Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  “I hope you won’t be allowed to enter the courtroom,” he said. “I didn’t know that you were such a reckless fool.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Don’t beg for trouble.”

  “Don’t worry; at a crucial moment I’ll tell them that if something happens to me, the list of KGB correspondents would be delivered to the West.”

  After that I lied to my friend, for the first time in my life. “It’s already in a couple of safe places. Feed this fact to them.”

  “They will crush you.”

  “This is the only guarantee for my safety.”

  We embraced again, and I went away thinking that it wouldn’t be easy to find people who’d agree to keep such a list, let alone pass it to the West.

  A month later I was invited, as I was told on the phone, for a chat in the KGB Reception Room. Tireless Sharansky volunteered to wait for me in a nearby grocery shop from where he could see its entrance so that if I did not reappear, he could inform foreign correspondents. At the threshold of that small pre-revolutionary house, a lean young man with his arm outstretched for a handshake approached me right away. The fellow acted like a movie orphan who had finally found his mother. “I recognized you immediately, Arkady Abramovich!” he said.

  I thought, what a stupid way to intimidate!

  In a little office another psychologist of the same brand also shook my hand. It took a half an hour for them to explain what Tom said in few seconds. It was not too late to change my mind before I made reckless moves. I would be allowed to return to my editorial team as an ordinary employee, and my future would depend entirely on the success of my labor.

  I wondered if they knew why they were ordered to treat me with such a generous proposal and said to myself, “Have no fear, Polishchuk! Otherwise the next step could be an attempt to make you an informant.”

  What followed was exciting for both parties of this heart-to-heart encounter. For a long time my educators explained what, too, could be summed up in ten seconds: We protect the Jews from the people’s wrath. The more experienced man said, “Just imagine what would happen if we stopped protecting you.”

  Under threat and heavy stress I often first react, then think. Here this bad habit surfaced again. I had been reading some historians and writers of tsarist Russia in preparation for traveling out to the anti-Semitic trials, and now I decided to share my new knowledge with my well-wishers: “I know some very Russian people that would disagree with you.”

  “You’re talking about a handful of Moscow intellectuals, divorced from the people. They’re living in their own little world,” said the senior in age and rank.

  “In a sense, you’re right,” I said, and they nodded heartily.

  “We keep our finger on the pulse of the country,” spoke the man of junior rank.

  “Yeah, no one knew the Russian people as well as Leo Tolstoy,” I drawled thoughtfully.

  “Yes, War and Peace is a very wise book,” observed the chief.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” I pronounced. “Do you know what Tolstoy wrote about the Jews at the end of his life?”

  “What?” asked his assistant.

  And then I threw a knockout: “These heinous rulers can at any time, if they wish, cause pogroms. It is within their own power to stop them.”

  They did not react. I signed a paper stating that I had been warned about the possible consequences of my anti-social behavior. Five minutes later, in English, Sharansky told a Reuters correspondent from a nearby phone booth about this official warning. This bloodless news was probably not even suitable for that reporter’s waste bin.

  3 Подопытные (Moscow: Sergei Dubov Foundation). Abbreviated when translated into English as Watching Communism Fail: A Memoir of Life in the Soviet Union (McFarland, 2008).

  NINE

  The First Trial, December 1974

  THE REFUSENIK VLADIMIR LASARIS and I did not feel much sympathy for each other, but we had a common cause and a common destiny for the foreseeable future. Our train was moving toward the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa where the trial of a fifty-seven-year-old physician was about to begin. Dr. Mikhail Stern had been arrested after giving his twenty-nine-year-old son a written permission that was required to immigrate to Israel. The outraged local officials trumped up a charge of bribery. The physician had been in prison for nearly seven months, and his wife, his elderly mother, and both sons were denied access to him.

  A day before our departure, Lasaris and I, along with another refusenik, Alexander Goldfarb, distributed among our Moscow acquaintances a statement of our intention to attend the trial. If we were arrested before we got there, it would confirm that the trial was only a guise for the guiltless doctor’s ongoing persecution.

