One afternoon in July, 1980, a 12-year-old immigrant Ukrainian kid was sitting in his cousin`s backyard in Chicago, getting ready to take a bike ride.
The kid was me. It was a great day-sunny, quiet-and everything was more or less okay with the world. Nobody was bothering me. And I wasn`t bothering anybody; I was minding my own business, polishing up my bike and thinking about taking it out for a spin.
I was sure I was safe. So I wasn`t worried about anything. Most important, I wasn`t afraid anymore about being taken back to the Soviet Union. My parents wanted to go back there, but not me. No way.
So a few weeks before, I had walked out of the Chicago apartment where my family lived and come to stay with my older cousin, who had a small place a few blocks away.
My big sister, Natalie, had done the same thing at the same time. We`d just gathered up our clothing and left my parents. My mother hardly said a word to us when we walked out right in front of her eyes. She didn`t care that much. Besides, she would follow my dad wherever he took her, and after barely six months in the United States, where he wanted to go was back to Ukraine, which is how Ukrainians call our homeland, not the Ukraine, as most non-Ukrainians call it.
And Natalie and I didn`t. We had fought with our parents plenty about this, especially with my dad. When my parents refused to agree to let me stay in Chicago if they went back to the Soviet Union, we did the only thing we knew: We fled.
It was that simple. That was the whole thing: I didn`t want to go back to Ukraine.
But my parents insisted I had to come with them, which caused all the trouble that came later, years and years of trouble. Fights, lawyers, courtrooms, television and newspaper guys buzzing around. International headlines. Denunciations from Moscow of me and the people who helped me. And lots of fear. Natalie and I were never sure whether the next day would bring defeat. If it did, they`d have to carry me off kicking and screaming to the Soviet Union.
I was adjusting the bike`s chain and sprocket when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.
Four men were running down the sidewalk toward me.
My father!
My father, his face red, shouting at me. He`d come to take me back!
The four guys stood looking at me, then the man with my father began repeating in Ukrainian with a lousy accent what the cop had said.
”We`re police. You`re coming with us.”
Confined in the small room at the police station, waiting for something to happen, I was pretty depressed. The whole day was wasted, and as the hours dragged by, it almost seemed I had been forgotten.
At one point my dad stuck his head in and said, ”Don`t worry, everything is going to be okay.”
”Yeah, everything will be okay if you just leave me alone,” I said. I was so angry at him. And no one was helping me.
But I found out later that things were happening fast, bringing the U.S. State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service into the case on my side.
There were going to be judges, lawyers, psychologists, police, federal agents and other strangers in my life for years to come.
When school opened (in Sambir, Ukraine) on Sept. 1, 1979, just 10 months earlier, I went, even though we were close to leaving for good. I studied less than usual, which wasn`t much to begin with. I kept thinking that we`d be gone soon and there`d be no school at all for me for a while.
Then one day that fall, our exit visas arrived. They set a November deadline for leaving the USSR. If we failed to go by then, the visas would expire, and we`d have to start all over again. We certainly weren`t going to miss that date.
Suddenly my parents were rushing here and there trying to get rid of the last valuable stuff in the house. The excitement picked up. There were nights when so many things were on my mind it seemed I`d never sleep.
We knew we`d go to Moscow in October to get approvals from Americans at their embasssy, as well as special international Soviet passports. I didn`t want to have to say goodbye to anyone at school, so I told them nothing-even the last day I was there. I was pretty sure we could slip out of town quietly, with no one knowing we had gone.
But the morning we departed I was surprised to see a big crowd of kids gathered outside the house. Neighbors had figured out this was the day, and it seemed like 300 kids were waving goodbye. I didn`t know we had that many friends!
It got to me then. For the first time I realized I had a lot of buddies in Sambir, knew the language and had a lot of other advantages, like packages from my American aunt . . . and I was about to go to some country I didn`t know anything about and that I`d heard a lot of bad things about, too, thanks to Soviet TV! I knew I would feel lost, like I was on another planet.
