Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  Faina was a very busy lady taking good care of two Arkadys and her grandchildren; almost every day she cooked and delivered meals to her ill and ungrateful older brother, five houses down the street.

  One bright September morning she woke me up and commanded, “Hurry up! We should go immediately, too many people will try to do this.” Angelinos in need could go to nearby flower shops and pick up a watermelon for free that day. Faina, her husband and I sat in my old Chevy and she said, to my dismay, “It’s so good, Alik, that it has this spacious trunk.”

  In five minutes I parked the car on the corner of La Brea Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, next to a florist. “No—no,” commanded Faina, “go to the backyard.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” I said timidly, praying nobody would be there. “Maybe we aren’t allowed to enter here.” I already had a foreboding.

  “Don’t you see that the gate is wide open?” she said. “Look at these huge watermelons. They’re like fat pigs.”

  So I backed up my Chevy close to the ‘pigs,’ hundreds of which lay on the ground. We were alone in the backyard.

  “Look,” Faina said, “nobody’s in the yard, nobody guards them, and nobody will count the watermelons we are going to load.”

  Her overweight husband and I, groaning, lifted one and put it in the trunk. After putting in the second watermelon I asked, “Fanechka, maybe it’s enough, one ‘pig’ for us and one for Oscar?”

  “Are you making fun of me?” she said. “We need three for us, three for my son, and three for my ungrateful brother.”

  “They will rot,” I said. “You see, passersby are already giving us dirty looks.”

  “I don’t understand how you could be a dissident in Moscow,” Faina said. “You’re afraid of your own shadow. Look, nobody wants these watermelons.”

  After we loaded six huge ‘pigs’ she said, “We should go. A woman is looking at us from the shop,” and we promptly moved out. The survival operation was over. Sitting next to me, Faina looked happy. Then I blurted out the next nonsense, “Your son might refuse to take more than one.”

  She looked at me with compassion, “Alik, you’re such an impractical man. We have to find a nice, down-to-earth, sane Jewish wife for you; otherwise, you won’t survive in capitalist America.”

  At home she immediately called Oscar, “Sonny, I have something very good for my grandchildren. Don’t forget to empty the trunk before coming here, and stop moaning like a wounded hare.”

  Thanks to her son’s connections, I got a cheap efficiency in a nice, subsidized, twenty-story building near the famous Santa Monica Pier. Not far from there was a bookstore. Those guys were sane, did not promote Stalin’s books, despised the Soviet rulers, and believed in the benevolence of a big democratic government.

  I told them that the very word “socialism” has been used by mortal enemies for their political ends, by dictators and European democracies, by atheists and Catholic priests, by slave owners and freedom fighters, by Zionists and anti-Semites, by Hitler and Stalin.

  It was not long after that when Paul Popov and Swedish Slaviska Mission managed to arrange my second visit to Sweden. In Stockholm some radicals asked me for an interview for their little Trotskyite paper. My Christian hosts and I believed that any publicity for the cause of persecuted Russian Evangelicals would be helpful. At a nice apartment, for two hours I answered all kind of questions from a dozen young men and women. As usual, they asked about Soviet free education, free healthcare, and free housing. The slave owners of the distant past, I said, did exactly the same—they fed their slaves, gave them shelter, and tried to keep them healthy, so the slaves could perform their tasks.

  My decent friends from the Santa Monica bookstore believed that Sweden was successfully moving toward true socialism. The Swedes believed that Swedish capitalists hijacked the very word “socialism.” Yet this apartment was of a subsidized kind. Then I caught them in a trap. “How many families live in this apartment?”

  “Of course, one,” they said. “We have a boy and a girl.”

  “In Moscow, such a dwelling would house four families—one room for each family,” I said.

  Upon returning home and sitting again in the Santa Monica bookstore, I thought of similarities between two incompatible socialist movements. They both, Californian socialists and Swedish Trotskyites, wanted to make the world a better place, and they knew how to do this. The thunderous Zeus from Manhattan would ask them, “So, is this your religion?”

