Almost always their grandfather’s wife would let them in, and they would find their grandfather seated at a large round table, writing. She was much younger than Solomon, with little education, a typical Russian commoner, from the lowest rungs of society. Always seeming agitated when the children visited, she fussed about anxiously, worked too hard at her hostessing, talked endlessly, until Solomon would say, “It’s enough, it’s enough, calm down.”

Sometimes their grandfather would meet them at the door, push the dog aside, and take their coats, happy to see them. Books and papers lay heaped on the table, together with large dictionaries, and it would take a few minutes for him to put everything away. The room was small, a couch on one side and the table in the center, and furnished in Russian peasant fashion: a clutter of ornamented pillows and a tablecloth and shelf hangings and needlework on the walls. The boys and their grandfather would sit around the table and engage in small talk. He would ask about the health of their parents. They knew not to say anything to their grandfather about their father’s activities. The old man’s wife brought them tea and preserves. In later years the boys learned that she was an alcoholic, that she often abused their grandfather, stole his money, beat him.

Leonid Slepak, slight of build, strikingly attractive, and seven years younger than his brother, spent much of his childhood in neighborhood child care centers. At times, if he was ill, his grandfather would come over to the apartment on Gorky Street and stay with him. He would bring along his work-he was always writing, translating-and sit at the living room table with his books and papers. Once Leonid kept disturbing him, and Solomon put aside his work and read him an Italian fairy tale, “Qnionhead,” translated into Russian and very popular then in the Soviet Union. How the little vegetables-onions, radishes, leeks-made a revolution and overthrew the oranges and tomatoes.

One time Solomon handed little Leonid a Russian rendering of Alice in Wonderland. In his own hands he held another copy, in English. He told Leonid to follow as he read and translated directly from English into Russian and to see if he made any mistakes. With growing wonder and delight, Leonid followed his grandfather’s flawless translation. Alice in Wonderland was the first book Leonid read in English.

The boys also went to visit Solomon in the hospital when he lay recovering from a heart attack in the fall of 1974. That time they came with their father, who brought along a gift of fruits. It was early evening, cold and rainy, no snow yet on the ground. Solomon Slepak lay in a small room with only one other bed, which was empty. That was surprising; most hospital rooms had six or ten or twelve beds. Clearly, he was in a room reserved for Old Bolsheviks.

He lay in the far left corner, and as they entered, he looked up and brusquely asked Volodya if he had changed his mind about emigrating to Israel. Volodya said no. Solomon pointed to the fruits and then to a small table and then to the door. Volodya put the fruits on the table and left the room and stood outside in the hallway. The boys came over to their grandfather and sat on his bed for a while, talking with him. Then they said good-bye and joined their father and went home.

Because the Slepak apartment was in the heart of the city, it had become by 1974 a collection point, a kind of lodgment area and operations center, in the visa war. It was down the street from two major hotels, the National and the Intourist: 15 Gorky Street. You walked past the shops to the entrance archway. To the left of the entrance was a large bookstore; to the right, a dairy products store. You went beneath the archway and turned into the courtyard. All the entrances to the apartments were from the courtyard, and the way into the Slepaks’ was through the first entrance, a wooden double door with waist-high glass panels, then another set of doors into a small foyer, where you saw the back of the elevator shaft, covered with wire mesh. You went left to the spiral staircase and up half a flight to the elevator, where you pulled open a heavy steel door and pushed through two swinging wooden doors into the tiny elevator. You pulled the steel door shut and stepped out of the way as the two doors swung back into place. Then you pushed the button to the eighth floor, rode up, opened the swinging doors and the steel door, and stepped out. You found yourself looking at two apartments, one in front, the other to the right. Number 77, the one to the right, with its brown wooden door, was the apartment of the Slepaks.

By 1974 Volodya’s name had appeared several times in the newspapers: a dissident, an enemy of the people. Most of the dwellers in the building might say hello when passing by in the courtyard or on the street but otherwise avoided Volodya and Masha. The only friends they had in the building lived on the floor below theirs, a married couple, he an architect, she an editor. Leonid’s classmates no longer visited. Sanya, now grown, lived elsewhere with a girlfriend.

Inside that communal apartment, in the room he shared with Masha-the other occupants were Leonid and a police sergeant and his wife, who lived behind their closed door and were often drunk-Volodya carefully prepared the means by which the lists of names, and the necessary accompanying data, of those requesting invitations to Israel were smuggled out to the West; tens of thousands of names went through his hands. First he bought Russian souvenir wooden dolls. He then cut the head off each doll, drilled a hole in the body, inserted the tightly rolled film negatives of the lists, glued the head back on, and gave the doll to a visitor who had been recommended by friends from abroad. The souvenir doll left the Soviet Union unconcealed in one’s baggage, a tourist’s memento. Among the Jewish dissidents, only three knew of the dolls, and only Volodya, and on occasion Leonid, handled the operation. None of the dolls was ever unmasked.

A tiny weapon, those dolls, and among the most effective.

A new weapon emerged: the Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group. The Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975 by thirty-five nations, including the Soviet Union and the United States, the former, because it wanted the international recognition given by the accords to its theretofore provisional postwar borders; the latter, because it wanted the Soviet Union to commit itself to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which called for universal freedom of expression and opinion. The agreement, three years in the making, carried no legal weight but was considered of great moral and political significance. The nations that signed the accords were to be “guided by the principle that such universal guarantees… should be firmly adhered to in their own country and elsewhere.” Of special significance to Soviet Jewish dissidents was the commitment by participating nations to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion,” and the promise to work for the reunification of families through emigration.

But the Soviets, who wanted the West to honor the fixed-border guarantees in the accords, had no intention of adhering to the human rights provisions, which they regarded as mere rhetoric. To counter that attitude and the possible sacrifice of human rights by the White House for the goal of détente, Representative Millicent Fenwick introduced a bill on March 23, 1976, to set up “a commission to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Accords.” The bill passed. Congressman Dante Fascell became chairman of the commission.

At the time the bill was making its way through Congress and to the desk of President Ford, who signed it that June, Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and longtime dissident, organized a group in Moscow to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights agreements, which came to be known as the Helsinki Accords Monitoring Group.