A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

  Change was the harbinger of the black cars.

  Gorbachev came to office with dangerous ideas, such as private enterprise (limited, of course) and freedom of the press (extremely limited, of course), but his initial forays into reform were rather innocuous. To be honest, they were rather idiotic. The marked Mikhail kicked off his premiership by venturing to Siberia to assess the working conditions of coal miners and lumberjacks. Raisa, his wife, accompanied him, which was a first, since previous administrations had a decidedly stag-party flavor, to the point where people wondered if their leaders even had spouses. In 1985, his first year in office, Gorbachev rolled out his anti-alcoholism crusade. “Fight the Green Serpent!” posters sprang up all over the Soviet Union. I remember seeing them at bus stops and on magazine covers, cartoons of sad men and women trapped in the coils of a sinister boa constrictor with puffy red eyes, as unpaid bills and unattended children huddled in the background. To the dictatorship—the Politburo, the KGB, the Red Army—Gorbachev was benign, a silly man who wasted his time on silly causes, and the hardliners were relieved. “Let him shit in the woods with his lumberjacks,” they smirked. “Let him fight the Green Serpent.” The population also relaxed, and all across the Union, from the halls of the Kremlin to smoky kolkhoz bars, Gorbachev’s reforms were met with quiet derision as people raised glasses to toast to his health. The regime felt secure, the jokes circulated in droves, but the dull purple spot still remained on Gorbachev’s forehead, and the old women muttered their warnings.

  * * *

  *1 In Russian, babushka refers to the woman and not to the actual scarf, as it does in English. The difference is negligible, however, for one is seldom seen without the other.

  *2 Even the actual word for bear, “medved,” is a euphemism meaning “honey eater,” which adds another layer of protection.

  *3 This was directly inspired by Kipling’s Just So Stories, in which a mischievous islander terrorizes a rhinoceros by putting crumbs under the rhino’s coat. I didn’t have a rhino but I did have Lina.

  SOMETHING WAS DIFFERENT; SOMETHING WAS IN THE AIR

  Bucharest, Romania, Summer of 1988

  Two babushki in a Ukrainian apartment complex weren’t the only ones reading the omens that summer. Six hundred miles away from Kharkov, on the western fringe of the Evil Empire, a man stepped out onto a Bucharest tarmac, drawn by the same winds of change that troubled the old women. Unlike the babushki, Amir Shaviv wasn’t concerned with the influence of birthmarks on the fate of nations; his interest in Gorbachev was of a professional nature. The previous twenty years had seen an erratic trickle of Soviet Jews fleeing the USSR to seek shelter in the West. The biggest factor behind this flow of Jews was the state of the Soviet government. During repressive times, emigration dwindled to a handful of families per year; when the regime eased up, it spiked to a couple of thousand families. But whether five or five thousand, any Jews crossing into the West became the responsibility of Shaviv’s employer, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint), and that made Shaviv as curious about the marked Mikhail as any babushka.

  The journalist–turned–human rights worker was in Romania trying to get a feel for the situation in Eastern Europe, since the news filtering in from beyond the Iron Curtain was of change and unrest. This had happened before, of course: the Prague Spring, Khrushchev’s Thaw, etcetera, etcetera—Soviet Cold War policies habitually cycled through periods of relative freedom followed by renewed cruelty. Nevertheless, the reports of 1988 were worth investigating. The triumph of the Catholic Solidarity movement in Poland, Gorbachev’s decision to cede political independence to Eastern Europe and withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan; all these were intriguing, to say the least. In light of this, Shaviv and the delegation he was part of were dispatched by Joint, an overseas arm of the American Jewish community, to visit and assess key areas under the pale of Communism.

  Bucharest was a good place to start. Its Jewish community was honoring Moshe Rosen, who had just celebrated his fortieth anniversary as chief rabbi of Romania. For four decades, Rabbi Rosen had kept the faith alive in the face of the Stalinist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Representatives from all over Europe were there to laud his efforts; their words would be a good indication of the degree of freedom in the Soviet Bloc.

