I left the center of our struggle for Soviet Jewry as quickly as I entered it. In 1973, I gave up being a lonely doublethinker and closeted dissident and plunged into the heart of the movement. Four years later, my exit was even more abrupt.
One minute, you’re in the middle of your press conferences, telephone calls, and Hebrew lessons. The next minute, a sea of hands pulls you out of an elevator and four KGB agents push you straight into a car.
They squeeze you into the middle of the back seat, packing enough men in so that you cannot make final, fleeting eye contact with friends and reporters, who were kidding around with you just moments ago.
The two iron doors of Lefortovo Prison close on you. First, one clangs shut, then the other. You look up and see the muzzle on every window, a wire mesh cage that traps you here. It is March 15, 1977. From now on, even a lonely ray of sun will be a rare visitor in your life.
They strip you. They search you in every orifice, up and down. It’s senseless. They know you have nothing hidden. Eight of them have been hounding you, tailing you around the clock for weeks. But as you stand there, naked, in front of three sergeants and an elderly female paramedic, involuntarily wincing with each poke or prod, you know the message they’re giving you: “From now on, nothing at all belongs to you. Even your body doesn’t belong to you.”
You will now live in front of their eyes full-time. You have no privacy. You cannot hide from them, not even for a moment.
They can come and search you at any time. The light is on in your cell day and night. And if at night you try to pull a blanket over your head to block out the light, they will demand you take off the blanket, or they will enter and pull it off themselves.
The moment they bring you to prison, just before they strip you, they read the accusation aloud. They’re accusing you of treason under Article 64A: high treason. This is a capital crime, they tell you immediately, although you already know that. The punishment: R-A-S-S-T-R-E-L. Death by shooting.
“There will be no more press conferences.” The colonel reading the accusation smiled. “Now everything depends on you.”
I knew what they wanted. I knew very well what they wanted. They wanted to send me back to the world where I say what they want me to say. To the world of doublethink.
They wanted me to stand in front of the journalists and say the Soviets were right and I was wrong. That was how they kept control in a country filled with hundreds of millions of doublethinkers. They didn’t need to kill more dissidents. They only had to show everybody that there was no way to be independent from the authorities in the Communist world.
But this kind of surrender was no longer an option for me. I could not return to that world; I had already lived there. I knew what living as a doublethinker was like. So I found myself standing there, naked, trying not to show my nervousness. I told myself, “They cannot humiliate me. Only I can humiliate myself.”
In the first weeks, the interrogation team grew to seventeen officers, as they set their sights on the Refusenik movement throughout the Soviet Union. The chief interrogator, a colonel, liked to say, “We are not bloodthirsty.” They all kept insisting, “You can save yourself by cooperating with us.”
The colonel reminded me that he had freed two famous dissidents a few years ago. Viktor Krasin and Pyotr Yakir had disavowed their “anti-Soviet activities” in a press conference in 1973, betraying their comrades. “I promised them they would be released,” he said, “and, you see, we kept our word.”
Well, that was a mistake. Reminding me of these two people, fallen heroes of the dissident movement, backfired. Yes, they were released, and some of their comrades were then imprisoned as a consequence. I remember hearing rumors about how miserable Krasin and Yakir were after they confessed. It was too difficult to return to living a life of lies as a doublethinker while burdened by the guilt of being a traitor. I had already heard that Yakir was drinking, and by 1982 he would drink himself to death. In 1975, the KGB helped Krasin and his wife emigrate. The authorities were worried about their mental states; broken men can’t be trusted to keep to their confessions. Arriving in Paris, Krasin gave a second press conference to recant the recanting he made in his first, forced press conference.
In 1984, Krasin would write about his confession: “What did I feel during those hours? Nothing. My soul was empty.… How I would live after everything I had done was not something I wanted to think about.” Everyone said that, when he left prison, you could see the emptiness in his eyes.
