Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter - Hardcover

Polishchuk, Arkady

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 099877703X ISBN 13: 9780998777030

Publisher: DoppelHouse Press, 2018

Synopsis

In this memoir, replete with Jewish humor and sardonic Russian irony, exiled Russian journalist and human rights advocate Arkady Polishchuk (b. 1930) colorfully narrates his evolution as a dissenter and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s Soviet Russia. Told primarily through dialog, this thrilling account puts the reader in the middle of a critical time in history, when thousands of people who had been denied emigration drew international attention while suffering human rights abuses, staged show trials, forced labor, and constant surveillance. From 1950-1973, Polishchuk worked as a journalist for Russian state-run media and at Asia and Africa Today, where all of the foreign correspondents were KGB operatives using their cover jobs to meddle in international affairs. His close understanding of Russian propaganda, the use of "kompromat" against enemies and his knowledge of "pripiski" (defined as "exaggerations of achieved results and fake reports") makes this memoir especially eye-opening for American readers in today's political climate. Through the course of the narrative, we are along with Polishchuk as he covers an anti-Semitic show trial, writes samizdat (political self-publications), is arrested, followed and surveilled, collaborates with refuseniks and smuggles eyewitness testimony to the west. The absurdity of his experiences is reflected in his humor, which belies the anxieties of the life he lived.

About this title

About the Author:

Arkady Polishchuk (b. 1930) is a Russian Jewish dissident and former journalist who has authored articles, essays, and satires for leading Russian periodicals, as well as two books about Africa. His writings have appeared in many publications in Europe and the United States including the National Review, The Chicago Tribune, and Witness. Polishchuk was a broadcaster and correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1985-2008 in Washington DC, Munich and Prague. Polishchuk has been heavily involved in human rights throughout his career, including as a testimonial speaker for Amnesty International and working on behalf of 30,000 Russian Evangelicals trying to escape decades of persecution under communist rule. In 1981 he was awarded the British McWhirter Human Rights Foundation Award and has received numerous travel grants for his human rights activities as well as being covered by Life, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Nightline with Ted Koppel and international publications. Polishchuk became a dissident in 1973 and spent several weeks in prison as part of a four-year campaign in support of Jewish and Christian emigration. When the Christian Emigration Movement was born after the Helsinki Accords in 1975, Polishchuk concentrated his human rights efforts on helping persecuted Christians – which included the dangerous smuggling of witness testimonies out of the USSR. Over several years he successfully petitioned for the right of Russian Evangelicals to emigrate and traveled to many European countries, to Canada and across the United States on their behalf. For two years he was the managing editor and spokesman for Door of Hope International, an Evangelical human rights organization focusing on religious persecution. He holds an advanced degree in Philosophy from Moscow University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From the Prologue: A Prison for Hedonists

Finally I understood what we had in common. Naiveté.
Everybody was already asleep. Nikolai pressed his turned-up nose against my ear and whispered, “Sometimes Brezhnev buys furniture for his whores in our store.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“One of his assistants always calls and asks us to deliver the same suite of furniture to a new address. He always tells me to control the delivery carefully, to go with the suite and the loaders I trust, and to be present when it’s unpacked and follow the instructions of the person who’s waiting for us.”
“A person? A half-naked beauty?”
“No. All three times it was the same man in a custom-made dark suit. He always knew how and where to put it all.”
“Did you like the apartments?”
“New houses, you know, very good apartments for a family of four―a bedroom, a nice kitchen with a window, you can even put a small table there, a decent living room with a balcony, an anteroom. Nice!”
“You should see if this guy who calls you can help.”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“The invoice always lists office furniture. It was his idea. It was he who encouraged me to join the Party.”
“They entrusted you with a top state secret. And they wouldn’t want to lose sight of you and have you become a loose cannon.”
We again had something in common. I also possessed a top state secret, and the KGB for sure did not want to let me out of sight. It was a sad irony in my thinking. What was more dangerous, to know how many beds Comrade Brezhnev had given to his mistresses or the identities and assignments of a dozen Soviet spies? I did not reach a definite conclusion and asked, “Have you ever seen this man?”
“No, but he gave me his phone number, and I called him a couple of times when we were waiting too long for the next delivery from Egypt.”
“From Egypt?”
“Yes. It’s great furniture, better than Finnish. Lots of gold and ivory.”
“For every sweetheart exactly the same reward?”
“Yes.”
“This is what we call true democracy,” I said. “Equal pay. Equal rights. Equal opportunity employer.”
“I think,” said Nikolai, “the presidents of Israel and the USA also have whores.”
“Yes,” I said, “but they buy them different suites of furniture, and this creates an inequality of women’s rights.”
Laughing quietly, Nikolai then said in all seriousness, “The main thing is to make sure that the bed won’t creak.”
“If it creaks, not only you, but I bet also the bureaucrat who calls you, would be sacked and expelled from the Party. The president of Egypt might also lose his job.”
“It’s not real gold and ivory,” said Nik.
“The founder of this state promised to use gold in communist society for toilet bowls.”
“Vladimir Ilyich Lenin? You’re kidding,” whispered Nik.
“Actually, I’m not.”