  I FOUND TIME when I could do some ice dancing in Burbank but soon hit the road again; this time I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a regional conference of Amnesty International in Dallas, Texas. In Dallas, someone handed me a letter received at Amnesty’s headquarters in New York. My name was written on the envelope in Russian and dubious English, and it had an American postage stamp but no return address. The letter was short:

  “My dearest friend Alik, you were right. You know that I don’t read Soviet publications, but Fred brought me the Literary Gazette with an article that delighted me. It said that you were working for the CIA, which indicated to us that you were fine and had friends. What a relief! Ask the CIA to assign you and me on reconnaissance to that sequoia forest in California and to British Columbia to spy on bears hunting salmon. The jeans that you sent me were probably stolen upon their arrival in Russia. Do you remember how you got fed up with your writing? Now, I have almost ceased writing. Gena.”

  It was Gennady Snegiryov. His letter was a sweet reminder of our lasting friendship that had continued even after I was no longer able to see my friends. They knew that I did not want to endanger their lives. This letter returned me back to Russia, and I did not like it. My brave Gena was afraid to show his address to unfriendly eyes, even in an American post office.

  “You were right” maybe meant that almost thirty years ago, after a boxing workout at the University, I had been right to reject his offer to acquire a fake certificate of my mental illness. Gena had close relationship with his psychiatrist. Walking between palms surmounted by large crowns, I remembered how after my graduation he applied to me his version of Buddhism. “You still have this stupid Soviet soul,” he said, “but I solemnly predict that soon it will be pushed out of your heart by a healthy anti-Soviet soul and it will torment you for the rest of your life.”

  It did not happen soon, but at the time I asked, “So you think that a soul wears out as the sole of a shoe?”

  “Exactly. Not exactly,” he said almost in the same breath.

  After that infallible prognosis, he washed down a huge portion of pills from my medicine cabinet and fell asleep on my floor. At daybreak I put a pillow under his head and covered him with a plaid blanket. We never used the word addict.

  “You were right” could also mean that years later, after the publication of my scandalous lampoon in Moscow, Kostroma authorities, armed with such a diagnosis, could have tried to put me in a madhouse. Or, who knows, maybe he meant something else.

  Looking out from the steep Santa Monica Coast, across the Pacific and onto the distant, impeccably rounded skyline, I thought, you’ll never see your soulmates again. It’s unhealthy to be an expert on human suffering, so it’s time to stop looking at the past.

  The ocean was getting darker with every minute, the distant waves turning into hardened lava. Where moments ago had shone the crown of the sun, a long red stripe now rapidly faded. It was absolutely clear to me that the sun had disappeared exactly behind that far-flung part of the Pacific where the sixteen-year-old Gena Snegiryov once sailed along the Russian coast with university biologists. Now I was loudly explaining to my buddy that I would try to get his address through my ex-wife or just send her his jeans.

  The gloomy boulevard was already empty as I continued talking to Gena, when he and my favorite bard and stagehand, Fred Solyanov, appeared to me, emerging out of pungently odorous black bushes behind dark palm trees. My dear friends—here, next to me. Gena inhaled deeply the fragrant air and said, “Exo
tics!”

  “Snegiryov,” I mumbled, embarrassed, “I did not send you the jeans.”

  “The devil with them,” Gena said and suggested, “Let’s race to that line.”

  “The horizon line?” I asked readily.

  “Yes, where else,” he said.

  “If Tom Kolesnichenko were here, he’d say you guys were crazy,” Fred said and gently touched a palm tree.

  “And our Marxist Nahl,” Gena said, “would’ve implied that it’s impossible to even reach the horizon, no matter how fast we are.”

  Fred tried to defend our Marxist. “He was the fastest runner at Moscow University.”

  They were gone as suddenly as they had appeared—into the same, now jet-black, sharply smelling bushes. I turned and trudged back to America, muttering, “Tom would never say such a thing.”

  Five minutes later, I looked at the horizon again, now from the height of my twentieth floor. However, the horizon had almost disappeared, and somewhere far away the dark sky merged with the dark ocean.

  APPENDIX

  Images and Documents

  Russian Christian signatories of a petition for emigration from the USSR.

  Select pages from Pharaoh, Let My People Go! edited by Arkady Polishchuk and published by Door of Hope International. Glendale, California, 1980.