I answered the colonel, who was surprised I knew about Krasin’s backpedaling: “You want me to have two press conferences. I prefer to have none.”
Just as they could not take my freedom, they could not take away that feeling of being part of a historic struggle. By connecting me with the past and the future, that struggle gave my life meaning and depth. The Soviets isolated me physically. They wrenched me from my home, my friends, my routines, and my little comforts. But did they take me away from the struggle?
I kept going back to what ended up being my last telephone call to Israel. I was anxious to get through because I feared it might be my final opportunity to hear Avital’s voice. When that Izvestia article accusing me of treason appeared, and Avital started mobilizing allies in Jerusalem, things turned tense in Moscow too. The days after the article appeared felt like a death watch. Every telephone call felt like the final one, and every meeting felt like a farewell, with forced smiles and false assurances. I wrote my “goodbye” letter to Avital and gave it to a trusted American journalist to pass to her.
Amid all this activity, I received a message. Avital would try to reach me by telephone at a certain time, at one of the homes of a fresh Refusenik. Most veteran Refuseniks’ telephones had been disconnected long ago, so we always relied on a new crop, whose lives hadn’t been fully shut down yet.
The phone rang on time. But, after all that anticipation, instead of hearing Avital, I heard a young male voice on the line. A twenty-nine-year-old rabbi in Jerusalem, who introduced himself as Eli Sadan, reported that Avital and her brother Misha had already left for Geneva to launch the struggle against my imminent arrest. The article had alarmed them too. “And we have opened our headquarters: Shomer Achi Anochi, I Am My Brother’s Keeper,” he said, briefly describing the group’s round-the-clock efforts to support Avital and prick the world’s conscience.
“We’re all fighting for you,” Sadan said. “You are our hero.”
Sadan’s teacher, Rabbi Tzvi Tau, then got on the line. “The whole world is watching what is happening with the Jews in Moscow,” he said. “What happens to you affects all of us. You are now in the center, influencing the entire Jewish world. All the struggle depends on you.” Tau added, “Chazak v’ematz,” the traditional Jewish blessing, be strong and courageous.
At the time, I barely heard the words, that’s how upset I was that the rabbis weren’t Avital. But in the prison vacuum, I replayed every interaction. I thought through their words, which sprouted a new meaning: “You are now in the center, influencing the entire Jewish world.” The rabbis’ once-frustrating distraction now gave me a new sense of responsibility.
I started reasoning with myself. “What really changed?” I wondered. I had been in the middle of the struggle, connected to so many people around the world. I had moved just two miles away: from Slepak’s Moscow apartment to the KGB’s Lefortovo Prison. But now I was even more in the center. The world was watching me. Every word I said, every action I took, would be more important than before.
But it’s not enough to feel important. It was also good to know that I had troops behind me.
Day after day, interrogation after interrogation, the KGB tries to make you feel that you are alone in the world. Beyond isolating you, muzzling you, and violating you, they try to demoralize you. In the first interrogation after my arrest, they shouted, “Enough! No more slander! Nobody can hear you here except us.”
In the hundred-plus interrogations over the next year, they would be much more subtle. They stopped shouting. Instead, they tried reasoning with me. They offered all kinds of explanations, in all kinds of different ways, to show me how lonely I was, how disconnected. They said that everybody had abandoned me, and that the Refusenik movement was falling apart.
They thought they could convince me because they controlled all the information. There was no radio. No meeting with relatives. No letters. The interrogators tried to be logical and specific. They used every bit of information they had collected during the years of monitoring the lives of Refuseniks: about petty quarrels, power struggles, ego trips. “You know how A dismissed B,” they would say. “How envious is C and greedy is D. They have enough problems among themselves without you.”
They continued, “You know these so-called Soviet Jewish organizations, how they cannot stand one another. How long do you think all these spoiled brats abroad can stay with this cause? They have their own lives to live. But we, we have all the time in the world.”
