He passed away on the night of December 17 of this year, 2022, in which he turned 91.
Not bad, huh? Many of us would be lucky to live so long...
But Vilya Svechinsky wasn’t really one of “us.” No, no, I’m not talking about the heroism of the “refuseniks.” The heroes of the “refusal” movement are countless. I’m talking about his constant search for the meaning of life. His search for himself in the life he was granted. Hence, his actions were dictated not by chance, not by adapting to the situation, but by his heart, conscience, pride, and the analytical mind with which the Lord generously endowed him.
His first life lesson was... well, here is his own story about it:
“My father told me a lot about the war... One time, they were attacking German infantry on horseback, and each cavalryman had two sabers: holding the reins in his teeth and hacking at the fascists with two sabers in his hands. They literally chopped off the Germans’ heads; my father saw the heads fly off! Once he saw a German with his head chopped off still run for another ten meters...
So, the army was commanded by General Kryukov, and when he was presented with the lists of those to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner, upon seeing the name Lazar Svechinsky, he said: ‘Lazar?! The Red Star is enough for this one!’ It was the first time in his life my father encountered blatant antisemitism. And the Order of the Red Banner was a rare, combat-specific award. What happened traumatized him deeply; it stayed with him. And with me too.
And that son of a bitch Kryukov later got 25 years for looting—he, along with the famous singer Ruslanova, looted and carried off Goering's entire warehouse, mostly carpets. Then they sold them...”
In 1948, the state of Israel was founded. And Vilya and his two friends—Roman Brakhtman and Misha Morgulis—realized that the dream of two thousand years had come true before their very eyes...
And the thought arose—we must flee there, join our people, build a Soviet government there, what else? True, regarding Soviet power in Israel, one of the friends—Roma Brakhtman—said it would be “only over his dead body.” We got so fired up with the idea of escaping to Israel that we thought neither of our parents nor of the consequences. Today, I understand it would have been hard to find bigger idiots. But that’s how it was...”
Naturally, they were caught, and each of the friends received ten years in the camps...
Many books have been written about life in the Soviet camps, and Vilya's life in the Magadan camp was little different from the lives of thousands and thousands of prisoners.
The most dreadful job in the camp, Vilya recounted, was drying sand:
“...Drying wet sand for the plasterers. Imagine a huge, thick iron sheet, about six by six meters, resting on concrete supports the height of an ordinary chair. A fire is lit and continuously maintained under almost its entire area. An old invalid would toss firewood in there.
I had to load this sheet with wet sand and constantly stir it. How else could you dry it? To do this, I had to stand in the middle of the sheet and found myself in the fire, as if in the middle of an onion. You had to duck your head so as not to get burned, and in that position, hunched over, suffocating, you had to turn over the sand and jump out of there, off the sheet. As soon as the sand was dry, you had to unload it—clear the sheet by loading the sand into wheelbarrows, and then start all over again. And the plasterers are yelling: ‘Give us sand!’ They desperately needed sand, and there were a lot of them, those plasterers...”
As luck would have it, upon learning that he had studied to be an architect, he was tasked with designing a cottage for some boss. He designed it. The boss loved it, and Vilya began to practice his trade. In between drying wet sand...
After Stalin's death, in 1955, Vilya, like many others, was released...
And what do you think? Vilya couldn't find himself in freedom. Boredom, lies, bureaucracy, the seemingly impossible dreams of Israel, and Vilya... returns to Magadan, but this time as a design engineer and architect. He didn’t want the dull, “talkative” life in Moscow; he wanted to work, and forgive the cliché, to be a useful member of society...
“You know,” Vilya confessed, “the years I spent in Magadan were the happiest years of my life in Russia...” And it was there, in Magadan, that he found the woman he would love for the rest of his life...
But all this lasted until 1967...
Let's hear from Vilya:
“No, no, I wasn’t disconnected from the outside world, from politics, and so on. Since I often traveled to Moscow, I kept my finger on the pulse of many events. And so one day I’m walking through a park in Magadan. There used to be a huge statue of Stalin there, which was torn down, and in its place stood a massive newspaper stand. I look and see a crowd gathered around it. I approach. I hear snippets of words: ‘Israel... aggressor... serves them right...’ I knew the Six-Day War had begun. I walk up, read the newspaper reports, and suddenly something stirred within me: ‘My God, what am I doing? What am I busy with? Vilya, what are you busy with? You're doing projects, going on hikes, painting en plein air, organizing art exhibitions and all that other crap... Vilya, but life hasn’t changed! Your people are fighting, maybe bleeding to death, they are being laughed at, hated, and you are living among these haters, pretending it doesn’t concern you, that everything is fine...’”