  Lasaris and I stood by a car window and in a low voice discussed what could happen if we were detained on the way to Vinnitsa. A Ukrainian with bright blue eyes and shining teeth came by several times to speak with us; the short man could pass for forty, if not for the bulging vein in his neck and the thick gray hair that belied his true age. His rustic manners lent some charm to his benevolence and curiosity.

  After talking to us once again about the usual trifles of journeying by train, he walked away to the next window and, believing that the noise of the moving train would not let us hear, said to a sergeant, “Oh boy, I shot a lot of them during the war!”

  The soldier looked at us and smiled at the man who continued calmly, “They all want to move to Israel, afraid that in the end, we’ll finish the job.” He jerked his massive shoulders and squashed an imaginary insect between the nails of his thumbs.

  We pretended as though we had seen or heard nothing. What else could we do? Spit in his face? Complain to other passengers? Kill him? It was our baptism by fire on the eve of a long trial.

  “A neighbor hung my grandmother,” I said, “when the Germans came to Kiev.”

  “And the others?” asked Lasaris.

  “You know where they are,” I said.

  “Babi Yar?”

  “Yes, in the mass grave.”

  We arrived without incident in Vinnitsa and easily reached the Sterns’ rickety house, no different from the others.

  We sat at the dinner table in a room where the walls had been ripped open, the furniture broken. The doctor’s wife Ida said, “I’m sorry we have no decent spoons and forks. The prosecutor Krachenko picked them straight from this table as evidence of our riches, frustrated after a futile two-day search for Jewish gold and diamonds.” She waved her left hand. “Even the penny watch from my wrist.”

  The prosecutor sincerely believed in the hidden wealth of the popular endocrinologist and had dispatched requests to dozens of cities, even in Siberia, to find out whether Stern kept his money in local non-interest bearing savings banks. Later in court Mikhail Stern tried to explain “whence came the myth of Jewish wealth,” but the judge forbade him to speak academically on the subject.

  We came to the courthouse an hour before the start of the trial. At the entrance six policemen and some sturdy fellows in civilian clothes were already counting the clock. Under their feet squelched cold mud, and snowflakes were falling on their black patent-leather visors. A first lieutenant, resolutely blocking the narrow door, stopped Stern’s older son Victor and asked: “Your summons?”

  “What summons? I’m his son.”

  “We have orders to let in people only pursuant to a summons.”

  “Is it a closed trial?” asked his younger brother August. Their mother and four sisters of Mikhail Stern began yelling at the police.

  “Your last name?” the three brash Muscovites—Lasaris, Goldfarb and I—shouted at the first lieutenant. The local police had not yet seen such impudence. The first lieutenant stammered, “Adamenko.”

  Men in civilian clothes shoved us away from the door, and another lieutenant spoke, “We let inside only those on the approved list! All seats are already taken!”

  All of a sudden, somewhere from the side, no
t from the courthouse, a big shot—a lieutenant colonel, without his coat—crashed into us. He was swinging his heavy hands and shouting, “If you disturb order, we’ll put all of you in prison for fifteen days!”

  The crowd around us was quickly growing. Some made a fuss, but the majority of the horde silently watched the unusual spectacle. A shabbily dressed onlooker was explaining to Ida Stern, “We have Soviet laws. If it is possible to admit relatives in, then you would be allowed, and if not—then you cannot.”

  I got a grip on myself and said softly, “Let the sons in. We aren’t violating anything.”

  The lieutenant colonel barked, “For them, he’s their father. For us, a criminal!”

  We also demanded that he give us his name. The lieutenant colonel was not used to Muscovite rudeness. The question extracted the sound of a racing motorcycle from his terrific set of lungs, a roar from a state of shock, as if we were telling the Vinnitsa policemen to take off their pants.

