Rare courage of a Soviet refusnik
LAST SUNDAY Masha Slepak was buried in Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery alongside her husband, Vladimir. For virtually the entire duration of the Soviet Jewry campaign in the UK, they were the central figures among the Moscow refuseniks. For Jewish “tourists” to the USSR, their apartment on Moscow’s Gorky Street was a fixed destination.
Masha’s name is always indelibly linked with that of her husband, but she played a full role in the refusenik movement in signing collective letters and taking part in protests.
Yet often women activists had the added task of keeping family and home together. They had to keep calm and carry on despite the repeated arrests of their husbands, the searches of their homes and the harassment of their children. They were strongly supported by countless thousands of women in this country.
Masha was born Mariya Rashkovskaya into an assimilated Jewish family in 1926. She graduated from a Moscow medical institute in 1951, met and married Slepak, a specialist in radio electronics shortly afterwards.
This period of their early married life, Stalin’s last years, was characterised by a vehement antisemitism. Masha’s father-in-law was a loyal Old Bolshevik who named his son after Vladimir Lenin and his daughter after Rosa Luxemburg. He justified both the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939) and the Doctors’ Plot (1953) in which mainly Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning the Kremlin leadership. This event provided the first stirrings in Masha’s mind that something was not quite right in the land of communist pioneers.
Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War changed her perception of herself forever. Although the Soviet Union cut its diplomatic ties with Israel during the war, it began to allow emigration again in August 1968. The Slepaks decided to leave and became involved in the first collective activities of the refuseniks. They were given the task of photocopying copies of the first Zionist periodical, Iton, compiled in Riga and distributed throughout the USSR to sympathisers.
Masha, her husband and their two sons Leonid and Sanya, first applied to leave in April 1970. They were finally informed on October 14 1987 that they could emigrate. The years in between were ones of frustration and despair, resilience and stubbornness. They were determined not to give in, not to give up.
At the end of 1972, Masha and Vladimir were told by a Soviet official: “It is in the interests of the State not to let your family out now. When it will be in the interests of the Soviet State, then you will be let out. Perhaps you will be let out next year, perhaps in two years, perhaps even this year. I might add, perhaps never… the same concerns your sons.”
In 1975, they decided that it would be best for Masha and their sons to try to
Maria and Vladimir Slepak in Soviet exile in 1980.
The couple in Israel 19 years later
You are lucky — 20 years ago we would have shot you’
leave separately as Leonid was due to be conscripted into the army in 1976. They decided to divorce to facilitate this plan. They were refused once more. Andrei Verein, the head of the Moscow visa office said they should count themselves lucky — “Twenty years ago we would have shot you”.
British support came in the form of weekly telephone calls from the then Labour MP Greville Janner and his wife Myra, who were prominent in the UK Soviet Jewry campaign. One hundred and seventy MPs signed a siddur for Leonid’s barmitzvah, and Masha’s mother paid a visit to Britain where she was greeted by campaigners.
In 1977 the elder son, Sanya was allowed to leave. In 1979, Leonid who had “disappeared” to avoid conscrip-