  The marks and notes are by various people who used the book to make presentations about human rights in Russia.

  Clandestine photo by Paul Popov of the Vushchenko-Chmykhalov families seeking asylum at the U.S. Embassy. Moscow, 1978.

  SELECTION OF TESTIMONIES

  Marina Bobarykina (12 years): I wish we could have children’s meetings like in your country. People get sent to prison for that.

  Mikhail Bobarykin (15 years): The kids in school stuck pins in my sister. They yell at us in the street: You believers ought to be killed!

  Tatyana Bobarykina (17 years): The doors of educational institutions are closed to us believers. We have to make a choice: either learning, or God.

  Alla and Nellie Galushkin (10 and 11 years): Our schoolmates throw stones at us.

  Valery Goretoi, the cherry picker (Starotitarovskaya) (11 years): Our teachers tell us that there is no God, but I say that there is God.

  Victor Goretoi (14 years): From the time of our childhood, we believers have to go through many hardships!

  Daniel Matyash (17 years): If the government won’t let us emigrate, many of us will be sent to prison.

  Elena Matyash (11 years): The officials are taunting us… My Mother was sent to jail… We do not want to live in this country.

  Olga Matyash (14 years): When we grow up, they will also send us to prison for our faith.

  Anatoly Pishchenko from Krasnodarsky region (12 years): Many believers are being sent to prison now.

  Valya Pishchenko (15 years): Children from atheistic families got so incited against us by our teachers that they beat me so that I have suffered from poor health for six years.

  Vladimir Pishchenko (15 years): I beg you: help us emigrate so we won’t have to look at the tears of our parents anymore.

  Nadezhda (Nadia) Shchukina (17 years): I cannot accept the Soviet government’s criminal deceitful allegations about freedom of religion in the USSR.

  Alla and Nellie Galushkin, Vladimir Pishchenko, Elena Matyash, Victor Goretoi, Valery Goretoi, Tatyana Bobarykina

  Valya Pishchenko, Marina Bobarykina, Mikhail Bobarykin, Nadezhda Shchukina, Olga Matyash, a Pentecostal family from Ukraine: Nikolai Nikolaevich Gordievsky, his wife Anna Andreevna, and their children. 1975.

  Anatoly Pishchenko, Daniel Matyash, a Pentecostal family from Ukraine: Petr Alexeevich Melnechuk, his wife Sofia Petrovna, and their children. 1975.

  A sample of numerous appeals made by Russian Christians to Soviet authorities asking for permission to emigrate. To sign was dangerous. Signatures could be used in courts.

  Birthday celebration of former Soviet general turned one of the leading human rights activists, Pyotr Grigorievich Grigorenko (center left on the couch), in his Moscow apartment. October 16, 1977. The photograph was taken when I was already in Vienna. Next to him is his fearless wife Zinaida Mikhailovna.

  Both Grigorenkos are in the chapter “The Assault on the American Embassy” and “Russian Jews, Russian Tigers, and Some Other Russians.” Nine years after this photograph was taken, we celebrated Grigorenko’s 80th birthday in New York, and four months later we buried him.

  From left to right, on the floor: G.O. Altunyan, member of the Initiative Group for the Protection of Human Rights. In 1969, he was sentenced to three years in prison; in 1981, to seven years of camps for especially dangerous state criminals, followed by five years of exile. Next to him is Alexander P. Podrabinek, just released from 15 days imprisonment, who famously fought against the use of psychiatry for the persecution of dissidents.

  From left to right, on the couch, members of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG): The well-known physicist N.N. Meiman. He contributed to the mathematical aspect of the development of nuclear weapons, and in 1953, became a laureate of the Stalin Prize in Theoretical Physics. Lawyer S.V. Kallistratova, who defended various Soviet dissidents and from 1977 was a member of the MHG. Grigorenko and his wife Zinaida. N.A. Velikanova, the mother of well-known human rights activist Tatyana Velikanova (who, before my departure, gave me the Viennese phone number of former political prisoner L. Kwachevsky). Priest S.A. Zheludkov. Andrei D. Sakharov. His human rights activism began in the 1960s with a speech in defense of Pyotr Grigorenko, who had been placed in a psychiatric prison.