My mood soured terribly. And then, when the Six-Day War ended as it was bound to end, the fantastic victory of my people only strengthened my belief that I was shamefully standing aside. “Vilya, you must do something for Israel! That war is over, yours is beginning...” And one day I came home and said to my wife: “Liza, we are not living right...” And she said: “Let's go to Moscow.” And I told my colleagues that I was leaving, that I had to do something for my people, that it was impossible to live like this. And that was it... I woke up.”
They returned to Moscow, and Vilya found a job in a design organization.
Even before receiving an invitation from Israel, Vilya was introduced to David Khavkin, David Drabkin, Lyonya Lepkovsky, Victor Polsky, and a little later—to Volodya Slepak, Volodya Prestin, Pasha Abramovich—in short, quite the “crew”...
A circle of about twenty people formed. They were very close. They gathered for Jewish holidays and went on trips to the countryside together. Khavkin was their Moses. And Vilya was heavily involved in samizdat. He duplicated the Russian translation of Leon Uris's novel “Exodus.”
It was a time of desperate struggle between the “Stalinists” and the “anti-Stalinists.” It was a time brilliantly described by the poet Boris Chichibabin:
Пока во лжи неукротимы
сидят холёные, как ханы,
антисемитские кретины
и государственные хамы,
покуда взяточник заносчив
и волокитчик беспечален,
пока добычи ждёт доносчик -
не умер Сталин.
Клянусь на знамени весёлом
сражаться праведно и честно,
что будет путь мой крут и солон,
пока исчадье не исчезло,
что не сверну и не покаюсь
и не скажусь в бою усталым,
пока дышу я и покамест
не умер Сталин!
And here is what Vilya himself wrote about this time:
“The fatal blow to Despotism was dealt by the people of the 60s. A weak man, armed only with his own righteousness, posed a formidable threat to Despotism. In Russia, this apparently became a tradition: participants of the War of 1812, upon returning from Paris, awakened the Decembrists. The Decembrists awakened Herzen, and Herzen in turn awakened an entire transit camp barrack... Samizdat appeared, and an insurgent situation of defiant petitions and protest demonstrations arose. Events took on a spontaneous, avalanche-like character. And the seeds of mass Jewish national self-awareness fell on fertile ground, fertilized with the blood and sweat of Russian dissidents, a significant part of whom were Jews.”
In the spring of 1968, many from the aforementioned “crew,” having received invitations from Israel, applied to emigrate.
In the autumn of 1968, they were all called at the same time and informed that their applications to leave for Israel had been denied as inadvisable. They were informed right over the phone.
Vilya: “And so it began... Three years of a whirlwind... Today, I think with some fear and amazement—was I really capable of those three years? Capable of doing such things? I was like a wild animal...”
It started with organizing meetings of Jews from all cities—Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Riga, Vilnius, Kyiv, Chisinau, Minsk, Odessa... And the first congress took place in Moscow. It was later dubbed the ACC—sounds powerful: the All-Union Coordinating Committee. The ACC did indeed launch a whirlwind of activity. Money appeared. The first money—from the Georgians, from many of those who went on strike at the Moscow Central Telegraph Office, who wrote the famous letter that Golda Meir read in the Knesset.
Vilya took an active part in publishing underground literature, supplying material for the underground journal “Exodus,” and so on, and so on.
Meetings with foreigners began. The struggle of Soviet Jews for the right to emigrate to Israel took on international significance. As Vilya said: “The silence of the lambs was over.”
Here is what Vilya wrote in the 31st issue of the journal “Zion” in 1980:
“How can we understand the genealogy of conscience?
In certain situations, preceded by a period of prolonged and hopeless suffering, people emerge who can no longer tolerate a state of constant, total compromise. Life becomes a lie. A Jew’s life—a double lie.
Thus arises an insurgent situation, a situation of confrontation. Dissidence. Jewish dissidence. The refusal to lie is not an ideological concept; it is a state of soul that, in a certain social situation, is perceived as a rebellion. The main thing in dissidence is to dare to act. It is to stand up and speak loudly. And to name yourself. This act, vaguely mentioned in all subsequent research literature, was and remains to this day the central meaning of dissidence.