  It was a hot day, and the International Hotel, where the gathering was held, was not air-conditioned. People melted in their suits. The sluggish heat, however, didn’t stifle the enthusiastic applause that erupted every time Ceauşescu’s name was mentioned. Rosen’s celebration, like all events held under the shadow of Communism, was infiltrated by government agents, and the speakers acknowledged their presence by invoking the Genius of the Carpathians on a regular basis. The mandatory thank-yous echoed by mandatory applause reminded the Joint delegation they were not in Manhattan anymore.

  The unfortunately named Adolf Shayevich, chief rabbi of Moscow, was one of the orators. After the customary tributes to Rabbi Rosen’s service, Shayevich’s speech took a sharp turn.

  “I stand here, and I address you not just as myself but as a representative of all Soviet Jews. And as I stand here, I think of what we, as Soviet Jews, do. I think of how we gather over the holidays and sit around our tables and say ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ ”

  The last sentence was a reference to an old Jewish custom from Passover, the world’s earliest celebration of freedom. The Jews had spent the better part of the past 2,500 years scattered throughout the globe; over the centuries, they had developed the idea that each year, Jews in the Diaspora should strive to spend their next year in Jerusalem. This embodied the desire to have an autonomous Jewish nation unified around a single historic and religious epicenter. And for the past 2,500 years, this proclamation had remained as vague as “Next year, let’s have world peace.” But in 1948, the birth of the State of Israel transformed the saying from ephemeral nostalgia to concrete opportunity. Ben Gurion Airport was now open for business, and the Promised Land was a plane flight away, ready to accept its people—along with their money, education, and expertise. “Next year in Jerusalem” had become a dangerous idea. “Next year in Jerusalem” got the crowd’s attention.

  Shayevich continued. “And when we say ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ are we just mindlessly reciting old maxims with nothing but superficial intentions behind them? Well, I am here to tell you that we, Soviet Jews, are saying ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ and yes! we are serious, and yes! we mean it!”

  Shaviv was shocked. Shayevich wasn’t just the chief rabbi of Moscow—he was the only rabbi of Moscow; actually he was the only rabbi in the entire USSR. Adolf Shayevich was allowed to exist because the Soviet Union grew tired of dealing with gripes from groups like Amnesty International and the UN. The chief rabbi of Moscow was displayed in the capital so that visiting dignitaries could be told: “We certainly tolerate religion. Look! We even have a rabbi!” Seeing Shayevich take charge at that podium was a bit like watching Mr. Peanut come to life, strut into Kraft Foods headquarters with his finest top hat and cane, and demand to be made CEO. Yet there he was, this nothing, this concession, promising the crowd, Ceauşescu agents and all, that he fully intended to get out of Dodge and take his people with him.

  The way Shaviv saw it, there were only two explanations: either Shayevich was insane, or he knew what he could say and get away with. Shaviv’s journalistic nature took over, forcing him to seek clarification, and he jostled his way through the crowd.

  “Amir Shaviv, representative from Joint; a moment of your time, if you would. That was a powerful speech, Rabbi.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  Excuse me, Rabbi, are you completely meshugah?

  “Excuse me, Rabbi, are you … aware of the implications of that speech?”

  A calm, measured response: “Yes, of course I am.”

  “And?”

  “And what, young man?”

  “And did you mean it?”

  Now came Shaye
vich’s turn to be surprised. “And I meant every word of it, young man.” The short, bearded rabbi frowned. “Why else would I say it?”

  Amir Shaviv was no therapist, but by the end of the conversation he felt comfortable enough to rule out any messianic complexes or delusions of grandeur. As strange as it was, Adolf Shayevich was both sane and serious.

  * * *

  On their way back to New York, the Joint team visited their Rome bureau. Residing nearby, in a Joint-run refugee shelter, were several families who had been fortunate enough to get out of Russia and were currently waiting to be accepted into the United States. Shaviv began asking questions, the most important one being “How long did it take you to get your exit visa?” The responses he heard time and again surprised him. Every single family living in Rome had received their exit visas within six months. Not years—months. Shaviv was accustomed to hearing accounts of individuals languishing interminably in the Soviet system, getting fired, jailed, harassed. Compared with those stories, a six-month wait was practically no wait at all.

  The team returned to Joint’s New York headquarters with more questions than answers. As Shaviv told me years later: “Here was a Russian rabbi who either was looking for a one-way ticket to Siberia, or knew that he could say what he said and not be punished. Then there are these Russians living in Rome, none of whom waited longer than half a year to be allowed to leave. We felt something was different; something was in the air. We decided to watch and be prepared.”

