Born in 1938 in Sestroretsk, near Leningrad into an almost totally assimilated family, he was influenced by the growth of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and the threatening “Doctors’ trial” in 1952 while still a high school student, which led to his understanding of his Jewishness and of Zionism. Becoming a member of an underground Zionist organization in Leningrad in 1966, he moved to Riga the following year where he distributed Zionist materials and the poems of Byalik. Arrested in 1970 on charges of helping organize the flight of Jews from the Soviet Union and other anti-Soviet sabotage, he was sentenced at the Riga trial of May, 1971 to 3 years of high-security imprisonment in the Gulag. He served his time in the Potma camps in Mordovia. Released in 1973, he left for Israel in the same year.