In his work ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’ Freud asserts that man’s striving for beauty is a striving for death.
The life-loving mind resists accepting this assertion. But empirical truth shows that the psychologically insurgent state of spirit (the striving for truth, the service of conscience) is, above all, a sacrificial state, that is, a state of readiness to suffer for one's truth...
... In the late 60s, a small circle of people arose within Russian assimilated Jewry, creating an insurgent situation, on whose banner Zionism was written. Jews appeared who had undergone a process of internal liberation. This was accompanied by an incomparable feeling of losing fear, and a sense of brotherhood, and a poignant feeling of sacrificial duty. For many of them, these were the shining hours of their lives.
The idea of serving one's unfortunate people, a passionate devotion to Israel, became the only significant ethical value in the narrow circle of Jewish dissidents. In their actions, paradoxically, emigration aspirations were not dominant.
The Jew, a person with a lowered head, tormented by an inferiority complex, became the central object of their efforts.
The struggle for the Jew is a struggle with the Jew.”
And people followed them!
They decided to send a letter of appeal to the world's Jewish community, written in response to another vile anti-Israel article in “Izvestia,” to Israel with David Khavkin, who had received his exit permit.
Vilya: “Khavkin got that letter out in a picture tube! Only Khavkin could have done that... Convinced that the letter was not being accepted in Israel, Khavkin sent it to America, where it was published immediately. Roman Brakhtman, who by then had received permission to leave and was already working at Radio Liberty, received this letter with the morning mail, saw my signature, and almost fell off his chair... ‘I,’ he told me later, ‘was frightened, I trembled, ran here and there, not knowing what to do. I was terrified to read it on air! I smelled the prison camp again...’”
This was the first letter, the first experiment; no one really even saw that letter. Then there was the “Letter of the Twenty-Five,” addressed to UN Secretary-General U Thant. This letter was carried out literally on the shoulders of the grandfather of a once-remarkable Jew, Izia Shmerler, who has today become the biggest scumbag and now calls himself Izia Shamir. But when he was Izia Shmerler, he was our hope, our joy. His father, a Polish Jew, died in Stalin's camps. This Izia brought us six massive suitcases from Siberia—I, a young, strong man, couldn’t lift a single one of them!—stuffed with reprinted Hebrew textbooks, “Elef Milim” and “Mori.” He managed to get them printed in a state-run (!) printing house. They were printed at night by young women whom he, of course, paid, and he paid with his own money! He refused to take money from us! That was a guaranteed prison sentence! The girls were facing three years each, and for him—a clear ten-year sentence!
Izia loaded the suitcases into a train compartment, paid the attendant well to keep anyone else out—she stood guard at the entrance like a lioness!—and he traveled alone from Novosibirsk to Moscow. We met him in Moscow and distributed the suitcases to different addresses. On our scale, it was a colossal print run of educational literature! Those were the kinds of things we did...
So, when Izia got permission to leave with his grandfather, we sewed our “Letter of the Twenty-Five” into the shoulder pads of his grandfather's fur coat. It is now on display in the Diaspora Museum. The letter was printed on a piece of a linen sheet that had never known a milligram of starch. Absolutely soft fabric! And we sewed this letter, this piece of sheet, into the shoulder pads of grandpa’s coat. And they searched the old man in the Lubyanka style; it was a real search. They tore almost his entire coat apart, suspecting he was carrying something, and found nothing! It was a prison camp stash; how could they find it?! To slice the shoulder pad open lengthwise and insert a piece of the softest fabric! Who could have felt that? I learned that trick from thieves. And the letter got through and made quite a noise.
I could go on day and night about our deeds and antics...”
At the same time, Vilya signed the famous “Letter of the 170” by Larisa Bogoraz and Pasha Litvinov in defense of the dissidents Ginzburg and Galanskov.
So Vilya was a dissident, too... But here is what Vilya himself writes on this subject:
“One gets the impression that a good half of the Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries consisted of Jews. Militants, terrorists, heroes of actions—they shot, blew up governors, ministers, and blew themselves up in the name of the holy cause of the people. Goetz, Gershuni, Manya Vilbushevich, Osip Minor—their name is legion. Minor’s wife, A. N. Shekhter, with the corpse of her frozen infant in her arms during the foot march to Vilyuysk—is a symbol of their passions and suffering.