  Amir Shaviv’s instincts would serve him well and sooner than he thought. What neither Joint nor the Jews of Russia realized was that glasnost and perestroika were gaining a soon-to-be-unstoppable momentum of their own. A little over a year after Shaviv’s trip to Europe, that momentum would trigger a series of frantic phone calls all over the Soviet Union, including my family’s Moskovskyi Prospekt 90, Apt. 5. Those phone calls, in turn, would result in a massive flood of refugees bursting forth to become the last great Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union.

  LAND OF ENDLESS TWILIGHT

  Pärnu, Estonia, USSR, July 1989

  Pärnu, the summer capital of the Soviet republic of Estonia, was a resort town renowned for healing: ancient mud baths and seawater spas, the calm, warm water of Pärnu Bay, tiny cottages and pleasant boardwalks, had for years drawn vacationers from all over the Union. Pärnu’s beaches lacked the usual garbage and dead fish deposited courtesy of Soviet environmental policies, and many vacationing Soviets preferred its rugged Estonian shoreline to the filthy, manicured sand of the sanatoriums. Concerts and festivals filled the evenings. Old women sat on street corners, perched over sacks of ripe blueberries, and for a few kopeks, you got a rolled-up newspaper cone of berries with a liberal sprinkling of sugar. And then there were the White Nights, a high-latitude phenomenon that enveloped the land in perpetual twilight. This wasn’t twilight as it is in most of the world; this was an ethereal glimmer that began at sunset, lasted for hours, and stirred something primordial in the soul.

  But clean beaches and White Nights weren’t the reason Mom and Dad brought me to Estonia in the summer of 1989. This tiny land, tucked away between Russia and Finland, had for centuries been ravaged by territorial conflicts. Unending cycles of occupation and counter-occupation had instilled its stern northern people with a deep passion for freedom. In 1940, Estonia became the last Republic to be “united” to the Soviet Union; it was a unification accomplished under the treads of tanks, but even those couldn’t quash the resistance. Estonian patriots (molded by their harsh climate into consummate hunters) melted into the forests, and long into the occupation, many a careless Russian trooper stumbling home late at night never made it back to the barracks. Estonians hated the Communist Party, they despised the very idea of its existence, and offered safe harbor to Georgians, Jews, Armenians, anyone persecuted by the regime. That’s what made it such an attractive getaway. Estonia meant movie screens playing films from the West and restaurants with European fare. It meant Jews speaking Yiddish in public. It was nice beaches and peace of mind, or the closest thing to it in the USSR.

  And what a thrill it was to be in the Republic in the summer of 1989. One beautiful Friday afternoon, my parents and I hopped on a bus to Tallinn to wander around the crooked alleyways and medieval bastions that still gird the Old Town. It was the heart of the Singing Revolution, as the historians would come to call it, when crowds of Estonian patriots flocked to the capital to hold vigils, sing old folk songs long banned by the Soviet dictatorship, and demand independence. The cobblestone plaza around Tallinn’s Town Hall was full of young musicians plucking guitars, poets reciting the Kalevipoeg, Estonia’s national epic, and people clustered around radios playing illegal broadcasts from Voice of America and the BBC. Soviet censors tried hard to prevent citizens from straying into forbidden airwaves; all transistors were programmed to block radio signals beyond official frequencies, but intrepid Estonian mechanics learned how to bypass the system, and the crackle of makeshift radios mixed with singing all over Tallinn.

  A procession snaked its way through the plaza, men and women holding hands and carrying placards. Mom got goose bumps. This wasn’t an official parade; this was a demonstration, against, not by, the regime. The line drew closer—candles, and signs, and singing. Clapping and cheers broke out. Mesmerized, Mom took a step forward.