I said to myself, “I have no choice. I have to break the isolation, and I can rely only on my memory.”
I tried hard not to listen to my interrogators, not to hear them. Instead, I went back to the world in which I had lived, which I knew well. I reminded myself of every meeting, every conversation I had ever had with my fellow Refuseniks in Moscow. I tried to think about what each person might be doing today. I remembered arguments, accusations, and suspicions. But what did all that mean now? It seemed so trivial.
From my jail cell, the community had never looked more united. The KGB kept emphasizing our internal chaos. But if a fellow prisoner had asked me, “Who are you closer to, the politiki or kulturniki? The Right or the Left? Likud or Labor? Reform or Orthodox? Union of Councils for Soviet Jews or National Conference on Soviet Jewry?” I would have scoffed. The disagreement-scarred dialogue had vanished. In its place was my dialogue of one. True, it was only in my mind, but it was also one dialogue of one people, united in one struggle.
Every squabbling Jewish organization was now on the same page, listed as anti-Soviet in my KGB file. It proved how meaningless the disagreements were. So I relived, again and again, the excitement of every demonstration, the power of every press conference, the determination of every signature on every petition. I resurrected those joyful feelings of solidarity, freedom, and mutual responsibility we felt for one another.
I thought about all the Jews from abroad I had met during the struggle. What was each one doing right now? I wondered about that housewife from Miami, that lawyer from San Francisco, that student from Toronto, and that Russian language teacher from London.
I thought of every living bridge who had connected me with Avital. All those who hid our letters in their underwear before crossing the border. All those who worked so hard to avoid having our communication cut. I tried to imagine their surroundings, their daily lives, their political activism. They would not forget. They would not abandon me. They would not stop fighting. I trusted them now as I had trusted them then. I believed—I knew—that they were continuing the struggle. And our struggle was my main weapon.
My imagined, ideal picture clashed daily with the miserable reality the KGB tried to impose. All the arguments, jealousies, and petty emotions that filled our days and the KGB files became irrelevant.
Then, there was Avital.
While studying game theory, I learned that there always exists an optimal strategy to minimize losses. Proof of its existence is based on the fact that, when you move from one system of coordinates to the other on the globe, there will always be one fixed point. The KGB specialized in shifting coordinates, trying to demoralize you by changing perspectives and contexts, making you feel powerless, and sowing doubt. Until my release, my one fixed point was Avital. She kept me centered, sane, and focused on the community that was behind me, not the unknown looming ahead.
To stay anchored, I composed a prayer in my primitive Hebrew. Before and after each interrogation, I said, “Blessed are You, Adonai, Ruler of the Universe. Grant me the good fortune to live with my wife, my beloved Avital, in the Land of Israel. Grant my parents, my wife, and my whole family the strength to endure all hardships until we meet. Grant me the strength, the power, the intelligence, the good fortune, and the patience to leave this jail and to reach the Land of Israel in an honest and worthy way.”
That’s how I tried to reestablish myself as a free person in prison: as a participant in the imagined struggle of an imagined global Jewish community. It restored my self-confidence and my optimism.
Just as I once teased my KGB minders as they shadowed me all over Moscow, I realized I could toy with my interrogators too. It reminded them and me who is really free and who is a scared doublethinker.
It was easy. All I had to do was tell some joke about the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Thank God, there were plenty of yarns about his arrogance, his crudeness, his senility. Of course, they were all underground jokes. One played on Russian words about him mistaking the British ambassador for the French one. Another kidded about him forcing Soviet cosmonauts to outdo the American astronauts who landed on the moon by rocketing to the sun, then reassuring them they wouldn’t be incinerated because they’d be launched during the night.
I’d tell my interrogators a joke. I’d laugh. And they would want to laugh, but they couldn’t, especially if there were two of them together. That would end their careers. They’d cover up with a tantrum. They’d pound the table, shouting, “HOW DARE YOU!!!”
