The Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry and Natan Sharansky

This week we take a look at an inspirational protest group – the Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry (aka ‘The 35s’) and their campaign to free Anatoly Shcharansky aka Natan Sharansky – one of many Jewish persons who were refused a visa when seeking to emigrate from the USSR and subsequently harassed and imprisoned by the KGB. These people were known as ‘Refuseniks’ by the Western press and the campaign of support for Soviet Jewry was part of the broader fight for human rights within the former USSR.

The Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry emerged in 1971 upon learning that a thirty-five-year-old librarian named Raisa Palatnik from Odessa had been arrested for distributing ‘samizdat’ (banned literature). She was sentenced to two years in prison in June 1972 after a period of harassment by the KGB beginning in October 1970. A small group of women decided to hold a protest outside the Soviet Embassy in London and from these modest beginnings the campaign on behalf of all Refuseniks began. During Palatnik’s time in prison, this pressure group distributed leaflets asking members of the public to help her as she stood on trial in the Soviet Union. They requested telegrams and letters to be sent to the Soviet Ambassador at an address in Kensington Gardens, London, or to Intourist Moscow Ltd in Regent Street.

This group acquired the nickname ‘the 35s’, perhaps due to the fact that Raisa was 35 years old at the time, or perhaps, according to a later pamphlet, it was because “a group of 35 thirty-five-year-old women set up the 35s – Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry. Through persistence, dedication, and sheer chutzpah, they were to change the face of the Soviet Jewry campaign, and of the human rights record of the Soviet Union.” [MS254/A980/2/27/7]. The group was primarily made up of relatively young middle-class Jewish housewives from north-west London, who’d no previous experience of activism or campaigns. They proved themselves to be a formidable force, conducting a tireless campaign to heighten public awareness of their cause, and were known for their effective and highly imaginative demonstrations and protests.

The 35s were able to rally an alliance of cross-party MPs in support of their cause and they celebrated the formation in February 1972 of the House of Commons All Party Committee for Soviet Jewry by holding a banquet offering the same grim provisions given to Soviet Jewish prisoners of conscience, which included: 14 oz of ‘black bread’ for breakfast, two-thirds of a cup of cooked cabbage soup for lunch and 5 oz of potato (without fat) for dinner: nutritionally insufficient to maintain even a three-year old child. 

House of Commons ‘Souvenir Banquet’ for the All Party Committee for Soviet Jewry, 23 Feb 1972 [MS254/A2079/3]

The campaign on behalf of the refusenik Anatoly Sharansky began when, in early March 1977, a ‘confession’ was extracted from another refusenik alleging that he and other Soviet Jews were covertly working for the CIA. It was in this context that the Soviet computer scientist Sharansky was arrested in Moscow, accused of treason, on 15^th March 1977. The Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry argued the arrest was part of a broader Russian anti-Jewish campaign. Sharansky was born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky in 1948 in the city of Stalino (now named Donetsk), then in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At the time of his arrest, aged 29, he was a leader of the Jewish community in the USSR and specialised in computer systems and was also an expert on computer chess.

Sharansky had applied to emigrate to Israel in 1973. Like most Soviet Jews who applied to emigrate he was dismissed from his job but refused permission for a visa. He married in 1974 but his wife was then expelled from the USSR. By 1975 Sharansky had emerged as one of the leaders of the Soviet Jewish human rights community. In his booklet on the history of the Jewish people in Russia titled ‘From the Tsars to Shcharansky’, Peter Moss described him as “the symbol of spirit and hope amongst the Jews of the Soviet Union. But if 1975 was the year of Helsinki and Shcharansky, it was, perhaps above all, the year when a new word entered into modern day language and into the dictionary: REFUSENIK: ‘A Jew in the Soviet Union who has been refused permission to emigrate to Israel.’” [MS343/A2067/6/26]

‘From the Tsars to Shcharansky: A brief background to the Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Emigration Movement in the Soviet Union (1500-1975)’ by Peter Moss [MS343/A2067/6/26]

Unable to work, Sharansky co-founded the Helsinki Monitoring Committee in Moscow in 1976 with Professor Orlov and dedicated himself to the problems of emigration and human rights in the USSR. Sharansky was put under KGB surveillance and his home searched multiple times before his arrest in March 1977. The 35s rallied to his support and produced a range of protest material drawing attention to his case, utilising mocks-ups of the publicity material of various prestigious Russian cultural institutions.

