'Russian Moses': Yuri Fedorov, the Soviet dissident who helped to let Jews out of the USSR, died in New York
'05.10.2022'
Lyudmila Balabay
On September 27, in New York, at the age of 79, Yuri Fedorov, a human rights activist, Soviet dissident, and a former political prisoner, died after a serious illness. He was one of the main participants in the so-called aircraft case, a high-profile trial that in 1970 brought widespread attention in the United States and other Western countries to the struggle of Soviet Jews for the right to emigrate to Israel. This case also led to the adoption of the "Jackson-Vanik Amendment", which laid the foundation for normal trade relations between the US and the Soviet Union, as well as the lifting of bans and restrictions on emigration from the USSR.
As a result of the “aircraft business”, the Soviet authorities were forced to slightly open the doors for emigration. Yuri Fedorov paid for this with a 15-year sentence in a special regime camp. After his release, he was granted political asylum in the United States, where he created and headed the Gratitude Foundation, which provides assistance to Russian dissidents. The story of the “Russian Moses” was told by the publication with the BBC.
An attempt to escape from the USSR, which became a legend
On June 15, 1970, Yuri Federov and 11 other young people arrived at the small Smolny airfield near Leningrad. They intended to board a 12-seat An-2p biplane flying to Priozersk, where four more guys were waiting for them.
The plan was called "Operation Wedding" because the cover for the fugitives was supposedly a wedding invitation. Almost everyone in the group (with the exception of two) were Jews.
The idea was bold: the guys planned to land both pilots in Priozersk, threatening them with two pistols with blank cartridges, and fly to Sweden themselves (one of the conspirators, Mark Dymshits, was a former military pilot). There, the hijackers planned to give a press conference, talk about the situation of Soviet Jews and demand freedom to travel to Israel.
But the Soviet secret services were on the alert. The KGB arrested the entire group of conspirators 30 minutes before departure from Smolny. All of them were convicted on a number of charges, the pearl of which was treason. Dymshchits and Kuznetsov were sentenced to death. Murzhenko and Fedorov, who had previously served time for anti-Soviet activities, received 14 and 15 years, respectively.
The intervention of Golda Meir, whose messenger reminded the Spanish Generalissimo Franco of his Jewish roots and convinced him to pardon the Basque terrorists sentenced to death; President Nixon's call to Brezhnev and a wave of protests in the West forced the Soviet authorities to commute the death penalty for Dymshits and Kuznetsov to 15 years in prison.
In subsequent years, the “aircraft pilots” were gradually released, usually exchanging them for Soviet spies arrested in other countries, and only Murzhenko and Fedorov served their terms in full.
Flight to america
Fedorov was released from prison in 1985, and in 1987, on the second attempt, he went abroad on an Israeli call. However, instead of Israel, he went to the United States. At first, he lived in New York with dissident Yuri Yarym-Agaev in an apartment on West 30th Street, which he rented as his “Center for Democracy”.
Familiar Russians hired Fedorov, who studied in Moscow at an electromechanical technical school, as an electrician. They sent him mainly to disadvantaged, that is, criminogenic areas.
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As a result, local Jews, who remembered Fedorov’s contribution to the struggle for free exit from the USSR (Yarym-Agaev calls him “Russian Moses”, who “brought the Jews out of yet another captivity”), got him a job at the New York Association for New Americans charitable organization, abbreviated as "Naiyana", which was engaged in the organization of Soviet Jews.
English Fedorov then knew so-so, but his colleagues forgave him for his good nature and historical merits.
Fedorov worked long enough at Naiyan to earn an old-age pension, albeit a modest one. It helped that his wife, who graduated from Columbia University, was for many years an economics professor at a small New York college.
Loved the state but didn't love New York City
Fedorov, according to Yarym-Agaev, with whom they were close friends, “categorically” did not like New York and for about two decades appeared in the city mainly only at the traditional meetings of Soviet dissidents, which were held in the end in the Russian Samovar.
The rest of the time he spent in an old house that he and his wife bought in the town of Fleishman in the Catskills, about three hours from the city. Fedorov did not like to visit New York, partly because he did not want to leave dozens of cats, which, laughs Yarym-Agaev, "completely occupied the house."
“It was something scary,” he continues. “Besides, he had three levels of cats. There was a caste system, a class system, that is, there were cats inside the house, there were cats that lived on the veranda - several houses were made for them - and there were generally stray cats that just came. There was a migration with illegal immigrants, meaning more cats were trying to migrate inside the house.”
Fund for dissidents
Remembering his difficult first years in America, Fedorov created the Gratitude Foundation to help needy dissidents and former political prisoners in his homeland. He collected money, mostly small amounts, and used it to help dissidents. Sometimes the amounts were higher. A former associate of Boris Berezovsky, microbiologist Alexander Goldfarb several times gave Fedorov several thousand dollars from the oligarch.
The fund's accounting department was led by the wife of its founder.
A few years ago, Fedorov was diagnosed with lupus. The treatment was very difficult for him. He spent the last year almost entirely in the hospital. Shortly before his death, Fedorov complained to his wife in English: “I can't take it any more!” (“I can’t do it anymore”) and left, leaving behind the warm memories of thousands, and maybe even millions of people.