Then our Levinsons with sabers and spurs flew across the country. My uncle Israel turned into ‘fiery Srulik,’ and his red locks stuck out revolutionarily from under his commander’s cap band. Everyone in whom conscience was alive and whose heart was not deaf to the people’s pain rushed into the revolution.
Of course, this was ‘nicer, more attractive, and more spiritual’ than being engaged in a private, petty affair—building one’s own national home.
And only a negligibly small number of people found the strength not to succumb to temptation and to turn their gaze and their steps toward Eretz-Israel, Palestine. This great act of spiritual maturity still stirs my imagination.
What follows are quotes from Vilya’s beloved Jabotinsky: ‘...and they will say: blessed are those who, in that troubled time, full of mirages and temptations, knew how to choose the straight path and led their people forever away from foreign aid and foreign betrayal.’
Thus, Time—the most impartial judge—hands Jabotinsky the certificate of truth.”
...But they sat without a solid connection to foreign correspondents. So Vilya categorically demanded that his dissident friend, Pyotr Yakir, introduce him to them.
And very soon, the “Letter of the Six” made a real splash...
Vilya: “The pretext for it was, again, an article, but this time by two Yids—Bernstein and Friedel—titled ‘Whose Tune Are the Zionists Dancing To.’ How those Yids fawned! They practically wept with delight... They, it turns out, were not only Soviet, but almost Russian, and their homeland was the USSR, and one must love this Motherland, this land, the Golden Ring of Russia... and naturally, they dropped a few words about certain individual Jews, Zionists of course, who don't understand what a happiness it is to live in the Golden Ring, and all that sort of thing. And we let them have it! We really gave it to them! Tina Brodetskaya, Alya Fedoseyeva, and I wrote the letter. It was my first foray into the art of epistolary literature. It was this very letter that gave all the organizations in Israel, America, and Europe involved in our cause the famous slogan ‘Let my people go!’”
This “Letter of the Six” took off. It really took off! It was a tough letter...
I will venture to offer the reader this letter, one of the very first that opened the era of Jewish glasnost in the USSR... Feel, ladies and gentlemen, the spirit and pathos of what was, no matter how you slice it, a romantic time.
“So, you, L. Bernstein and M. Friedel, write that the Israeli parliament adopted a resolution demanding to ‘respect the indisputable right of every Jew to live in the land of his historical mother-homeland, i.e., Israel.’
It is appropriate to ask: do you know of another historical homeland of the Jews that is not an ‘i.e.’? Perhaps you mean to say that Jews, unlike other peoples, have no historical homeland, or at least should not have one? Or, as you try to convince readers, can the Jewish national question be resolved only on the field of class struggle? It turns out that it is not some continuity of generations, not the spiritual heritage of ancestors, not the history of a country and its people that forms a person’s soul, but... class struggle, and only class struggle. Moreover, you believe that the Jewish problem can be only political, social, even religious, but by no means national in the sense of its own statehood.
Do you hear, L. Bernstein and M. Friedel? You who speak on behalf of the ‘Jewish population of our country,’ can you read P. Markish, S. Galkin, L. Kvitko, I. Feffer, D. Bergelson in your own, Jewish language? Do you know even a single Hebrew letter? Are you proud of the spiritual heritage of your people—at least the Bible, even in its literary-historical aspect? Do you, your children, and your grandchildren know about the heroic popular uprisings of the Maccabees, of Bar-Kokhba, against foreign rule? What do names like Yehuda Halevi, Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, H. N. Bialik, S. Frug mean to you? Or is this not your history and not your spiritual heritage?
Then what is yours? And where is it? Surely not just the bare field of class battles? And on the basis of what national spiritual heritage do you masquerade as internationalists?
Neither the French, nor the English, nor the Russian peoples have had to prove their right to national existence before the whole world. The history of the Jews turned out differently. The Jewish people had to prove this right. And the Soviet Union was one of the first to recognize the State of Israel. Does this not mean that from now on every Jew has the right to participate in building his own state, in forming a Jewish national culture on the land of his ancestors? And you, the so-called ‘representatives of the Jewish nationality,’ do not hesitate to resort to police threats, qualifying this right and the open expression of the people's will to return to the land of their ancestors as ‘treachery’ and ‘treason’!
As for the class struggle, the Communist Party of Israel (even two of them!) is successfully carrying it out. It is clear that your goal is to prove to both foreign and Soviet readers that the thought of settling on the ‘land of their ancestors’ in Israel is alien to the Jews of the Soviet Union. But just take a look at the Department of Visas and Registration of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and ask how many tens of thousands of Jews are futilely knocking on its doors in the hope of obtaining permission to leave the USSR to reunite with their relatives in Israel. Try to comprehend, L. Bernstein and M. Friedel, that the right to leave any country is the legal right of every person and is nowhere in the world considered ‘treachery’ or ‘treason to the Motherland’.
