Stalin’s daughter from fleeing to the West.16 In a way, Kennan’s operation had caused the fall of an all-powerful chief of the omnipotent KGB—a remarkable achievement for a retired diplomat, a forty-one-year-old woman, and her 272-page book.

  By the end of the 1960s, though, some of Kennan’s other ideas finally began to bear some fruit. In April 1968, in the kitchens of Moscow’s freethinking intelligentsia, people were talking in low voices about the launch of the Soviet Union’s first uncensored underground human rights newsletter, the Chronicle of Current Events. The newsletter took as its epigraph Article Nineteen of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The Chronicle of Current Events would continue to report arrests and the prosecution of dissidents in the country for fifteen years and became the longest-running samizdat publication in the country.17

  In August 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Eight people, including the editor of the Chronicle, walked to Red Square, where they unfolded homemade protest posters. In just a few minutes, all of them were arrested. The Chronicle reported on their trial. From the first issue, the Chronicle was routinely smuggled to the West, reprinted, and read aloud on Radio Liberty—one of the stations that had been launched thanks to Kennan’s efforts. And thousands of Russians, having figured out a way around the Soviet authorities’ jamming, now listened to broadcasts (dubbed by the Kremlin “the voices of the enemy”) from Radio Liberty and other Western stations.

  In December another Russian book hit bookstores in the United States: Harper & Row published The First Circle, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The novel was based on Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in a secret research facility that used gulag inmates as workers. The book had been refused publication in Moscow and then was smuggled to the West. Soon the flow from the Soviet Union of manuscripts critical of the Kremlin regime became unstoppable. A new era had begun.

  CHAPTER 10

  NOW IT’S OFFICIAL

  The crushing defeats of democratic upsurges, first in Hungary in 1956, then in Czechoslovakia in 1968, were expensive and sobering lessons for the Western powers. Kennan’s dream of the impending liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europe from Communist control faded away. But there was still something that could be done for those trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

  Hundreds of thousands of people wanted out. If the lands themselves couldn’t be wrested from the Communist grip, went the thinking in the West, then at least some individuals could be rescued.

  However, this was easier said than done. The Socialist camp, as people living behind the Iron Curtain referred to their nations, made a point of not letting people go. The borders were sealed.

  This began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Soviet Jews became the most active in fighting for the right to emigrate. After the Six-Day War in 1967, which was followed by a break in diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel, the Soviet Union’s long-running campaign of anti-Semitism worsened significantly. The Soviet Jews had been attacked again and again, in wave after wave. Now they called for help from the outside.

  That call did not go unheard. Numerous rallies in support of Soviet Jews were held in New York and Washington, DC. Advocacy organizations leveraged support from Jewish institutions and from allied advocates of religious freedom all over the country. The United States raised the issue at the United Nations.

  But the Nixon administration was reluctant to officially back the cause of the Soviet Jews. Both Nixon and Brezhnev wanted to improve relations. The Soviet Union had its eye on a new status—that of a Most Favored Nation trading partner of the United States. Nixon, for his part, was ready to grant that.

  Rather than champion the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate, the White House preferred to privately hand Soviet officials lists of Jews refused exit visas from time to time. Sometimes, on an ad hoc basis, the USSR let the people on these lists go.

  Then things got worse for Soviet Jews. In August 1972, three months after Nixon’s visit to Moscow, the Soviet authorities instituted a fee for Jews who applied for exit visas. This fee was exorbitant, ranging from 4,500 to 12,000 rubles—then roughly the cost of three cars. The logic for the fee, which some in the West called a “ransom,” was the same as that used to justify anti-Semitic Soviet restrictions on Jews enrolling in universities: “We don’t want to provide costly education to people who are about to leave for Israel.” The introduction of the fee, an overt sign of the state’s hostility, resulted in more applications.

  In response, some congressmen and activists in New York came up with the idea of introducing legislation that would make the Soviet Union’s access to Most Favored Nation trade benefits dependent on its allowing for the free emigration of Soviet Jews. Senator Henry Jackson drafted the amendment, which would require all countries of the Communist bloc to comply with a set of free emigration requirements. He and Congressman Charles Vanik cosponsored the amendment. By spring 1973, Jackson and Vanik were determined to get their amendment passed. That didn’t suit Nixon at all.

  On March 1, Nixon met with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in the Oval Office of the White House. Three Israelis and three Americans were in the room, but the conversation took place mostly among Meir, Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state. They had talked for an hour, mostly about arms shipments and the prospects for peace with Egypt, when Meir raised the emigration issue.

  “One other point. The Soviet Union is bad. They have people in prison just because they want to go to Israel. This ransom is terrible. If they would only let them leave. Anyone who applies for emigration loses his job, and usually goes to prison,” said Meir.

  “I know about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union,” Nixon responded.

  Meir interrupted him. “Now it’s official.”