  So passed an endless half hour. And suddenly, someone very important, who will remain unnamed, saw our unpunished insolence amid the crowd of law-abiding citizens. Perhaps he wondered what the corrupt capitalist press obedient to the Zionists would say about the trial. A head stuck out of the courthouse and whispered in the first lieutenant’s ear. And the world turned upside down.

  “Please come this way,” said Lt. Adamenko ceremoniously.

  In seconds the crowd, bristling with elbows, dragged us along the narrow stairs to the fourth floor.

  When Stern entered the room, guarded by six soldiers with rifles and dressed as if for parade, I recalled the show trial at the railroad club in the Kostroma Region. The killer was guarded by two bored policemen with side arms.

  We knew that Stern had spent a long time in a damp basement cell. He was ill. Imagine my surprise when he, with a quick and firm step, straight as a stick, walked between the rows, blew a kiss to his wife, and took his place behind his lawyer and the soldiers. A tidy rectangle of his gray beard emphasized the blackness of his hair. You would have thought that he dyed it, but we knew that the gray beard was the stigma of prison.

  When the formalities began, Stern answered the judge’s questions loudly, as if reciting poetry. Everything said during the trial that I reproduce here is verbatim, since I jotted it all down in the courtroom, in front of the judge and surrounded by KGB onlookers.

  On the question of his ethnic origin Stern replied, “As long as the world will have at least one anti-Semite, I will speak loudly—I’m a Jew.”

  A middle-aged Jewish onlooker in a dense crowd at the open door suddenly became distinctly pale. The next two questions of the Judge Vasily Orlovsky were also close to my heart: “Were you a member of the Communist Party?” and “When were you expelled from the Party?”

  A loyal Soviet patriot, Stern said, “For forty years I have been an active member of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party.”

  Orlovsky repeatedly prohibited him to speak on topics that were not related to the court proceedings, but the defendant believed that they had a direct bearing on the case. For example, he still managed to say, “My criminal case was fabricated according to the recipe of the notorious Doctors’ Plot in 1952. At that time, eminent figures of medicine were accused of poisoning their patients and attempting to murder Stalin and other leaders.”

  “Defendant Stern,” said the judge, stopping him, “we know the history better than you do. The Party long ago corrected the errors that occurred. All of this is irrelevant to the case.”

  “Relevant,” Stern said. “The witnesses for the prosecution were told: the Jewish doctor is a spy who was paid for poisoning the Soviet people.”

  Prosecutor Krivoruchko jumped up, his hands outstretched to Orlovsky: “I demand…”

  “Defendant,” the judge said, “speak on the substance of your petition. Otherwise I will have to…”

  Stern said, “The witnesses were intimidated.”

  Prosecutor: “The question of the witnesses for the defense can be resolved at the end of the judicial investigation.”

  Counsel David Axelbant: “No, it should be resolved right now. Some of the forty witnesses on our list may be present in this room, and the court is entitled to reject them for that reason. Many of our witnesses live far away in the villages, and it will take time for them to arrive at the court.”

  “The question of the witnesses for the defense we’ll resolve in the future,” the judge said.

  Many days later Orlovsky agreed to hear four of the forty witnesses for the defense.

  The judge turned to the reading of the indictment, and he did so with fervor. The twenty-seven pages of text narrated that Mikhail Stern tenaciously grabbed the sick, the disabled and even the dying by their pocket and shamelessly dumped out of it all he could—from fifty rubles to two-dozen eggs.

  “By extortion,” the document stated, “Stern forced the sick, for the sake of their health and to save their lives, to give him bribes. From twenty-one patients he extorted 775 rubles, two geese and three buckets of apples and thus committed a crime pursuant to Article 168.2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic.”

  This article carried a punishment for bribery ranging from eight to fifteen years. The document also referred to Stern’s second offense: “Nineteen cases of fraud... to aid in the acquisition of foreign drugs” that he said “only he had.” So, “he also received money in the amount of 754 rubles and 3 kopecks, and got a rooster and seventy eggs.”

