On 6 February 1972 fourteen Jews addressed a letter to US President Nixon. Bearing in mind his impending visit to Moscow, they asked him to use his good offices to obtain permission to emigrate to Israel for Esther Markish, the 60-year-old widow of the well-known poet Perets Markish, who was shot in 1952 [1].
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A reference issued by the Central Scientific Research Institute for the Cotton Industry to Roman Rutman for submission to the Department for Visas & Registration (OVIR) contained the following statement:
“The administration, Party committee and trade-union committee of the institute object to Rutman’s emigration to Israel, since he is … a highly-qualified specialist.”
After OVIR refused to give Rutman and his family permission to emigrate (remarking: “You must understand — after all, we don’t detain collectors of scrap material”) Rutman stopped working. He declared a strike beginning on 21 February, demanding to be allowed to leave for Israel with his family.
A few days later he was dismissed [2].
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At a meeting of the Frunze district soviet executive committee in Moscow, Vladimir Slepak was accused, in the presence of the district procurator, of being a parasite [3]. Slepak is a highly-qualified engineer with more than twenty years service to his name and formerly headed a laboratory.
Last September Slepak was forced to leave his job at a scientific research institute as a result of persecution (CCE 23.6). The cause of the persecution was his wish to emigrate to Israel.
At present he is making a living by giving lessons and consultations, of which the financial authorities have been notified and which Soviet law regards as work of social value.
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THE KISHINYOV TRIAL
Political prisoner G. Z. Shur has written a letter to the USSR Supreme Soviet [4] in which he sheds light on certain details of the June 1971 Kishinyov Trial of the Nine (CCE 20.3).
The “Zionist, nationalistic books’’ Ariel and This is Israel, confiscated from Shur during a search, were judged to be material evidence of his guilt, since they “characterised him as a member of an anti-Soviet organisation”.
Ariel is a survey of culture and the arts, published in Israel in 1965 in Russian, and sent to the USSR by post. The content of the collection is suggested by the titles of the articles it contains: “Shakespeare on the Israeli stage”, “Israeli methods of investigating cancerous diseases”, “Mstislav Rostropovich on tour in Israel”, and so forth.
This is Israel is an advertising brochure published in England by a travel agency. It contains mainly illustrations, views of historical monuments and scenery in Israel.
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Charges against the accused at the Kishinyov trial also mentioned such books as:
- The Maccabees are My Brothers by Howard Fast, on the national-liberation uprising of the Jews in the second century B.C. against the Graeco-Persian hegemony;
- A textbook of Jewish History for Schools & Private Study by S. M. Dubnov, published in Russian in Petrograd (1918);
- A Jewish Encyclopaedia, a pre-revolutionary publication in Russian; and so on.
A Collection of Prayers, Rituals and Laws of the Jewish People, a pre-revolutionary publication in Modern Hebrew and Russian, was confiscated during the search. Subsequently it was “destroyed by burning” by KGB officials, since it “had no bearing on the case and its content was reactionary” (the certificate of burning is quoted in full in Shur’s letter).
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NOTES
- See text in News Bulletin on Soviet Jewry (NBSJ), No. 212, which also reprints Mrs. Markish’s letter to Golda Meir of 6 February 1972. (For NBSJ, see Bibliography CCE 23.11.)
Among the many letters on behalf of Mrs. Markish and her son David, see those in the London Times (23 June 1972) from 12 eminent writers, including Joseph Brodsky; and the Daily Telegraph (4 January 1972) from three journalists.
See also accounts in the British press of the hunger-strike by Mrs. David Markish outside the Soviet embassy in London on 11-13 June 1972.
(Cf. Vladimir Gusarov, My Daddy killed Mikhoels, CCE 11.14 [13], the major event of the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign of late Stalinism.)
↩︎ - Rutman wrote an Open Letter on this whole episode (see NBSJ No. 213).
He also signed many Jewish appeals, notably one from nine Moscow scientists to the international scientific community calling for help in emigrating. See extracts in a Reuters dispatch (12 January 1972).
↩︎ - The public accusation that Vladimir Slepak was “a parasite” occurred on 23 February 1972 and provoked strong protests in the USSR and abroad (see NBSJ Nos. 211-214, on the whole affair).
Later, on 12 May 1972, a Jewish prayer-book signed by 200 British MPs was sent to Moscow by airfreight as a bar-mitzvah present for Slepak’s son Leonid. It was confiscated by the Soviet customs.
Then the Slepaks telephone was cut off. Protests were requested in the UK parliament from the British government by the secretary of the All-Party Commons Committee for the Release of Soviet Jewry Labour MP Greville Janner (son of Barnet Janner), especially concerning the Soviet breach of the International Telecommunication Convention. He received sympathetic but cautious replies from government spokesmen (see The Times, 15 & 16 May, and 8 June 1972).
↩︎ - Shur’s letter to the USSR Supreme Soviet (dated 25 October 1971) has reached the West but it has not yet been published, perhaps because it is 3,500 words long.
In January 1972 Shur suffered severely, in Camp 17(a) in Mordovia, from chest pains and an ulcer. When the authorities refused to hospitalize him a hunger-strike involving 11 Jewish prisoners was staged from 7 to 18 February 1972 (see NBSJ No. 212).
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