On the fourth day after my arrest a newcomer shook my hand.
He had heard on America’s Radio Liberty about our demon­stration. A broadcaster had mentioned me by name. Listening through heavy jamming required patience and craving for knowledge. And in this way I was introduced to the goddess of lucky chance, Miss Publicity. Quickly word spread through the mess hall and toilet, so the news arrived to Victor Elistratov, Michael Kremen, and Felix Kandel, my partners in crime locked away in other cells.
The very next day, the 25th of October, each cell had its own celebrated Jew, altogether fifteen men who had taken part in a demonstration in support of our two-day sit-in inside Brezhnev’s Reception Room. On October 26th another newcomer told us that the American president named either “Garter” or “Garder” sent a telegram to Brezhnev urging our release. It was the presidential candidate Jimmy Carter.

I was in the toilet minding my own business at the trough when somebody put a hand on my shoulder. I turned around―it was a black-bearded refusenik named Isaac Elkind. “Welcome to the club,” I said. I hadn’t seen him since Brezhnev’s Reception Room, where Isaac had been quietly petitioning for an exit visa to Israel and joined us, but was not arrested with our gang because he was sitting with timid people petitioning for their imprisoned relatives. What had he done to end up here?
“Fifty Jews marched to the Party’s Central Committee,” he said, “surrounded by an army of plainclothes KGB agents.”
A policeman at the door began yelling at us.
“Continue peeing,” I said.
“This is it,” Isaac said. “I can’t.”
“Shake it!” I said.
“We all wore yellow Stars of David!” he said, his voice broken from the effort.
“Great!” I said. “Jews are becoming impudent.”
“A bunch of Gypsies saw us, and one of them yelled, ‘Look! Sheriffs!’”
“Hah―ha! Hollywood should be proud of such a great cultural success. And stop the violent shaking of your toy! You might get a headache.”