“Look,” I’d say to them calmly, “you can’t even smile when you want to smile. And you claim that I’m in prison and you’re free?” I did this to irritate them, because they spent so much time trying to irritate me. But, mainly, I was reminding myself that I was free, as long as I could laugh or cry as I felt.
I also contrasted their picture of what was happening beyond the barbed wire against my vision of the current struggle, and I challenged them. I pretended to know what was going on, usually by reading into something they had said or didn’t say. “Hmm, it’s good to know that you didn’t succeed in breaking even one Refusenik, since you have no one to bring for cross-interrogation against me.” Or, “Wow, I hear that, despite what you said, and all your efforts, those Jewish organizations keep fighting for us.”
Then I gauged how confused they seemed. They didn’t want to deny or confirm what I said, but they wanted to know how I had gotten that information. They searched me again. They interrogated my cellmates more aggressively. All their nervousness proved one thing: that the imagined world I was projecting forward from my past was far more real than the world they were trying to impose on me in the present.
Frustrated, they kept returning to their only weapon, their fixed point, R-A-S-S-T-R-E-L, death. “You are playing all your games,” they sneered. “They have nothing to do with reality. Are you ready to give up your life as a talented scientist, with a young beautiful wife waiting for you, to keep playing your jokes and your games? You will be brought to trial. You will face the death penalty. That is what you have to think about, Anatoly Borisovich,” the interrogators said.
I had never fielded so many KGB compliments praising my scientific skills and my wonderful spouse. But the life they wanted to send me back to would not be the life I wanted or needed. Their aim was to convince me that nothing was more important than physical survival. But I knew I could not control that. “If physical survival is my aim, I am finished,” I reasoned to myself. “Because physical survival depends fully on their goodwill. My aim should be different: to live as a free person until my last day.”
This aim was realistic. Because it depended only on me.
A few years ago, when Michael Oren was Israel’s ambassador to the United States, he called me. “You’re not going to believe what Max Kampelman is saying,” Michael said. Ambassador Kampelman had represented President Ronald Reagan during many negotiations with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. “Kampelman told me that your wife was such a right-wing, religious fanatic, she prevented you from being released for health reasons in 1983, three years before you finally were freed.”
I chuckled. Even thirty years after our victory, some of our most committed allies could not comprehend how total our struggle was or what really drove us. Confused, they resorted to primitive clichés. It was easier to believe in religious or political bogeymen than in the effectiveness of our idealism.
Avital didn’t try to prevent my release. On the contrary, she fought persistently for my freedom every day during my nine years in prison, never losing hope that the next day would be the day of my release.
In mid-1983, Max Kampelman and Lawrence Eagleburger, two leading American diplomats, invited Avital to the White House. By this point, administration officials, State Department diplomats, and many congressional leaders were frustrated. Despite all their efforts, Russia wasn’t budging, and my situation was worsening. One internal White House assessment from October 1982, which I read when it was released decades later, warned, “The chances of freeing Anatoly are bleak indeed.”
Nine months later, however, Kampelman and Eagleburger were jubilant. They believed they had made the impossible possible. They proudly informed Avital that the Reagan administration’s intense pressure had finally forced a Russian retreat. The Soviets were ready to release me. They dropped their demand that I acknowledge my “crimes” or request a pardon. I merely had to sign a one-line statement requesting that the regime free me for humanitarian reasons, “on the grounds of poor health.”
I had just completed a 110-day hunger strike. Prison guards had force-fed me thirty-four times. I weighed thirty-five kilos, down from sixty-five kilos just before my arrest. The health considerations were justified. Still, Avital answered Kampelman and Eagleburger immediately. “He won’t do it.”
She left. Both diplomats walked away stewing and bewildered. What did she understand that they did not? She and I knew that ours was not just a struggle for my physical survival. It was a struggle to open the gates of the Soviet Union. My release, if it was to come, could not be at the cost of the struggle. It could only be thanks to our struggle.
