Long-Suffering Soviet Jewish Family Wins Its Battle to Emigrate

The Yakir family, which suffered for generations under Soviet power, Thursday won a 14-year battle to emigrate to Israel. Even among the long-term Jewish refuseniks, it’s quite a story.

The father and uncle of Yevgeny Yakir, the head of the family now, were shot as “enemies of the people” in a purge of the Red Army at the height of Josef Stalin’s terror in 1937.

His father, Moris, was a former Red Army pilot who fought against the Franco rebellion in Spain. Yevgeny’s uncle, the legendary Gen. Iona Yakir, was a Red Army hero during the Russian civil war and later became commander of the Ukraine military district.

Gen. Yakir apparently incurred Stalin’s wrath by recommending a halt in grain shipments out of the Ukraine during the famine there in the 1930s, believed to have been brought about by Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture.

Yevgeny’s mother, Klara, was sent to a prison camp for 19 years for being the widow of an “enemy of the people.” She was released and rehabilitated in 1956 as part of Nikita S. Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign.

In fact, Khrushchev even cited the sufferings of the Yakir family during his 1961 speech at the famous 22nd Congress of the Communist Party, where de-Stalinization was the major theme.

Yevgeny, known as Zhenia to his friends, never knew his father. Although he was denigrated as the son of an “enemy,” he went to a university and graduated as a mechanical engineer. He patented 12 inventions during his career.

In 1973, however, when he first applied to emigrate, he was fired from his job. For a time, he worked as an English translator, then gave tennis lessons and recently has been restringing tennis rackets.

Yevgeny’s son, Alexander, was sent to a labor camp for two years in 1984 on charges of avoiding military service. The son, who was 28 and near the age ceiling for compulsory army service when he was convicted, said he was trying to avoid learning military secrets that could block the family’s emigration.

Alexander Yakir was a university honors student in electrical engineering but never worked at his profession. Instead he held jobs as a fork lift operator, lifeguard and manual laborer.

Yevgeny’s wife, Rimma, once a computer operator in a machine-building plant, lost her job as well. Although she was a graduate of the Moscow Polytechnical Institute, she became a cleaning woman.

Yevgeny’s uncle, Pyotr Yakir, a forerunner of later political dissenters, published a book in the West in 1972 recounting his 17 years in special penal institutions set up for children of enemies of the people. Pyotr, however, was arrested and, after 14 months of interrogation, shocked the dissident movement and sullied the family’s reputation by denouncing several of his friends in 1973.

In return, after being convicted of anti-Soviet agitation, he received a relatively light sentence of three years in prison and three years in internal exile. He died in 1983, a broken man.

For 14 years, the Yakir family’s applications for exit visas were refused, ostensibly on grounds that Rimma Yakir became aware of state secrets at her factory job.

On Thursday, however, the official Tass news agency announced that a government commission which reviews appeals by refuseniks had made a favorable decision concerning the Yakir family.

Yevgeny, informed of the Tass report by a Reuters correspondent, was jubilant. As befitting someone who has known repeated rebuffs from the Kremlin, however, he said he preferred to defer any statement until he was officially notified of the good news.