  “Please, no families!… Please back up!… If you have a family, do not approach!” the demonstrators shouted as soon as Mom ventured too close. It was 1989 and yet, just three months earlier, a similar demonstration in the Republic of Georgia (another hotbed of anti-Soviet resistance) had ended in tragedy. Young Georgian women donned traditional Georgian bridal costumes and marched on Rustaveli Avenue in the capital city of Tbilisi. Georgia’s governor, alarmed by the display of national identity, ordered the people to disband, but the protestors, perhaps buoyed by the spirit of Gorbachev’s reforms, refused. The governor responded by calling in the Spetsnaz, the special forces unit of the Red Army. After the mêlée cleared and the tear gas drifted away, the bodies of nineteen young women in bridal costumes, faces bludgeoned beyond recognition by razor-sharp military spades, the trademark weapon of the Spetsnaz, lay sprawled on the avenue for the Union to see. Thus died assurances of freedom in the age of glasnost, and memories of the mutilated faces of those nineteen beautiful Georgian girls haunted the plaza in Tallinn. “Single individuals only; if you have a family, do not approach!” rang out the warning as hope and danger floated on the Baltic breeze.

  * * *

  One August evening back in Pärnu, Mom, Dad, and I came across about twenty-five people, some vacationers, some locals, gathered in one of the many small parks that dot the town. A slender man with auburn hair, a thick mustache, and round glasses stood in the center of the group. Next to him was a pregnant woman with gray-blue eyes and jet-black hair. The man read aloud from a book, and often he’d pause to explain something in the text. His Russian was broken and strange because it was the first time I heard a foreigner use our language—in person, on TV, or anywhere. But the man displayed no discomfort. On the contrary, he spoke as if the essence of his words would overpower incorrect tenses and misplaced articles. Of Jesus he spoke, of Isaiah and God and Mary, of faith and endurance, and swords and plowshares.

  The woman, black hair framing her pale face, struck up a melody, simple and moving, on her guitar. Everyone held hands as her music filled the park and the summer breeze tossed her hair. I don’t know how long it lasted—maybe a minute, maybe five, maybe more. It was August, the White Nights were almost at an end, but it seemed that as long as this woman kept singing, the twilight would endure and hold the night at bay. At last, she reached the end of the chorus, chanting the final line over and over as the strumming faded into the night air. Her song ended and with it the dangerous thrill lifted, and the circle disappeared, reverting once more into a few strangers enjoying a summer night in a park, just as other strangers enjoy summer nights in other parks all over the world.


  The pregnant woman shut her guitar case and approached us. “Shalom. My name is Rita.”

  Rita was an American. Her Russian was better than the man’s, her husband, Ben. They were Baptist missionaries, holding sermons, donating clothes, speaking with people, listening and praying.

  The Soviet Union persecuted all religions, but it hounded the Baptists without mercy. Other denominations had the decency to conduct their affairs underground, but the Baptists just didn’t get it. Suffering was a part of their faith, and they walked serenely to the gulags, knowing the earthly torments of the Soviet Union meant nothing compared with what awaited those who abandoned their god. This stoic temperament unnerved the USSR, who hated the Baptists and feared them.

  Rita offered us a Bible.

  “It’s a gift from Christians from all over the world,” she said. “This is the thousandth anniversary of Russia’s conversion to Christianity.”

  Dad nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard rumors of that on Voice of America. But didn’t the Soviet Union reject your gift?”

  “Of course it did.” She shrugged. “So we figured we’d just distribute them ourselves.”

  “But how were you able to come here?”

  “With God’s help”—she smiled at her partner—“we managed to bypass the system.”

  The book she held out was lightweight, printed on wafer-thin paper, portable and concealable. Dad, ever a lover of books—especially forbidden ones—accepted the gift, tucking it deep into his tote bag.

  “Aren’t you concerned about your public … activities?” he asked.

  “We’ve been doing this for a long time. And besides, Estonia’s lightened up a lot in the past year, thanks to Gorbachev. We’ve been to worse places.” Something about Rita’s tone gave her credibility, and Dad loosened up. He told her about our family, specifically about needing to leave the country as quickly as possible. My parents and I dreaded returning to Kharkov: the absence notes from various doctors were no longer working, and the school director made it clear that my presence in the third grade was going to be mandatory. Gorbachev’s reforms had put the country under great duress, and anti-Semitism was flaring up, as it always did when insecurity waxed. One month before coming to Estonia, Mom had picked me up from the last day of second grade. As she was icing the bruise over my eye, I asked her if it was possible to stop being a Jew. “We have to get out of here,” Mom whispered to Dad that night, her hands trembling with helpless fury. “We have to, whatever happens, we have to get out of this inhuman country.”*1