How could I contribute to the struggle in prison? By reminding the world that the regime was evil and hypocritical. By showing that the accusations of high treason against me were based only on open meetings and public statements as a Jewish activist and democratic dissident. And by explaining that this sinister accusation of espionage stemmed only from my sharing a widely circulated list of Refuseniks, sent to Jewish organizations and public figures.
How could I weaken the struggle? By recognizing the regime’s moral authority and legitimacy.
On the first day after my arrest, preparing for what I expected would be round after round of KGB grilling, I settled on the approach that guided me for nine years. My aims would be to refuse to cooperate, to use every interrogation to learn something about them and their methods, and to unmask their lies and charades whenever possible.
That is why, after a year of interrogations, I prepared for my trial by studying the fifteen thousand pages in my case file so thoroughly. That is why I rejected the lawyer they chose to represent me, so I could use every opportunity to prove the accusations false. That is why my first words to the court were “I am innocent, and all the accusations against me and our movement are absurd.” And that is why my last words to the court before they sentenced me to thirteen years in the Gulag, that dark network of prisons and camps, were “And to the court, which has only to read a sentence that was prepared long ago, to you I have nothing to say.”
I wasn’t really addressing the court. I was advancing my mission of exposing the real nature of this trial to the world. After the trial, I refused to talk to any KGB officers again, treating it like the illegal organization that it was. Their response was predictable: they imposed tougher and tougher physical conditions, sent me to punishment cells, canceled meetings with my family, and confiscated letters I wrote.
During nine years in the Gulag, I would be in a camp for less than one year in total. At camps, you could interact with a dozen or so people and get some sunshine. During the other eight years, I spent half the time in a cell with one or two cellmates, half the time in solitary confinement.
Solitary sounds worse than it was, when the alternative was cellmates who might be KGB informers. I always found solitary comfortable, if I could read or write there, if it was warm, and if there was food to eat. If I wasn’t going to be with fellow dissidents, what else did I need?
The punishment cell, however, was barbaric. This sensory deprivation chamber, where I spent 405 days in total, was small, cold, and dark. There was little stimulation—no light, no furniture, nothing to read, no one to talk to, and barely anything to eat.
Then there were the hunger strikes.
While confiscating the letters I wrote, the authorities would occasionally deliver letters to me from my seventy-four-year-old mother, who asked with alarm, “Are you alive?” and “What happened to you?” The bits of information my tormentors most enjoyed conveying had to do with her spiking blood pressure and periodic hospitalizations. “You see what you are doing to your mother,” they said. “Talk to us. Accept the rules of our dialogue. Then, you can send her a letter.”
I had no choice. I had to use the most powerful weapon available to me: an unlimited, open-ended hunger strike demanding my right to send letters. But for it to contribute to the struggle, my family and the world had to know about it.
One thing I had in prison was time. I waited patiently for half a year, looking for an opportunity to send the message. Finally, one of my fellow political prisoners was about to be released. By misbehaving, I arranged to be sent to a punishment cell below his cell. I tapped a message to him in Morse code. Then I waited another two months for a signal that my family had received the message.
I started the hunger strike on Yom Kippur 1982. My timing was deliberate. It meant that, as I began, millions of Jews would be fasting with me. I would need this feeling of unity in the days to come, as I languished on the border of life and death, living from one forced-feeding to another.
It’s a three-day cycle. At the start, I would drift away slowly, until I was lying there, barely conscious, unsure if I was awake or asleep. Then, they would violently swoop down on me with their clamps and rubber hoses. Before I knew it, the blood was knocking forcefully around my head. My heart felt like it was jumping out of my chest. My stomach felt bloated. Then, whoosh, my body was no longer in overdrive but had started that slow deterioration into the next cycle.