Every evening my cell had a political study class. There was even a student behind a wall―a young fellow in the punishment cell. He had heard our indiscernible voices and managed to hollow out a narrow hole in that crumbling wall. Sometimes I heard him shouting “Wow!” right into that breach, enthusiastic applause, and merciless beating on the old wall. “Comrade Wow” had been transferred from our cell to the windowless punishment room before my arrival.
We met by chance, face to face, so to speak. We both had diarrhea and were fortunate that the man in uniform watching our behavior in the toilet was that old carelessly-shaven policeman whose only concern was his upcoming retirement. Maybe our quiet talking gave him a chance to daydream at the door.
Before his arrest, the young man had spent the evening with his fiancée in a restaurant of the Moscow Hotel known for its good dance orchestra. They waltzed, tangoed and hugged, danced and kissed, drank some dry wine, kissed after every sip, and were happy. When the lovebirds were leaving this monument to ponderous Stalinist architecture, a collision on a scale of an ancient Greek tragedy took place. Outside the entrance there were several immense square columns. Comrade Wow rushed between them toward a taxi, to get ahead of others and to open the door for his girl. At that particular split-second two cops were coming out from behind a column. The bridegroom knocked one of them off his feet. The whole Pantheon of Greek gods could not prevent this.
He apologized many times. His fiancée apologized many times. But the policemen brought him to a police station, and when he begged them to measure his level of alcohol intoxication, the whole station laughed. When he begged after midnight to let him go―today was his wedding day, they laughed even harder. He threatened to take them to court, and that was hilarious. In the morning the judge sent him here. He was crying, swearing, kicking the cell door and demanding to see a prosecutor until guards locked him in the solitary sweatbox.
I expressed my sympathy to the fellow, “From now on you should believe in fate. Are you an atheist?” “Of course,” he said, “I’m an engineer. And you?”
“Not anymore, but I’m afraid, in my temple there is only one parishioner. Lately I’ve met very religious people and have come to admire them greatly.”
“Jews?”
“No, Christians.”
“Difficult to believe that there are still some true believers here. Who are they?”
“Pentecostals, Baptists, other Evangelicals.”
“These are terrible people! Sectarians!”
“The best people I ever met. They could be a treasure for any country, but here they’re considered to be weirdos―they don’t drink, don’t beat their wives, don’t swear, don’t steal.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I’m trying to help some of them.”
“Why?”
“It’s tempting to answer your ‘why’ pompously, like, it’s easy to help your own tribe―it’s like helping yourself, anyway, but try to help those who aren’t like you.... But even this is a shallow answer. I envy them. They are innocent like children. Their only crime is their faith.”
“Faith also helped to kill millions,” he said.
“True. But atheism, to a large degree is also a religion; the same goes for Communism―it also killed millions, and it isn’t familiar with the word ‘repentance’.”
Our Argus at the latrine’s door apparently returned to this sinful earth from his dreams of retirement. He began gesticulating at us and yelling, “You guys have no shame!”
When we walked to the door, I said, “I’m sure, if you see a drowning child, you’d try to help.”
“Go. Go!” the guard growled. “Professor!”
“But a child can drag you to the bottom,” said my interlocutor.
“Yes, it happens.”
While the old jailer was fiddling with the key of my cell, the young engineer asked, “Why didn’t you talk about them with your cellmates?”
“I’m here as a Jew,” I said.

The prison administration was aware of my sermons and took measures to stop this disgrace. The lieutenant brought two of the stronger cellmates to his office and suggested they knock the crap out of me and write a report about my anti-Soviet propaganda. They refused, and one of them was proud of it. The other fellow was nervous, yet managed to bring me a tiny onion. Once Nikolai brought a skimpy lemon. The dirty, unripe lemon with greenish skin tasted sweet, not sour at all. There must be a medical explanation for why the lemon was sweet. On that day, I managed to pass a small onion to Anatoly Sharansky, a fellow inmate from the next cell and a future Israeli minister. He had a high fever and was sick as a dog.
Alas! I never got a second lemon.
My sumptuous feasts ended the very next day. From then on, prisoners were unable to bring anything. Their supply of cigarettes was severely cut down, and this could damage the concord between the law enforcement and the petty criminal world. The KGB had obviously uncovered shocking facts of our life of luxury.

Finally the administration found a good citizen. Soon after arrival this former navy warrant-officer, a brave boxer, called me a saboteur and promised to put me in my place if I dared to offend his patriotic feelings. Nobody paid attention to him. We continued our political study.
Birdie, who failed to punish me on the day of my arrival, now became an expert on Christianity. “Why did you kill this Jesus?” he asked.
“Do you really care?” I said. “Maybe you’d prefer to tell us why you killed sixty million Russians during the twenty-nine years of Stalin’s rule?”
“I didn’t kill them. It was Stalin,” Birdie said.
“I didn’t kill Christ either,” I said. “Anyway, it was his predetermined destiny. But what an athlete this Stalin was! He alone killed more of his own people in peace-time than Hitler during the war. Could it be that our mustached God had millions of helping hands? Who were those turnkeys, and interrogators, and judges?”
“Jews,” Birdie said.
“I didn’t serve as a jailer or as a prosecutor, or in a shooting squad, or as an informer. Your neighbor did. He would help Stalin to send all of you to a camp―just for listening to me.”
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“Remember how tsar Nikita Khrushchev dragged the embalmed Stalin out of Lenin’s Mausoleum and put him in the garbage? Our saints aren’t immortal anymore. Today Nikita himself is in the garbage and we all dearly love you-know-whom...” I did not dare to utter the name of the Leader.

