Fateful Call Ends 5-Year Wait : Refusenik’s Dream Comes True--He Leaves for West

A telephone call and a postcard have made a world of difference for Alexei Y. Levin, turning his dream of emigration into reality.

Levin, 45, was one of the Jewish refuseniks who for five years was denied permission to leave the Soviet Union.

He had been advised to forget his dream. But now, in what appears to be a reversal of policy, he and hundreds of others have been issued exit visas. A new wave of Soviet emigrants is headed for Israel, the United States and other countries.

Levin, a science historian, left Friday for Vienna and, he hopes, the United States.

A small, frail man with poor eyesight, Levin brightened the other day as he told a reporter about the telephone call he received last Feb. 27 from the Moscow visa office. The caller told him that his application to emigrate had been approved and that a postcard would follow with directions on exit procedures.

“For the first time, I realized that I was a free man, a man with real choices,” he said. “It was an unforgettable feeling.”

Then, for what seemed like an eternity, he waited, rushing to the mailbox every morning, hoping to find the promised postcard. Finally, three weeks after the phone call, it came. Sighing with relief, Levin began a final round of the bureaucrats.

At one office, he surrendered his Soviet passport, effectively renouncing his citizenship. He also surrendered 700 rubles (about $1,100 at the official rate of exchange).

Renunciation Fee

“You have to pay to give it up,” he explained. “It’s a state fee.”

He was required to produce a certificate from the Housing Authority to prove that he owed no money for rent or utilities.

Levin owns his apartment, a cooperative, and he plans to sell it for about 4,500 rubles ($7,065). He has asked that the money go to his former wife to use on behalf of their son.

Finally, he received his exit visa on April 2 and was told he had nine days to leave the country. He celebrated like the intellectual he is--by spending three hours in a research library.

Levin had to get a transit visa from the Austrian Embassy and an Israeli visa from the Netherlands Embassy, which has looked after Israeli affairs here since the Soviet Union broke diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967.

He was allowed to exchange 90 rubles for $141 to take out of the country.

‘For Ice Cream’

“The emigres say it’s just a little something for ice cream,” Levin joked, adding that he expects some financial help from foreign friends.

One of his saddest chores was to bequeath his library, including a collection of Russian poetry and science fiction, to his teen-age son, Ilya. Two cars were needed to transport all the volumes.

Levin said the books were too heavy to take with him and, besides, Soviet customs rules forbid the export of books printed more than 20 years ago.

With his exit visa in hand, Levin was able to buy a one-way ticket to Vienna on Aeroflot, the Soviet state airline. The two-hour flight to the West costs 308 rubles (about $483).

In another only-in-Moscow experience, Levin spent more than an hour waiting in line at the dry cleaners with his best suit and other clothing. The wait was not so bad, he said, because he was able to read a book.

Typical Last Week

His last week in Moscow was typical for departing former refuseniks--sentimental farewells to family and friends amid the exciting anticipation, tinged with some anxious concern about starting life over in a new land.

He left behind his 70-year-old mother, Anna, a half-brother, Alexander, and his cherished only son, Ilya, now 14, knowing that he might never see them again. His father died in 1941, a month after Levin was born, in the Battle of Moscow.

Levin and his close friends, who know him as “Alex” or, in the Russian style, “Alyosha,” wept openly as they kissed goodby. No more would he appear in their cozy kitchens, sipping countless cups of tea sweetened with homemade jam.

But for Levin, who was jobless for the last five years because he had applied to emigrate, the frustration of trying to follow his profession gave him no reason for second thoughts about his decision to leave.

Vanished Prospects

“I long ago realized I had no prospects in this country,” he said. “I regarded myself as a prisoner, as a person whose natural rights were suppressed and denied.”

Before he incurred the wrath of Soviet authorities by seeking to leave the country, Levin had benefited from some of its best educational institutions.

Upon completing the 10th grade, he was given a gold medal for having made perfect marks. After working two years in a factory, he succeeded on his second try at passing the entrance examinations for the physics department of Moscow State University.

Although he suffered from a lung disease that interrupted his studies for two years, he received a “red diploma,” the Soviet equivalent of graduating summa cum laude.

He was then admitted to the Moscow Physical and Technical Institute, where he wrote a dissertation on the philosophy of science and was awarded the candidate’s degree--the equivalent of a doctorate.

16 Jobless Months

Equipped with these credentials, Levin hoped to find a position at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Instead, he went jobless for 16 months.

“I was a Jew,” he said. “I was never a Komsomol (Young Communist League) member, and naturally I was never a (Communist) party member.”

He was promised a job in an institute for science and technology, but later he was told that there was no room for another Jew on the staff. And he had setbacks in his personal life. His vision was impaired by a hemorrhage in his left eye. His wife of three years divorced him in 1973, soon after the birth of their son.

But then his luck changed. An old friend helped him get a job as a junior research officer in the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In this position he published about 30 articles in professional journals and prepared his dissertation.

Early in 1981 he was suddenly fired. Levin said the director of the institute suspected that he wanted to emigrate because of his professional contacts with foreign scientists.

Moment of Decision

He appealed to party and academic officials, with no success. In December of that year, he said, he was informed “semi-officially” that he would never be hired for scholarly work again.

It was at this point, Levin recalled, that he decided he had to emigrate, since his career was over in the Soviet Union. He applied for an exit visa in March, 1982, and got the first of six refusals in July.

Last September, he said, a visa officer told him: “Try to find any job. . . . It’s possible to live without being a professional.”

But under the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the tide was turning in favor of many refuseniks who, like Levin, had never been involved in secret work.

If Jewish emigration continues at the pace set in the first three months of 1987, as many as 10,000 may emigrate this year--10 times as many as in 1986. But many who applied to leave in the early 1970s are still being refused, usually on grounds that they are privy to secret information.

Teaching Aspirations

Levin is optimistic about his future. He wants to go to the United States and, ideally, teach his specialty, the history of Russian science, at a college or university. But because he was trained in mathematics and physics and is able to speak English well, he feels capable of filling many research or scholarly positions.

He has already published articles in scientific journals in the United States and Britain. He has also translated two books from English to Russian and managed to support himself by writing reviews of foreign scientific works--under a pen name after his ouster from the Academy of Sciences.

While awaiting his exit visa, he prepared a lecture course on Russian science before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and compiled a biographical index of 700 prominent Russian scientists.

Dream Job

“It’s really my dream to receive a professional job in this field of Russian and Soviet science,” he said. “This topic to me is very, very fascinating.”

Levin realizes that he is venturing into an unknown world and that there may be setbacks. Yet he is not overly concerned.

“I am bringing with me only one valuable thing--my brain,” he said with a smile. “And, besides, I know I had no future in the Soviet Union. A social system which interferes so crudely in personal decisions has to be considered inhumane. I hope it will change.”