  Alexander Podrabinek told me that this picture was taken by Yuri Grimm, a former political prisoner. (Sakharov Archive)

  A.D. Sakharov (left) participated in the International symposium on magnetic resonance imaging. Winnipeg, Canada. February 16, 1989. Photographer unknown. (Sakharov Archive)

  I flew to Winnipeg from Washington as a correspondent for Radio Liberty to interview Sakharov at this symposium. He and Lusia (as we called his wife Elena Bonner) told me that it would be better to do without an interview. In the Russian parliament there was an ongoing slanderous attack on Sakharov because of his open opposition against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Most of the deputies were growling and spewing curses. They would have used this “anti-Soviet interview” to continue their slanderous attacks against him. I was the only exiled Russian dissident who met with them abroad not long before his premature death. (In the past, he had not been allowed to travel; for example, to receive his Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.) I returned from Winnipeg without having fulfilled the assignment. Ten months later, on December 14, 1989, he died from a sudden cardiac arrest in his apartment on Chkalov Street. Sakharov was sixty-eight years old.

  My last article in Soviet media, “The Black Mark of Apartheid,” Journalist, circa 1970. It was a professional’s dream to appear in this magazine. It had an unusual feature for Russia—some of the authors were pictured, and even more that that, they were given a short introduction. But I made a mistake. When then editor-in-chief Yegor Yakovlev asked me to write several lines under my picture, I wrote something very short; however, when my article was published and my career in the USSR was over, I wished I had written a longer “goodbye” about my accomplishments. Interestingly, it was this very Yegor who was ordered years earlier to fire me from the newspaper Lenin’s Banner (Leninskoye Znamya) and who advised Tom Kolesnichenko after that to avoid contact with me.

  Attending the McWhirter Human Rights Foundation Award ceremony in London, 1981. Next to me is the widow of the publisher Ross McWhirter, killed by terrorists. On my right is Ross McWhirter’s twin brother, Norris. In 1980, Vladimir Bukovsky was the first Russian who received this award. In 1982 it was given to Alexander Ginsburg.

  Index

  Arkady Polishchuk is designated as AP. Photographs are indicated by page numbers in italics.

  Ahs, Josef, 210, 212

  Ahs, Mikhaela, 213

  Alexeeva, Ludmilla, 292

 
All Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, 307

  All-Russian Society for the Blind, 46–47

  Altunyan, G.O., 339

  American Consul, Vienna, 278–279

  American embassy, 224–227

  Amnesty International, 278, 324

  Andreevich, Victor, 47

  Antonov, Boris, 148, 156, 162

  APN news agency, 91–92

  Asia and Africa Today (magazine), 44, 67–74, 81, 90

  atheism, Communism as, 28

  Axelbant, David, 138–139, 147, 158

  Babi Yar massacre, Kiev, 318, 320

  Bakhmin, Vjacheslav, 265

  Bayda, Josepha, 149–151

  Bayda, Stephan, 150–152

  beatings by secret police, 14, 210-213, 224, 241-242, 336

  Beilin, Yosef, 213

  Belyaev, Igor, 101

  Bendery, 168, 172

  Beria (Sorokovka), 65

  Beria, Lavrentiy Pavlovich, 65, 65n1

  Berkovich, Gary, 119–120, 187–190

  Biryukov, Evgeni, 81–83

  “The Black Mark of Apartheid” (Polishchuk), 341

  blind people’s plight in Rusinovo, 47–56

  Bloch, Irmi, 265, 277–278, 280

  Bobarykin, Mikhail, 336, 337

  Bobarykin, Nikolai, 239

  Bobarykina, Marina, 336, 337

  Bobarykina, Tatyana, 336, 337

  Bonner, E.G., 230, 258–259, 265, 340

  The Border Under Lock and Key, 306–307

  Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich, 84–85, 203

  Brezhnev’s Reception Room sit-in, 12, 25–26, 204–209, 211, 213

  Bukovsky, Vladimir, 309–310, 341

  Butyrskaya (Butyrka) prison, 11–34, 212

  The Buyers of Souls (TV documentary), 214