To you, L. Bernstein and M. Friedel, as to everyone ‘who knows the laws of social development,’ it should be known that the wheel of history can not only not be turned back, but it cannot be stopped. And today, when the Jewish State has been revived and has existed for 22 years, the ‘striving for unity, for life on the land of our ancestors’ is natural and indisputable.
Therefore, all Soviet Jews wishing to reunite with their people in the land of Israel would undoubtedly welcome the respect for their indisputable right to ‘live in the land of their historical mother-homeland’.
And before the great power that gave refuge to many generations of Jews, we repeat the words of our distant ancestors who demanded the right of Exodus from Egypt: ‘LET MY PEOPLE GO!’”
Signatures: Vitaly SVECHINSKY, Dora KOLYADITSKAYA, Mark ELBAUM, Tina BRODETSKAYA, Lev FREYDIN, Blyuma DISKINA
Moscow, December 1969.
Vilya: “And so, we came out into the open. This letter was broadcast on all the ‘enemy’ radio stations. People called me from many cities, worried. And from those cities, other letters started to flow! And what happened? No tails, no summonses to the KGB, no disconnected phones. None of that happened yet. We weren't the Crimean Tatars, who had almost no one to defend them. Not even the Islamic world supported them. But to touch the Jews—oh, that’s another matter! In New York, Kahane is throwing bombs. Soviet diplomats can’t get a moment’s peace. It wasn't so easy to take us. But the authorities lay low, watching us very carefully.”
“And in response to our demarche—our ‘Letter of the Six’—the authorities hurried to arrange a press conference of ‘tame’ Jews. It took place on March 4, 1970. Participants included Raikin, Bystritskaya, General Dragunsky, and the then-minister Dymshits. We watched this stinking performance on television. Raikin moved and spoke as if he had suffered a stroke. Bystritskaya continued to play Aksinya from ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ and showed with her whole demeanor that she didn't even understand what the word ‘Israel’ meant... some nonsense, she implied. Dymshits droned on officiously about the achievements of Soviet Jews, holding himself up as an example: a Jewish minister—what more could one want? General Dragunsky was particularly zealous—it seemed he was ready to run over all Zionists in a tank. It was horrific!”
... Who doesn't the Lord appoint to be an anti-Zionist!
And in response to this vile performance, the famous “Letter of the Thirty-Nine” appeared, a letter that has firmly entered the history of the Jews...”
...I catch myself trying to tell the life story of Vitaly Svechinsky. But, ladies and gentlemen, that would be a novel, a novel about an extraordinary man, a man who was fearless, intelligent, ironic, worthy of a novel about a true Jew... I cannot manage it...
The next morning, the text of this letter was broadcast on the Voice of America!
The letter caused a great stir. People began to be summoned. The KGB started to “work with” people. And so they organized a seminar near Moscow, and there Vilya told the assembled people how to behave during interrogations. How to answer, how not to fear their bluffs.
Vilya: “And the letters came in avalanches... Most of them went through the correspondent of the Norwegian newspaper ‘Aftenposten,’ Per Hegge. He was the one who smuggled Solzhenitsyn's ‘Archipelago’ to the West. After that, they declared him ‘persona non grata,’ wanted to expel him from the Soviet Union, but didn't. He was a desperate man, a terrible adventurer, who knew Russian perfectly... He considered it a sacred duty. Once, when we were being followed, he took my mail—a thick bundle—in his car, hid it under the seat, ran a red light, turned onto a side street, threw me into a snowdrift, and drove off with the mail to his bureau.”
...And the searches began. One of them was directly connected to the “Hijacking Affair”...
Vilya: “The Hijacking Affair is a simple, almost criminal matter... When it happened, when it became obvious that yes, the guys went for a hijacking to ‘split,’ I had a clear feeling that I’d been stabbed in the back. I had been in this movie before... In my youth, we wanted to get a boat to ‘split’ too, and what’s a boat—I was even interested in hijacking a plane...
