For eight years now, Avital Shcharansky has been traveling the globe to plead for the release of her husband from a Russian gulag.
Her dream may come true Tuesday if Anatoly Shcharansky is among those expected to be exchanged in an East-West spy swap.
Anatoly Shcharansky, 38, was a major figure in the Soviet human-rights movement and the Jewish campaign to emigrate to Israel before he was arrested in March, 1977. In July, 1978, a Soviet court sentenced him to 13 years in prison and labor camps for treason.
Avital Shcharansky`s tireless campaign may have been instrumental in putting his case on the agenda of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva last November. She dropped out of sight Feb. 2 when reports surfaced in West Germany that Shcharansky might be freed as part of the expected East-West prisoner exchange.
Yuri Stern, spokesman for the Information and Research Center for Soviet Jewry in Israel, said Avital Shcharansky, 35, had been advised to keep a low profile to avoid jeopardizing the exchange.
She reportedly left for Berlin over the weekend accompanied by an Israeli Mossad (secret service) agent.
In Bonn, the West German newspaper Bild reported that Shcharansky would arrive in East Berlin Monday but would not be handed over at the Glienicke Bridge, as expected.
”He will be handed over at a place which has not so far been used for an exchange,” Bild said in a report released ahead of its Monday publication. U.S. sources in Berlin, however, told the Associated Press that the exchange was still set to take place at the bridge Tuesday afternoon.
Bild also said the Soviet Union would allow Shcharansky`s mother, Ida Milgrom, to emigrate to the West, but not as part of the spy exchange. No date has been set for her departure from Moscow, the paper said.
Avital Shcharansky was born Natalia Stiglitz, the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. Her
disappointments began the day after she and Anatoly were married by a rabbi in Moscow on July 4, 1974. With her visa to emigrate to Israel due to expire the next day, she reluctantly left. In Israel, she changed her name to Avital and relied on official Soviet promises that Anatoly would soon follow.
”We really believed that we would see each other very soon,” said Mrs. Shcharansky. ”Now that we were married, it seemed so natural that they should allow a husband to join his wife.”
When no visa was given to her husband after three months, Avital began campaigning for permission for Anatoly to emigrate; but her pleas received little attention outside Israel. It wasn`t until Shcharansky`s trial and long prison sentence in 1978 that the world began to take notice of his shy young wife.
Awkward at first, Avital developed poise and a sense of theater in both English and Hebrew as she forced her husband`s case on world sensibilities. Since then, she has become an international personality through her speeches and television appearances on her husband`s behalf.
”She was very hard for me to sell,” said Irene Manekofsky of the Washington-based National Union of Councils for Soviet Jews at the time.
”Before the trial, I had to jump through hoops to get publicity for her. Now they`re tearing me apart.”
In the last eight years, Avital has pleaded her husband`s case before presidents and prime ministers. She has appeared at countless anti-Soviet demonstrations, sometimes wearing a striped prisoner`s uniform. She has written a book about her husband`s ordeal, chained herself in protest to the gates of Soviet embassies and gone to jail herself for disturbing the peace. She has testified before Congress, posed for pictures beside ambitious politicians and accepted numerous awards for her husband`s bravery.
The Soviet Union, which does not recognize her Jewish marriage, has labeled her a ”professional adventuress.”
A major American newspaper described Avital Shcharansky`s campaign as ”a case study in the politics of sorrow, the packaging of martyrdom.” The Washington Post wrote skeptically of her ”keen understanding of the press and how her displays of emotion often come at a proper time, appearing fresh and touching and extraordinarily effective without seeming phony or superficial.” Some activists in the Soviet Jewry movement have quietly criticized Mrs. Shcharansky for angering the Soviets and endangering other Jewish dissidents by focusing so much world attention on her husband`s case.
In speeches and interviews, Avital Shcharansky has said her campaign is both a personal struggle for reunification with her husband and a plea for all Soviet Jews wishing to emigrate.
”Anatoly symbolizes the struggle of all Soviet Jews to be repatriated to Israel,” she said in Geneva last November. ”The Soviet Union has said openly that it is determined to crush the Jewish movement in Russia. The Soviet Union is watching to see what will happen and what is the world`s reaction to the oppression of Jews and freedom.”
”My husband faces the same threat as that posed by Hitler`s Germany 40 years ago. At that time, other countries carried on with their Olympic and diplomatic games with Germany,” she said. ”If countries pursue this game today, we will be on the brink of a catastrophe. Anatoly`s case is a test for humanity.”
Today, a religious Jew living in Jerusalem, Mrs. Shcharansky has surrounded herself with friends who are identified with right-wing Israeli politics and the nationalist movement to build Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank. But she has avoided all political causes unrelated to her husband.
The years of struggle on behalf of her husband have begun to show on her face. In recent public appearances, she has appeared thin and tired. Her dark hair, covered with a scarf, shows many streaks of gray.
Her friends say that after all the years of media attention and publicity, she is tired. Most of all, they say, she fears she will be too old to have children if her husband is released only at the end of his sentence in 1991, when she will be 41.
”She just wants her husband back and to raise a family,” said an associate who asked not to be identified. ”The novelty of being a celebrity has worn off.”
In a recent interview with an Israeli newspaper, Mrs. Shcharansky described her husband.
”He`s just special. He is really free in his soul. It is not as though he wants to be free and fights to be free. He is free,” she said.
”I don`t think he`d like to hear me speaking about him like this–he will probably be angry when he comes out. But for now, that is all I can do for him.”
