Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

6. Poetry, Love, Persecution

126 6 Poetry, Love, Persecution Whil e I was in Chas hnikovo for part of the summer, my parents undertook to renovate our apartment, which hadn’t been upgraded since we moved there in 1971. Decent wallpaper and tile had been procured for double the official prices, and an enterprising contractor who ran a virtually private business on the side was hired to do the work. Upon returning home at the end of July 1985, I found our place completely redone from floor to ceiling, replete with new living room furniture and bookshelves. It may seem odd that my parents, then refuseniks of almost seven years, would decide to do it. Did the renovations symbolize a surrender, an acknowledgment that we were giving up our hope of emigrating? As of the summer of 1985, the political situation in the Soviet Union didn’t promise a change of fortune for the refuseniks. The “rule of corpses”—Brezhnev’s latter years followed by Andropov’s brief stint on the Soviet throne—had ended in March 1985 with the passing of Konstantin Chernenko. At the March 1985 Extraordinary Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee, the fifty-four-year old, power-hungry Mikhail Gorbachev had succeeded Chernenko as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Gorbachev was elected over his Brezhnevite rival Viktor Grishin by a narrow margin, and his grip on power still seemed very tenuous. It was known that the new Soviet leader Gorbachev had been a protégé of both Mikhail Suslov, the Party’s Grand Inquisitor, and Yuri Andropov, the former chief of the KGB. To put this in a refusenik’s perspective, my parents first stood on the path of emigration and tasted of political persecution at the end of the Brezhnev period. Throughout the Andropov and Chernenko years (1982-1985), we continued to reapply for exit visas, and Poetr y, Love, Pers ec ut ion | 127 the authorities promptly denied our requests. As my parents renovated our apartment, the dawn of Gorbachev’s rule brought forth not a promise of reforms that would later transform and undo the country, but only the recent, chilling memories of Andropov. The renovations of the apartment hinted at a modicum of comfort in our lives. My father was working as an endocrinologist at a neighborhood clinic, and also consulting at another hospital and seeing private patients, and my mother was teaching English part-time at a district House of Culture and giving private lessons. A fragile equilibrium had set in. The refuseniks had become an isolated community with some economic stability but not much hope for emigration and still a hanging threat of persecution. When we drove to Estonia for our August vacation, I sat next to my father while my mother napped or read in the back seat. I remember thinking, as we crossed the rolling Valdai Hills, that we would always live in Russia, that every summer I would be going to Pärnu, that my future children would grow up in a country that would be fundamentally unchanged and would always hold its Jews as captive aliens. In the middle of our August vacation, my father had to leave Pärnu for a week and drive back to Moscow. He then left the car in Moscow and took the overnight train back to Estonia. Two weeks later my parents and I traveled back to Russia by train. We took an early morning bus to Tallinn and spent the whole day with Jüri and Urve Arrak, who were still married and living in a state of teetering harmony. The Arraks were fully aware of my parents’ circumstances. Yet on that sparkling Baltic day we never spoke of being refuseniks and of the dangers of dissent. Instead, we feasted on the gifts of Tallinn’s best patisserie, including my favorite strips of moist coffee cake layered with whipped cream and topped with glazed cranberries. The Arraks drove us to see the spot on the coast outside Tallinn , where episodes of Grigory Kosintsev’s Hamlet had been filmed in the early 1960s. We stood on an observation platform, looked down over the toothy cliffs on the beach below, and spoke, like characters in a Chekhov story, of time that churns our lives into granules of fine white sand. A farewell dinner at the Arraks’ Tallinn apartment crowned the day, a farewell dinner and an adventure. We had been taking the same [18.222.184.162] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 17:26...