You have to understand, just as Jews were beginning to get off their knees, to rise up, to look to the sky, to speak out, to declare, to sign letters and all that—to do such a thing at that moment! I felt it as a betrayal, a spit in the face, it turned our cause into some banal high-jacking. The most interesting thing is that when I shared this thought with Khavkin here in Israel, he said the exact same words about the affair—‘a knife in the back.’ We were on the same wavelength. And I heard more than once that they didn’t so much want to hijack the plane—they understood they would be caught—as to stir up public opinion with their act.”
But the main thing is the intention, and then the Lord disposes of everything. And when they were jailed, jailed for the intention to seize a plane, the world was silent, silent, and that was it. No one was moved by it. At that time, Basques, Arabs, criminals were hijacking planes, who wasn't! It was the number one way to get attention. But then, when Kuznetsov and Dymshits were given the death penalty, that’s when it all started! The world was shaken: execution for what? For hijacking? What hijacking?! For an attempt? But there wasn't even an attempt! There was an intention, a plan. There is a plan, there is an intention, there is an attempt, and there is realization. So the guys were stuck somewhere between the plan and the intention. And for that, the death penalty?! That's when it all began. That’s when they laid their solid brick in our movement.
And we wrote a letter, calling the death penalty for Kuznetsov and Dymshits and the savage sentences for the other guys barbarism. Here, thank God, the case of the Basques in Spain came along. Golda Meir put pressure on Franco, he pardoned the Basques, and Brezhnev had no choice but to pardon Kuznetsov and Dymshits. The whole world was pressing all the pedals then.
After all these events, my own affairs moved with great speed. After a summons for interrogation in Moscow, they didn’t bother me anymore, and on January 13, 1971, returning home late in the evening, I saw a yellow postcard in the slots of my mailbox: I was urgently summoned to OVIR the next morning. In the morning, an inspector named Akulova received me at OVIR. And I was at a loss for words...”
Vilya: “Well, here we are at Sheremetyevo. We went up the stairs—me, my son Borya, Liza with an infant, Geulah—and I see before us a whole brigade of secret service agents, ready for a big ‘shakedown.’ And Liza with the baby is being taken to another cubicle at that moment. Then I went up to the senior officer and told him: ‘I’m not carrying anything with me. What I had to pass on, I have already passed on, and I have nothing on me. You can search, but I declare that I have nothing. I can attest to this in writing. All I’m carrying is this pin, a gift from an old camp friend. Here it is...’”
“My camp buddy Zhora made it for me. A metal pin that you could attach to a jacket lapel. It depicted the earth, a piece of sky, barbed wire, and hanging from it were our patches with camp numbers, which we wore on our caps, on our trousers. And our camp numbers were engraved on these patches.”
“The officer examined the pin for a long time and declared that he couldn’t let it through... But there was no search, absolutely none. They didn't even unswaddle the baby.”
“And through the glass, I saw the crowd seeing me off, familiar faces, my father... Mom didn't come to say goodbye, she couldn't... And I walked away from them with a baby basket where Geulah was dozing... By the way, at the ZAGS (civil registry office) they didn't want to register my daughter—the clerk flipped through a thick reference book and couldn't find such a name. ‘We don’t have a name like that!’ ‘But we,’ I replied, ‘do!’ And I insisted. I wrote the name for her in Russian, and she copied it into her papers.”
Life in Israel...
It differed little from the lives of many Jewish immigrants from Russia. The search for work, housing, a place for oneself in a society that turned out to be somewhat different from what had been imagined. But, thank God, things worked out for Vilya.
In Israel, he immediately began to work closely with Nativ, particularly with its head, Nehemia Levanon. He was sent to Brussels for the first international congress in defense of Soviet Jews, then to Paris, where he spoke in Jewish schools, then to the USA, where Vilya was received by the then-Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Then two architects came to his ulpan, one of whom was the famous Israeli architect Al Mansfeld. He had read about Vilya in the newspapers; there were many interviews with him at the time. Nehemia had trumpeted all over Israel that a famous activist, a Prisoner of Zion, and so on had arrived. And Mansfeld at that time was the number one architect in Israel.
Mansfeld was pleased with him. He taught him a lot, although Vilya had arrived as a mature architect. He worked for Mansfeld for four years. Mansfeld paid little. Like the great Corbusier—who, true, paid no salary at all—people came to Mansfeld who wanted to learn architecture, not to earn money, but specifically to learn, to delve into architectural revelations.