  During the first break, I pushed through the crowded corridors. People were staring at me. Several former patients of Stern discussed the indictment.

  “Filth!” said a man with a gray wooden crutch sticking out of his pants instead of a leg. “He annoyed some authorities, so now they tell lies about him.”

  “Well, how can you say that? You’ve heard how many witnesses!”

  “We have not heard witnesses yet,” countered the man. “Did he take money or an egg from you? No. From me, no. And from her he didn’t take a kopeck.”

  “But then the doctors do take money; one cannot make a single step in a polyclinic without money,” objected his interlocutor with a scarf thrown over her shoulders.

  “You don’t know him,” insisted the cripple. “He would give his own to others.”

  “So, why don’t you offer yourself as a witness?”

  “Didn’t I go? I walked right into the judge’s office. I have nobody to fear. And he said”—here the man pursed his lips portraying Orlovsky, shook his head awkwardly as if his neck was made of wood, and choked out—“Stern isn’t charged with extorting money from you.”

  I did not speak to that handicapped man, fearing possible complications for him. He had come to the court many times and always tried to put his head between the escort soldiers to greet Stern.

  A woman with her hair folded into a bun probably came here like me, from the overcrowded courtroom; she counted Stern’s income for those who were not able to hear: “Well, what is it? One and a half thousand rubles in ten years? This means—150 in a year, right? So... and then in a month... twelve rubles, isn’t it right? Well, well, well! The saleswoman in a grocery store steals more in one day by cheating buyers!”

  During the breaks, rushing out into the hallway, onto the stairs and even out into the street, became a routine activity for all of us, the three Muscovites and two sons of Stern. The local refuseniks and their children were waiting to pick up our notes. I had a more difficult time than the others because my notes were more bulky and the men sitting next to me always tried to follow me.

  UPON MY RETURN to the courtroom, a new man, this time of athletic build, turned aside his knees to let me pass. I thanked him. He smiled wryly and glanced at the notebook, already in my hand. The court embarked on hearing the testimony of Hanna Overchuk, one of the two main prosecution witnesses.

  A year after her last visit to the doctor, her husband and she realized that Stern had taken possession of their hard-ea
rned money. On May 14, 1974, Hanna handed this statement to the investigator Krachenko: “Due to the fact that Stern fraudulently, under the guise of treating my son, took 65 rubles from me, please take steps to recover the said amount in my favor.”

  She told the court a story that we repeatedly heard from other prosecution witnesses in the following days. A military-medical commission of a district found a prospective soldier unfit for service and sent this fifteen-year-old villager to Vinnitsa for treatment in the endocrinology clinic. Thus the Overchuks appeared in Stern’s office.

  “Why did you put 25 rubles on the doctor’s desk?” asked the prosecutor Gregory Krivoruchko.

  “For a drug. He said the pharmacies didn’t have it, but he would get it,” said Hanna.

  “Who else was at that moment at the office?”

  “My son had already left it.”

  “Did the doctor examine your son?”

  “Yes, like all others.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That the boy’s genitals had not developed normally.”

  “How much money did you and your husband give to the defendant?”

  “65 rubles.”

  “How many shots did the doctor administer to your son? How often did he travel to see this doctor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were you surprised that the doctor asked him to undress in your presence?” asked Stern’s defense counsel David Axelbant.

  “No. He’s a doctor.”

  The indictment repeatedly emphasized that Stern, to extort money effectively, constantly bared boys’ genitals in front of their mothers. The expression “he showed her his penis” ran through many pages of the prosecutorial work. The prosecutor working in a region known for endemic diseases of the thyroid gland and the genitals, apparently decided that this method looked particularly suspect.

  “Did you tell your husband that you gave money to Stern?” continued Axelbant.

  “I don’t remember,” Hanna said.

  Two days later, her husband, farmer Ivan Overchuk sheepishly replied to this question, “No, she didn’t.”