Mock Georgian State Dance Company poster [MS254/A980/2/27/7]

Mock Bolshoi Ballet flyer, 1986 [MS254/A2079/3]

Mock Bolshoi Ballet flyer, 1986 [MS254/A2079/3]

In a letter dated 14^th March 1978 addressed from Margaret Rigal, the Secretary of the International Committee for the Release of Anatoly Sharanksy (whose Joint Chairmen were John Gorst MP, Helene Hayman MP and Russell Johnston MP), we learn the following: “On Wednesday 15th March [1978], Sharansky will have been in prison, incommunicado, for a whole year. A lawyer has now been appointed by the KGB, against the wishes of his family, since she is elderly and has not agreed to plead his innocence […] Any hope, therefore, of a fair trial or any suggestion that the verdict might accord with justice is little more than a pious wish. If the trial takes place, the verdict, I am sure, is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps a letter from you reminding the Soviet Ambassador that no civilised country keeps a prisoner incommunicado for over a year before there is a trial, might bear fruit.” [MS254/A980/2/27/2]

At the time of the 1980 Moscow Olympics the 35s staged a protest at Wembley Arena calling for Sharansky’s release, with a mock Brezhnev present.

Sharansky protest at Wembley Arena, early 1980s [MS254/A980/4/28/22]

In March 1985 there was a change of leadership in Soviet government under Gorbachev. His policy of ‘Glasnost’ (roughly translated as ‘openness’ or ‘transparency’), led to some degree of liberalisation in the Soviet Union. The 35s invoked Glasnost in their campaign of continued pressure on the Soviet authorities to live up to their human rights obligations, under the 1975 Helsinki Accords. This pact, signed in 1975 by 35 nations (including the USA and the Soviet Union), included guarantees on the inviolability of frontiers and non-interference in the internal affairs of states but article VII also called for “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief”. The 35s’ protests invoked both Helsinki and Glasnost.

35’s Moscow State Circus flyer [MS254/A980/4/28/62]

35’s Moscow State Circus flyer [MS254/A980/4/28/62]

Refusenik ‘Glasnost’ lorry-placard protest, c.1985 [MS254/A980/4/28/44]

It was within this climate of sustained pressure from the West on human rights issues on the one hand, as well as a willingness on the part of reformers within Soviet government to change the status quo in the USSR on the other hand, that Sharanksy was freed, as part of an East-West prisoner swap in February 1986. By this time, after almost nine years in Soviet prison, Sharansky was described as the “world’s most famous dissident” in The Sunday Times of 28^th September 1986. In February 1986, he walked across Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge to the West, finally released by the KGB. He took a new Hebrew name ‘Natan’ and anglicised his surname from Shcharansky to Sharansky, symbolising his disconnection from the Soviet Union. In September 1986 the 35s held a special event at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate Sharansky’s freedom.

Flyer for the Sharansky Royal Albert Hall event, 21 Sep 1986 [MS254/A980/4/28/1]

Sharansky with 35s at Royal Albert Hall, 1986 [MS254/A980/4/28/3]

Sharansky at Royal Albert Hall, 1986 [MS254/A980/4/28/19]

He met prime ministers and presidents and was hailed as a symbol of freedom and resistance. He was feted by people from all sides of the political spectrum as a public symbol of freedom, whilst simultaneously maintaining his own sense of himself as an individual.  In January 1987 Sharansky was given the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Award for his “invincible spirit in the face of Soviet oppression” [MS254/A4249/4/11]. He later entered Israeli politics, representing the interests of Russian immigrants to Israel, and served in government for many years from the mid-1990s. He has recently renewed his calls for defending the principles upon which the free world rests and condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the country where his life journey began in 1948.

For those interested in the stories of the many other Refuseniks, there are a range of relevant collections here at the University of Southampton including: the Papers of the Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry; the Papers of Michael Sherbourne; the Papers of Conscience; the Papers of Dr Colin Shindler; the Papers of Rabbi Lawrence Littlestone; and the Papers of Sheila Rawlins.