Vilya: “I wanted to leave Mansfeld after just a year, but I didn't because I was deeply traumatized in Russia, I was tired, apathetic, and so I worked for him for four years... And Mansfeld’s wife, Bella, got Liza a job in the geological library at the Technion. Liza knew English well.” Vilya laughs: “A permafrost expert in Israel...”
His son was in school, Geulah—in kindergarten...
He stayed with Mansfeld for four years. Until he began to understand that architecture is good, but the West is built on a different principle. Here you need to open your own firm and get into business, become an independent architect, take orders...
And Vilya decided. With several friends, he founded the design and construction company “Alir” (Aliyah mi-Rusiyah).
They took out a state bank loan—a mashkanta. They were given an experimental project commissioned by the state. It was a pre-fabricated, experimental house, and the newly-fledged company went bust on it—the money was gone, and the project was not completed. And they were left in debt...
A case was opened against them in the Ministry of Justice. An investigation began into how the money was “embezzled.” So they went to the Ministry of Justice. An investigator received them, and they told him who they were, told him that they went under because they had no idea how such things were done, that they received a very difficult project, and that they had even invested their own money to keep their company afloat... The investigator listened carefully and took them to his boss. The boss asked them to briefly repeat everything they had told the investigator. There was a long pause. He looked at them, they looked at him. And the boss told the investigator: “Close this case.” That was it... He believed them, and that’s where it ended.
And Vilya was left alone—a private operator in the architectural market. There was no money. He took on any work. Then he met a man named Zvi, who was looking for a partner. And they received an invitation to participate in a competition for the Fania Kaplan Cultural Center project.
Fania Kaplan was a rabbanit, the wife of the chief rabbi of France. The money was one hundred percent French, and the clients wanted Israeli architects to participate in the competition. Six architectural firms competed along with them. They worked on the project with great enthusiasm.
But then they realized that some kind of scheming was starting around the competition; there was a premonition that everything had already been sold in advance, but one evening they got a call informing them that the clients had demanded all projects be delivered to Paris. Both the projects and the models—everything was requested in Paris. So all the local schemers were out of the picture.
A week later, Vilya received a call from Paris in the middle of the night, informing him that they had been unanimously awarded the first prize. It was a big celebration... They made the working drawings, and the center was built quite quickly—a two-story public building with a hall.
This brought in money; they, as Vilya put it, “got in the picture.”
Then they got work from the army—they designed officer quarters for military bases when they were moved from Sinai inland. In short, the work started rolling in...
After nine years of working together, Vilya and Zvi parted ways.
Vilya: “And in 1978, the Sokhnut announced the Judaization of the Galilee—it was all Arab then. The land was going to waste. Empty lands are foreign lands. It’s always been that way.
The Sokhnut planned six settlements. Tal-El was one of the first. The Sokhnut laid a road, brought water, installed an electric generator. While still in Haifa, I made the general plan for Tal-El and... moved there. In 1974, my mother came to me. As soon as my father died, without waiting for permission, she came...
Vilya: “There were seventeen families of us. At first, they gave us Sokhnut houses—very decent little houses: three bedrooms, a small kitchen, a toilet, a shower, a very decent living room, even a ‘pinat ochel’ (dining nook)... And we thought that it was unlikely I’d manage to get my own house in Haifa... What house—not even a front garden... But here there was a real opportunity to have our own land—the Sokhnut gave it for free, just build, settle, build your own house. And it wasn’t the end of the world, but between Karmiel, Akko, and Nahariya, and only about a forty-minute drive to Haifa.”
“We arrived at a completely bare place, and now I have my own architectural firm here!”
Vilya: “I don’t belong to any party, but I’m right-wing, I always voted for Likud...”
He once expressed his opinion on the Russian parties in an article “Pre-election Polemics,” published in the newspaper “Vesti” in April 1999: “...the saddest thing in the rapid dance of Russian parties, where the IBA party leads, is the lack of a good ear. For how else can one explain appropriating this name after the publication of Zinoviev’s books! (for those who have forgotten—in Alexander Zinoviev's famous satirical novel ‘Yawning Heights,’ the setting is a city called Ibansk, and its residents, naturally, are Ibanites—a name phonetically similar to a vulgar Russian curse). And if not ‘Ibanites,’ then what else can you call the representatives of the IBA party?
The official slogan of the Ibanites: ‘Vote for your own!’— is a demonstrative rejection of Zionism in its classic form, created by Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor. Truly, the work begun by giants is being completed by pygmies.
... Being rooted—that is the highest civic virtue in Israel.”
He always voted only for Likud.