Minute by minute, as I downshifted again, as everything vital ebbed out of my body, I only had enough strength to hold on to one feeling: the confidence that I was never alone. Avital and my family and my people were with me. As I got woozier and woozier, yet again, I felt I had done whatever I could; I’d passed the baton in this existential relay. Now, it was their turn.
On the forty-fifth day of my hunger strike, it wasn’t my heart that failed, but Brezhnev’s. “Avital is doing a good job. Brezhnev couldn’t take it anymore,” I joked to myself. The new supreme leader was Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB who had sent me to prison by signing the first documents initiating my criminal case.
The pessimist in me knew how cruel he could be. The optimist hoped that he might feel pressured to show a different face to the West as he assumed his new position. Soon, he let the West know that he was open to reviewing my case.
On the 110th day of my hunger strike, I was allowed to send a letter to my mother. Actually, I gave the letter to the prison warden, who cursed me for treating him like a mere mailman. But I insisted on proof of delivery by receiving a letter back. That demand triggered more shouting and cursing about my disrespect.
A reply arrived an hour later. My mother was in another part of the prison, negotiating desperately with the authorities. They still forbade any visiting. But they allowed us, finally, to exchange letters, as was my right under Soviet law. That is why, on January 14, 1983, I ended my hunger strike.
Meanwhile, another round of negotiations monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Accords began, this time in Madrid. President Reagan, who had become emotionally involved in our story after meeting Avital, kept encouraging her campaign. He instructed his negotiators not to sign a joint communiqué unless I was released. That’s when the Soviets proposed their noble health compromise. And that’s when the Americans fell into the Communist trap.
I learned about the diplomatic maneuvers and public campaigns in July 1983, five months after my hunger strike ended, when the KGB allowed my mother and brother to meet me in prison. After being so stubborn about banning visitors, the authorities had approved the visit so my family could deliver the American proposal Kampelman and Eagleburger had negotiated.
“No,” I answered immediately. “I committed no crimes. The crimes were committed by the people who arrested me and are keeping me in prison. Therefore, the only appeal I can address to the Presidium is a demand for my immediate release and the punishment of those who are truly guilty. Asking the authorities to show humanity means acknowledging that they represent a legitimate force that administers justice.”
I saw how difficult it was for my mother to give up hope. I decided to use my hard-won privilege, after weeks of starving, to explain my logic. I sent long letters to my family in Moscow and Jerusalem. My handwritten letter to Avital was twelve pages, single-spaced. I recalled how one of my first cellmates, clearly cooperating with the KGB when they were interrogating me, mentioned Galileo Galilei. The Inquisition in 1633 forced this great scientist to recant his true theory that the Earth orbits around the sun. Nevertheless, at the end of his life, he proclaimed, “Yet, it moves,” restoring the truth.
“Now there was a smart man,” my cellmate, Timofeev, told me. “He recanted to the Inquisition and was able to continue his scientific research with so much benefit to humanity.” That was the KGB’s constant message: “Just say that we are right. Get released, then do whatever you want.”
What I took from this conversation was that, nearly four hundred years after Galileo’s moment of weakness, this legendary scientist’s stature could still be used to pressure me. That proved that what we do really does matter, that we all are interconnected. I certainly didn’t want any secret police ever using my name to weaken anyone else.
In my letter to Avital, I wrote, “In addition to Newton’s law of the universal gravitational pull of objects, there is also a universal gravitational pull of souls, of the bond between them and the influence of one soul on the other. With each word we speak and each step we take, we touch other souls and have an impact on them. Why should I put a sin on my soul now?”
Connecting this moment to the moment when I crossed the line from loyal Soviet citizen to dissident, I continued, “I have already succeeded once in tearing the spider’s web, breaking with the difficult life of doublethink and closing the gap between thought and word. How is it now possible to take even one step backward toward the previous state?”
That’s how I felt in those days. I was interconnected with thousands of my people. I had full confidence in their determination. And I knew they had full confidence in mine. I was not going to weaken them.