The main topic seemed to be quite innocent, and I was surprised when, thirty minutes later, the warrant-officer pushed me from behind in front of the urination trough. I lost my balance and stepped with one foot in the stinking gutter.
He said, “I’ll make you drink piss from the pail.”
The cop at the door was glowing with delight.
“We’ll see,” I said while walking to a sink. I took the shoe off and rinsed it under the tap. I took a sock off, washed it and used it to clean my naked foot. I washed and wrung the sock again. The good-natured jailer said, “Hurry up.”

My cellmates already knew about the threat. When we were taken back, one of them immediately blocked the peephole, two guys took hold of the patriot’s hands while the fourth―my taciturn friend from the wooden platform―quickly grabbed his hair with one hand and with the other covered his nose and mouth with a dirty cloth. In seconds, they began dragging him to the pail. The rest of the cellies were swearing approvingly. The more the patriot shook his head and mumbled through the rough cloth, the more they twisted his arms; he was becoming more and more bent forward to the stinking pail.
“He’s a brainwashed fool,” I said, “Let him go, guys. A happy slave.”
“You don’t know who the warden will bring here tomorrow,” my coolheaded friend knew what he was talking about. “You’re in trouble if they send in two more dogs like this.” For the first time he demonstrated an ability to produce sentences in correct Russian. After that he turned to slang again, “Check this out, piss-pot, next time I’ll bust you up.” To make his point more convincing, he hit the back of the patriotic warrant-officer’s head.

That quiet evening we talked about the over-fulfillment of the State Planning Committee’s five-year economic plans. To my surprise the audience found this subject easy to grasp. Flier summarized my boring delivery: “If you have to make ten screw­bolts in one day and instead you make fourteen, it means that the Socialist plan isn’t truly scientific. But if it’s scientific, it means that you screwed up all the bolts.”
“You should teach at Moscow University,” I said, “and make your students analyze the official slogan ‘Perform the five-year plan in four years!’ The government urges true patriots to do hack work. So, who is the saboteur? Remember Khrushchev’s favorite slogan ‘Catch up with and overtake America!’? In fact, this task was proclaimed during Lenin’s rule, in the early twentieth century. At that time even the new Socialist names were invented―Dognat (Catch-Up) and Peregnat (Overtake).”
Butcher interrupted me. “It’s not a big deal, and we can catch up with America.” He checked to see that everybody was looking at him, and finished triumphantly: “But if we overtake them, all the Americans would see our bare asses.”
I concealed from the audience that I knew the joke.

It seemed like ages since my fellow inmates stopped smuggling little goodies for me. The anxious men in uniform told them that if they were caught with even a rotten potato, this would be the last day of their cigarette business. My stomach struggled even with bread. Watery and gluey, it kept adhering to the teeth and gums, and only fingernails helped to unstick and push it down the gullet. Mother Nature is wise―my difficulties with our strict diet were fully compensated and balanced by unstoppable diarrhea.
One lucky day I enjoyed some rare solitude in the toilet. My bare bottom was hanging over the hole in the concrete floor. I ignored the nasty bouquet and thought about the meaning of life. My exalted thoughts were rudely disturbed by someone tickling my anus. In fear and disgust, I reached out and right away grabbed something slimy and wriggling between my fingers. At that crucial moment the only wish of my life was not to tear it apart or allow the creature or a part of it to slide back inside my intestines. What else can a human dream of?
I began slowly bringing the unlucky thing out and before my eyes. A five inch worm was dancing in my fingers. It was in one piece! What a relief! Alive and kicking! Sadly, it preferred suicide to my diet. I threw it into the hole.

One evening I saw a happy smile on the usually gloomy face of our navy warrant-offi...

About this edition

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 099877703X
• ISBN 13: 9780998777030
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352