Vilya: “I know many people who often changed their direction, tried many things in ideology, beliefs, and so on. It often depends on mood, on how life turns out. I know people who were very right-wing in Russia and became very left-wing here. I don’t like this at all—right-wing, left-wing... It simplifies the problem. These so-called leftists are a real horror: they see nothing, confuse scales, forget who stole and from whom. With them, it’s no longer clear who the victim is and who the aggressor is. They say: Israel is the aggressor. Why?! Because it is a strong victim that repels all blows, that doesn’t break. Therefore, it’s an aggressor! But in reality, everything is so simple: the Arabs are the aggressors. They don’t want Israel here, they don’t want it ontologically, they don’t want it on principle, they don’t want the Jewish spirit here! They all voted against its creation! The Galilee was declared Arab land. And Haifa too. And no one remembers anymore that as soon as Israel was created, the Arabs went to war against it. Seven states, without a declaration of war, went to destroy Israel. And what an Israel! One that had just come out of Auschwitz, from Treblinka! They were brought illegally from Cyprus. And who did they bring—skin and bones. A people who came out of the ovens, breathless, came to the shore of this land and were happy that they were given this piece of land, this scrap of land, a narrow strip along the sea... They raved with joy, danced in the streets day and night. Such happiness—a Jewish state! 600,000 people—that was the entire population of Israel then! And at that very moment the Arabs attacked to bury us. And the Jews, who came out of the ovens, were immediately given weapons. They weren't asked their names. And they went into battle, and died, and perished, and won, and freed themselves from the Arabs. But not completely... Now it’s a different century, we were too late. Much too late. In fact, that was when all the dots should have been put on the i’s, to create clear state borders, an anthem, a flag, a coat of arms—a sacred cause! The main thing is the honor of the state, something Jews just can't seem to understand. Jews are not a state-minded people. We must become one, understand what it means. After all, how were European states created? They defended themselves, held onto their land with their teeth, fought for it for centuries! Jewish statehood should take an example from European statehood. And in many ways it does—the parliament, ministries, courts, police. This is all from Europe. We don’t take the statehood of Saudi Arabia, or China, or the Soviet Union as an example. We count ourselves as part of European civilization. So we must go all the way. Take an example in the historical context too! We must know and defend our place! We must know our place!
For some time now, I’ve started to think—who are we, what is Israel, what is life, and, most importantly, what does it mean to be born a Jew? What does it mean? Should I belong to this people, or am I a free person, a citizen of the world? My God, why do American Jews help Israel? Why do they hold together as a community? On what basis? Guys, two thousand years have passed! What community? What are you talking about? Why are you holding onto this? You go to synagogues, gather for holidays, don't eat on Yom Kippur, eat matzah on Passover, wear a kippah, even the non-believers... And you teach your children these traditions. What’s the deal? The deal is that Jewishness preserves itself, it is alive. Alive after such a terrible war, after everything it has had to endure! And I realized that this is not a physiological phenomenon—it is a unique spiritual phenomenon!
I realized my Jewishness spiritually, I learned that I belong to a Great Tribe that was called into being almost four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and upon which was placed the role of a collective guide for a human race that had lost its way in materialistic, pagan ossification. And this guidance led to the creation of a new, salvific cultural formation—Western, or European, civilization.
And it is difficult for me today to reconcile with our role as the collective kike in the community of European countries. But I know that at the end of days, it is Israel that will lead mankind to its providential harbor, for it was upon Israel that this role of pilot was placed four thousand years ago...
“The WORD entered this world, and this WORD will conquer this world. ‘...and nations shall walk by your light, and kings by the brightness of your rising’ (Isaiah, 60:1-3).”
This Role of the Jewish people in world history echoes in the insights of people who are not foolish, and most importantly, are sensitive to world events:
And here is what wise men have said:
Vladimir Solovyov:
“Passing through the entire history of mankind from its very beginning to our days (which cannot be said of any other nation), Jewry represents, as it were, the axis of world history.”
Winston Churchill:
“...no man with the capacity for thought can deny that they are, without any reservation, the most remarkable people of all those known to our time. We owe to the Jews Christian revelation and a system of morality that, being completely separated from the miraculous, remains the most precious treasure of mankind, which in itself is worth more than all knowledge and all doctrines.”
Of the 250 houses in Tal-El, 120 were built by Vitaly Svechinsky...
Eternal memory to you, our dear friend, Vitaly Svechinsky...