THE MAGAZINE OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES
A Refusenik Protest Remembered
Maxim D. Shrayer
Cover of Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story. Courtesy of the author.In late March, just as the 1987 Purim-shpil season had been winding down, the refuseniks mulled over the news of a visit by Edgar Bronfman, then president of the World Jewish Congress, and Morris Abram, at the time president simultaneously of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. They were received in Moscow by high-level Soviet officials. We heard from various sources that on the table was the condition of Soviet Jews, specifically refuseniks, and emigration. The Jackson-Vanik and the Stevenson Amendments, the former only repealed in 2012, restricted US trade relations with the Soviet Union. The linkage of Jewish emigration and the trade relations between the two countries was hardly new. New were concrete and real promises that Soviet officials had reportedly made. The refusenik community was on the verge of change.
Something had also changed in my parents' attitude to my direct involvement in refusenik politics. They weren't encouraging me, but they weren't trying to stop me, either. I had resigned from the Komsomol (Young Communist League), and the membership no longer weighed me down or hindered me. Nor was I any longer particularly concerned about being thrown out of the university. I finally felt free to protest the authorities alongside my parents and other refuseniks. The demonstration I remember most vividly took place in early April in the center of Moscow. My father and I took the direct Metro line to Pushkinskaya, then walked briskly for ten minutes from the Pushkin monument along Tverskoy Boulevard toward the Nikitsky Gate. There was still a chill in the air, despite the late morning hour and the sun, and the buds on the limes and poplars were only beginning to unfold and show green. The grande dame of Moscow's boulevards, with its dark-green benches, smaller monuments, and play areas with seesaws, was empty, save for an occasional retiree reading a newspaper posted on a billboard or an old lady pushing a pram. We passed the Literary Institute on the right, the new building of the Moscow Art Theater on the left. Practically every inch of the street here was a museum, of either public or private memories. In that mansion Maria Ermolova, one of the greatest Russian actresses, once had her home. On that peeling bench I had sat kissing a Jewish girl I met in front of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, both of us recent high school graduates waiting to take university examinations. Tverskoy Boulevard was a legendary rendezvous terrain, and I was now treading it with my father on the way to a refusenik protest.
The author with his parents, David Shrayer-Petrov and Emilia Shrayer, Moscow, Fall-Winter 1985–86. Courtesy of the Shrayer Family Archive.We approached the end of the boulevard with its public garden and circle of benches surrounding the monument to Kliment Timiryazev, eminent Russian botanist and plant physiologist. Past this point was a busy intersection where the boulevard ring veered to the right and continued for a few blocks under a different name, only to hit the Arbat. From here one could see the yellow confines and gilded cupolas of the Grand Ascension Church where Pushkin was married to Natalia Goncharova in 1831. More or less straight ahead lay Herzen Street, which took one past the Moscow Conservatory of Music and toward Red Square. Across the street on the left, the modern gray building of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) stood out among its teal and tea-green old neighbors with ornate stucco façades. I was tempted to come out of the boulevard and turn right onto a quiet lovely street called Malaya Bronnaya, with a struggling Russian theater occupying the building that had once belonged to the Moscow Yiddish Theater. A short stroll brought one to an enchanting area of Moscow, the Patriarch Ponds, and to what had once been an area of Moscow seething with Jewish life, around the former synagogue at Bolshaya Bronnaya Street.
"What are you doing?" I yell at the two "athletes." I cannot control myself.
"What do you want, sissy? You stay out of it," one of them replies, stepping toward me.
Face to face, I get a good look at my enemy. He is not a bored youth from a workingclass suburb seduced with ultrapatriotic hogwash. This one is a professional, a wellgroomed man in his late twenties, with a clean shave. His athletic cap and jacket must be a costume he was issued at his office that morning, to look like a Soviet nobody. But a thug he is all the same, doubly the thug because he takes a salary and state benefits for persecuting defenseless refuseniks.
"What right do you have to do this?" I scream right in his face, and in place of this one thug I suddenly see brigades of other thugs as they call Jewish kids "kike" in the school courtyard, assault Jewish girls in secluded park alleys, knock Jewish mothers off their feet on Arbat Street.
"What right?" the thug now brings his barrel chest inches away from mine. I can smell his cologned sweat, see a faint scar beneath his right eye.
"Yes, what right," I scream back. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. "These people have a constitutional right to free speech," I scream.
"Get him out of here," a war veteran's bleaty voice emerges from behind the thug's back. "Why isn't he paying his debt to the motherland?"
In my state of extreme agitation I can still process the fact that the old goat is referring to me and to military service. I know I should stop and retreat, but I cannot. I want to fight the thug, I want to rip his throat out. I feel as though years of bottled-up rage are about to burst out of me. I want revenge for what he had done to my mother just a few weeks ago. I can feel that our bodies are about to collide, that he's just waiting for me to shove him first. Fortunately my father brings his right arm around my chest and restrains me.
"Stop, he's provoking you," father whispers loudly as he drags me away from the thug, who still hasn't moved. Only after a few minutes of being pulled away from the scene and in the direction of the Pushkin monument do I begin to come out of the trance.
I was lucky, very lucky. I had escaped unscathed. My father didn't say anything to me afterwards. I think he wanted to, but held back. Only now, as a father of two children, a man in my late forties, have I begun to understand what my father was feeling.
Born in Moscow in 1967, Maxim D. Shrayer immigrated to the United States in August 1987, after a summer in Europe. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and the author of twelve books in English and Russian, among them Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration and I SAW IT: Ilya Selvinsky and The Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah. Shrayer has edited and cotranslated three books of fiction by his father, David Shrayer- Petrov, most recently Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories. Shrayer received a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for An Anthology of Jewish Russian Literature, and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Jewish poets as Shoah witnesses. He lives in Brookline, MA with his family and in summer directs the South Chatham Writers' Workshop on Cape Cod.