My Parents, the Cold War Couriers
15th March 2025
Have you ever been lied to by your parents? I have. When I was a little kid back in 1981, they fed me the mother of all whoppers. My two siblings and I were farmed out to various friends and relations for a week, as our mum and dad explained that they were off to New York on a holiday to which we were not invited.
Reader, they did not go on holiday to New York. On their return to our hearth and home, they revealed to us that they had been on a secret and illicit trip to Leningrad and Moscow at the height of the Cold War.
This is a tale of derring-do and espionage, starring a young Glaswegian Jewish couple who probably should have known better.
It’s the tale of two brave people who successfully delivered medicines and other vital goods to the oppressed Russian Jews who needed them most, but who failed to pick up so much as a crappy Russian doll for me in Moscow duty free.
This is the tale of that time my parents went to Soviet Russia, and all I got was this lousy story.
Let’s jump back in time to the 1970s. The USSR, under belligerent, communist rule, was a harsh living environment for most people, and especially for Jews who sought to express their identity. Those who requested permission to leave the country and move to Israel were refused, then persecuted for having the temerity to ask, losing their jobs and often being sent to gulags or prisons.
These Soviet prisoners of conscience became known as refuseniks. While western governments, keen to cultivate a détente with the Soviet block, initially took little interest in their plight, an organisation formed, determined to make a difference. It was a group composed of Jewish women around Britain, mainly in their 30s, who called themselves the 35s. They campaigned relentlessly to raise awareness of their oppressed sisters and brothers in the Soviet Union, picketing the touring Bolshoi, protesting outside the Soviet embassy, lobbying MPs to put pressure on the Russians. They launched a postal campaign, sending letters and goods to Russian Jews, along with a pink card that they asked the refuseniks to send back as a way of tracking their welfare. That return of a pink card from Russia was always a special moment.
While our mother Maxine was a member of the 35s, campaigning, organising, dragging the rest of our family along to demonstrations through the late 70s and early 80s, our father Nigel was also very communally active, as Chairman of the Glasgow Zionist Organisation. It was his role that led the Israeli embassy to contact my parents in 1981. A man from the embassy (no doubt in trench coat and fedora) called them from a phone box and asked them to travel incognito to Russia with medicines and other items that would help refuseniks. This was a big ask. But they didn’t have to think about it. They immediately said “yes”.
It’s only looking back now as an adult, a lot older than they were then, that it dawns on me for the first time what an utterly bonkers, foolhardy, deeply courageous endeavour this truly was.
And so, with their cover story established and offspring bundled off, Maxine and Nigel flew to Leningrad in mid-winter with a mission – to meet with refuseniks, and to pass on simple goods which were of enormous value to them. Cigarettes, white chocolate and soap could all be used as currency in Soviet prisons. They brought an expensive new camera, which could be sold on the black market to support a Jewish family for months. They brought vital medicines which certain refuseniks needed. And coffee. Lots of coffee.
Mainly, my parents played the part of British tourists on a Thompsons holiday jaunt around Leningrad and Moscow’s best known sights including the Winter Palace, the Hermitage Museum and St Basil’s Cathedral. But most days, they found a way to slip away, whether through feigned illness or a list of other pre-prepared excuses. They stayed in the sort of hotels for which the expression “decaying grandeur” was conjured up. In fact their Moscow hotel was the Metropol, the setting of Amor Towles’ majestic novel, “A Gentleman in Moscow”. On each floor of the hotel sat a woman who looked like she’d been there since the revolution. Just sat there, keeping her old babushka eye on things. Assuming that their room was bugged, Maxine and Nigel spoke bland pleasantries aloud while discussing their plans through writing notes to each other. And, of course, burning after reading.
They made contact with refuseniks by walking at least half a mile from the hotel, then using a public phone box. There are a lot of phone boxes in this story. And through those contacts, they met extraordinary, brave and determined Jews. And helped them. Both materially, but also by telling them about Jewish customs and practices which it was illegal to teach anywhere in the Soviet Union.