  Nixon was now on the defensive. “What do we do? We have talked to them, Henry and I, and we will continue—but privately. We could do it publicly—like Congress—but what good would that do?”

  Kissinger came to the president’s aid and asked Meir not to interfere. Nixon quickly added, “We can’t face down the Soviet Union any more—it would mean mutual suicide. We have a dialogue.”1

  Moments after the Israelis left, however, Henry Kissinger turned to Nixon. “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”2

  Nixon had his own deeply anti-Semitic theories about Jews—who he believed shared a common trait of needing to compensate for an insecurity complex.3 Not surprisingly, then, the US president’s policy toward Jews wanting to leave the Soviet Union was quite clear. “I know,” Nixon replied to Kissinger’s comment. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”4

  Two weeks later, on March 16, Jackson re
introduced his amendment in Congress. This caused a hysterical reaction at the Kremlin, which was busy with preparations for Leonid Brezhnev’s first official visit to Washington in June.

  Angry and confused, Brezhnev summoned a session of the Politburo. The Politburo, he said, had agreed to suspend the collection of the fee. Why had that not happened? Brezhnev stopped just short of accusing the Interior Ministry and the KGB of sabotage. “My instructions were not met,” he said. “It worries me.”5

  Yuri Andropov, the KGB’s chief, stepped forward and took responsibility for the delay, but he backtracked immediately: “Only 13 percent of them are people who pay.”

  Angry, Brezhnev snapped back: “Excuse me, but I have this information before me. I’m reading it: In the first two months of 1973, 3,318 people left, including 393 people with education, and they paid 1,561,375 rubles.” Then Brezhnev asked sharply, “So why do we need this million?”

  Undeterred, Andropov evoked the threat of a brain drain. “Off go the physicians, engineers, et cetera,” said the KGB chief. “We’ve begun getting applications from academicians. I presented you the list.”

  But Brezhnev was adamant. He wanted a good trade deal with the United States, and he did not want this issue to get in the way. He had his own peculiar solution to the problem, as revealed in his quarrel with Andropov: “When I reflected on these things, I asked myself… Why not give them a small theater with five hundred seats, which would work under our censorship, and keep the repertoire under our supervision? Let Aunt Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there.” He seemed genuinely certain that giving Jews a theater would make the problem of Jewish emigration go away.

  Finally, the fee was quietly abandoned. But the change that the conflict over Jewish emigration had set in motion—the slow dissolution of the impermeable Iron Curtain—would prove irreversible. Even in the absence of the fee, Jackson and Vanik’s cause steadily gained support, both at home and abroad. In September 1974, Andrei Sakharov, a leading dissident from the Soviet Union, sent an open letter to the US Congress voicing his support for the amendment. It was published in the Washington Post, entirely in capitalized letters.6

  In December, Congress approved the amendment. Under the new law, countries that denied their citizens the right to emigrate forfeited both credit and investment guarantees.7 It was Sakharov’s letter that was credited with having persuaded the American congressmen to vote the way they did.8 President Ford signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in January 1975 with the Jackson-Vanik amendment, although he expressed his reservations about “the wisdom of legislative language.”9

  The new amendment failed to help Soviet Jews immediately, though. Jewish departures declined sharply, from thirty-five thousand in 1973 to just thirteen thousand in 1975.10 The amendment was meant to be punishment for breaking international obligations—the United States clearly articulated what it wanted the Soviet Union to do to look like a civilized country.11 Instead it became, as the New York Times put it, the “very symbol of a cold war turning colder.”12

  CHAPTER 11

  BEAR IN THE WEST

  Throughout the 1970s, Soviet people kept trying to find ways to leave the country. Some Russians were allowed to travel abroad. It was not surprising, then, that a visit to any capitalist country became seen—by the KGB and by Soviet citizens of all stripes—as an opportunity to defect.

  Most of those granted the precious privilege of being allowed to travel were the crème de la crème of Soviet society, foot soldiers in the cultural Cold War with the West, like dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet and classical musicians. But by the 1970s, the Kremlin was clearly losing the battle, as the Soviet Union’s cultural warriors kept defecting to the enemy.

  In Moscow and Leningrad, everyone knew Mishka na Severe, meaning “Bear in the North.” It was one of the country’s most beloved chocolate candies, with an easily recognizable paper wrapper featuring a huge white polar bear standing on an ice floe. In 1974, a new joke started circulating in Leningrad: Mishka na Zapade, meaning “Bear in the West.” People laughed because they all knew the anti-Soviet story behind the twist of phrase: In June 1974, Russia’s most famous ballet dancer, twenty-six-year-old Mikhail Baryshnikov, had defected while on tour in Canada (Mishka is diminutive for Mikhail).1 A popular artist, loved by everyone, Baryshnikov was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, someone who could make the most difficult and complicated ballet jump look as effortless as his leap over the Iron Curtain appeared to be. With his good looks—big blue eyes and fair hair—Baryshnikov is an icon. He would later become known to many Americans when he played Carrie Bradshaw’s charming but self-centered Russian lover in the TV show Sex and the City.

  By Soviet standards, Baryshnikov was already a successful and prosperous young man before his defection. A star of the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, his career was skyrocketing. He had a comfortable apartment in Leningrad and a car—the roomy Volga, named after the great Russian river, that usually only Soviet bureaucrats could afford to drive.

  But Baryshnikov felt constrained in his art. He was not happy with the extremely conservative style of Leningrad’s former Imperial Russian Ballet, which was still performing mostly classical works. To the young dancer, this repertoire felt outdated. He yearned to explore more contemporary forms of dance. After all, the sexual revolution had reached the Soviet Union too, and as Baryshnikov would say later, he could not dance as if nothing in the world had happened since the premiere of Swan Lake one hundred years earlier.

  Then there was the KGB. The Soviet secret police had agents and informants everywhere, and the Kirov Ballet was no exception. Dancers and singers grew accustomed to being under constant surveillance—it was considered a sort of tax to pay—but sometimes, as Baryshnikov learned, the KGB turned to blackmail. After his return from a tour in London, the KGB informed the dancer that they had a record of everything he had done abroad—including the romantic relationship he had struck up with an American girl.2 “It was during this period that I really began to take stock of my life and realize how uneasy I was feeling most of the time,” he remembered later.3

  Despite these gloomy thoughts, Baryshnikov had no plans for escape when, in May 1974, he and a group of dancers from the Bolshoi Theater embarked on a tour headed first to Canada and then to South America.4

  John Fraser, a young dance critic for the Globe and Mail, saw Baryshnikov’s performance at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto and was deeply impressed by the Russian dancer’s talent. Fraser got to the office to write a review of the show and saw a note marked “urgent” on his typewriter. It was from an acquaintance, the wife of another critic. Intrigued, he called back. She asked Fraser to do her a favor. Her instructions were mysterious: The journalist was to approach Baryshnikov in the theater and pass on a phone number. Fraser was instructed to tell the dancer that his friends were waiting for his call. “Remember these names: Dina, Tina, and Sasha. Have you got them? Dina, Tina, and Sasha,” she told him.5

  Time was short. The woman insisted that Fraser had to find a way to meet Baryshnikov that night or the next. Fraser didn’t have to think twice. He adored Baryshnikov and agreed to help. He finished writing his review, then hastened back to the O’Keefe Centre. Fraser hoped to find Baryshnikov at the gala dinner held after the performance.

  Fraser wanted to be very cautious, as instructed, so he hid the scrap of paper with the phone number beneath his wedding ring. He made his way through the crowd at the gala dinner and spotted Baryshnikov. Now Fraser just had to catch him alone. Finally, the moment presented itself. Fraser approached the dancer and tried to pull the scrap of paper out from under his wedding ring—but in his haste, he tore it. Baryshnikov burst into laughter and took his notebook out of his pocket. Confused but determined to accomplish his task, Fraser scribbled the number and the names.

  Dina, Tina, and Sasha—Baryshnikov decrypted this message immediately. Dina and Sasha were his friends from Russia, and Tina was the American girl he had met in London. They wanted him to esca
pe.

  There was one last performance left to do at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto, and Baryshnikov did not want to let his colleagues down. He decided to escape the next day. It was a risk, but he decided to take it.

  The night of June 29, however, everything went wrong. The curtain failed to lift, so the performance started fifteen minutes late. The anxiety made Baryshnikov’s hands shake as he elevated a ballerina. But the public noticed nothing, and the spectators were thrilled by his role in Don Quixote—which meant that the ovation lasted much longer than usual. Baryshnikov had one curtain call after another.

  According to plan, Baryshnikov’s friends were waiting for him in a car not far from the theater. After the show, Baryshnikov was supposed to duck out of the O’Keefe Centre’s stage door, run to the waiting car, and jump in. They would drive away, and he would be free—far from the Soviet Union and out of reach of his KGB handlers and the annoying Communist Party, which he was being pressured to join.6

  With all the delays, Baryshnikov was late. He knew his friends would be getting increasingly nervous. He made it out the theater door only to encounter the next problem: a crowd of his admirers waiting for him in front of the bus that was supposed to drive him and the other artists to a mandatory closing reception. There was no doubt that Baryshnikov’s KGB handlers would also be at the reception: they had to keep tabs on each and every artist to make sure all the Soviet dancers returned safely to the Soviet Union. This was not an easy task nor one they took lightly. After all, Baryshnikov’s colleague, the Kirov ballerina Natalia Makarova, had fled during their London tour only four years ago.

  Baryshnikov stopped to sign autographs. Then, thinking quickly, he slipped into the crowd of his fans. Voices called from the bus, “Where are you going?”