They met a young man called Misha, a university lecturer in maths, who visited Babi Yar to lay a wreath in commemoration of the thousands of Jews murdered there in 1941. For this, he was picked up by the KGB. By the time he returned to Leningrad, he had been sacked by the university and given a new job cleaning a bathhouse. Misha and his girlfriend Dina explained that they hoped to leave the Soviet Union for the socialist idyll of life on a kibbutz in Israel. And as they stood in the December Leningrad snow bidding farewell at the end of their first meeting, not long before the start of Chanukah, Maxine told Misha a little about the festival of light.
They worked their way through their contacts, distributing the smuggled goods and bringing a little hope to those they met. They met with an elegant Moscovite lady whose name they do not recall but we shall call her Anna. Anna appeared to have found a way to game the western visitor system, showing my parents her well stocked larder filled with goods, alongside a pile of those pink cards, sent by concerned campaigners but which she had never bothered to send back. As my parents left, Anna took my dad’s phone numbers. Just in case of future needs.
Misha invited them along to a shiur, that is, a Jewish lesson. He warned them that a similar meeting had been raided by the KGB a few months earlier. Did that put them off? It did not. They went along and tried their best to concentrate on the words of a number of speakers including Grigory Wasserman, a prominent refusenik. But every knock on the door was a moment of terror for my parents, who were keen not to complete their tour of Leningrad’s key buildings with a trip to Kresty Prison.
At the end of this meeting, Misha asked them to stay on, and they were shown a document, signed by a number of Jews, setting out the challenges of their lives as refuseniks in Soviet Russia. They wanted to get it to a human rights congress taking place soon afterwards. They asked my parents to smuggle it out. My parents response to this latest unreasonable request? Yep…you’ve got the hang of this script by now.
A few days later, they were at Moscow Airport, ready to depart. Nigel had the document in his pocket, his logic being that if caught, it was better to look naïve, as if he didn’t understand what he’d been asked to take home. They were informed that the plane was delayed. And then delayed again. As the hours went on, my father became increasingly and understandably agitated. Every time an airport official walked past him, he briefly pictured himself behind bars, somewhere in Siberia. As his composure deteriorated, Maxine intervened, grabbing the document and shoving it in her own pocket. And when that plane finally took off, Maxine and Nigel finally relaxed.
They met the Israeli embassy guy a few days later. “Fools and angels”, he said, shaking his head when they showed him the document that they had smuggled out of Russia. But he passed it on, and the refuseniks got to share their story with the world.
They didn’t stay in touch with many of them, it wasn’t really practical back then. But they did have further contact with people they’d met on two further occasions. Some months after their visit, Nigel was back at work at his optical practice in Glasgow, when he received a long distance phone call. It was Anna, the ever acquisitive Moscovite, checking whether he could arrange for her to be sent a new set of designer spectacles. No pink card necessary, thanks.
At the end of the 80s, Gorbachev introduced Glastnost and Perestroika, and with it, an end to restrictions on Jewish emigration. Many left for Israel, including Misha. He didn’t make it to a kibbutz. When my parents visited him a decade after they had last seen him at that tumultuous meeting in Leningrad, he and Dina, now his wife, were ultra-orthodox Jews, living in a religious suburb of Jerusalem. Though an auspicious moment, it quickly became clear that the two couples had a lot less in common than they might once have envisaged. But Misha did share one little nugget before heading off for prayers. That conversation, when my mum told him the story of Chanukah, that was the very first thing that this Rabbi ever learned about the Jewish religion.
In truth, I’m not sure what to take from that little punchline.
Reliving my parents’ escapades from way back when, I’ve had a chance to reflect a little. The entire story seems mad. My folks agreed to take an enormous risk to help people they’d never met living in an alien environment thousands of miles away, all with the encouragement of the Israeli government. What are we to make of this?
At its core, this is a story of peoplehood. That’s what drove my parents, in truth very sensible, responsible people, to do what they did. It’s what motivated the Jewish state to send volunteers into Russia. And it’s the reason that many Russian Jews pushed back against a communist dictatorship’s refusal to allow them to identify as Jews. All of them, all of us, united by this unfathomable, unbreakable bond. And if you don’t get that, you’ll struggle to understand why the events since October 7th have affected us in such a profound way.
This sense of peoplehood is what motivated Maxine and Nigel, and thousands of other activists in Britain and elsewhere, leading apparently ordinary lives, to do this extraordinary work to help their fellow Jews.
Here’s to all of them. Extraordinary people. But also, our mums and dads.