Thinking all this, I suddenly didn`t want to go outside. The kids were sure to ask why I hadn`t told them we were leaving, and I didn`t want to answer. I just waved at them out the window. Pretty soon the kids went off to school, and we got a taxi to the main train station.
It was an overnight train trip to Moscow, and when we got there, we had to find a hotel, which turned out to be harder than you might think. The first clue about how touchy this was going to be was right in the station. The place was jammed with people who looked like they had been living there for weeks. Boxes, bags and suitcases were piled everywhere, kids slept on benches and adults sprawled in the aisles and corners. Crowds shuffled everywhere and waited in long lines at ticket windows.
It was no better on the streets. What crowds! Moscow is always jammed with people like us, in from the provinces, buying clothing, fresh meat, things they can`t find in the countryside. They had all gotten there ahead of us.
We lugged our bags to three different hotels and were turned away at every one, supposedly because they were full. At the last place, after a woman clerk told us to get lost, my father took her aside and gave her some money. Then she said, ”You`ve got a room now.”
There were six of us: my parents, the three children (Natalie, 16; Mikey, 5; and me) and a neighbor my father had brought along for help. If customs inspectors refused to allow us to take some valuables, like jewelry, with us, the neighbor would take the stuff back to our relatives in Sambir.
At the hotel we met another Soviet family that was heading to the States, too. The mother was a Ukrainian and the father a Greek who had got stuck in the USSR during the war. His wife spoke Russian and English as well as Ukrainian. We struck up a friendship with their son and daughter, who were close in age to us. We used to play cards together in our rooms, or the son and I went around the hotel fighting with Armenians we found in other rooms.
These new friends left before we did and now live in Morton Grove, a Chicago suburb. Small world.
We spent almost three weeks in Moscow while my parents got the various additional papers they needed. Natalie and I roamed around with Mikey or went sightseeing with our parents.
It was our first time in Moscow, and since we didn`t plan on coming back, we toured its famous places, like Lenin`s Tomb in Red Square and the Kremlin. It seemed like every other person in Red Square was a cop.
There were long lines for Lenin`s Tomb. No way to get in there, so we went into GUM, the department store across the square from it. Long lines there, too. They had a lot more variety in Moscow shops, but a lot more people were trying to buy the stuff. My father found a shoe sale going on and got himself a new pair for America.
One day we all went by taxi to the American Embassy. I got real scared because when we got out in front of the building, Soviet guards in gray uniforms ran up to us like big watchdogs, shouting, ”Dokumenti! Dokumenti!” My father pulled out the special papers we`d been given and shoved them at these guys. They kept yelling, ”What are you doing here?”
My father yelled back while we huddled around him. My mother was as scared as we were.
They checked everything for about 10 minutes, then waved us in: ”Okay, okay, go! Go!”
We hustled through an archway in the building, and then there were some American security guards there. They barely looked at us. I guess they figured that if the Soviet guards had let us through, there was no reason to check us out. We went up into the consulate rooms on the first floor and waited for about two hours.
It would have been just one more boring wait, except this was the first time I had a look at a piece of America. First thing I saw was a big American flag. I liked the colors and the stripes.
There were magazines in English that I couldn`t read, but some had a lot of pictures, and I spent most of the time staring at them, trying to figure out what America must be like. I saw that America didn`t look like Mars. In fact, it looked like a place I could live with.
When we left, the Soviet guards just kind of scowled as we walked out.
After three weeks we headed for the airport. No more waiting around. This was the real thing.
At the ticket counter, my father handed over all his documents, and the officials went through them with angry faces. Then we went to customs, where agents opened all the bags and dumped everything out. They even took my father and mother off to separate little rooms and strip-searched them, to see if they were trying to smuggle anything out of the country. The agents set aside a bunch of things they wouldn`t let us take.
For example, we all were wearing gold rings, and Natalie and my mother had women`s gold watches and gold earrings as well. The idea was to try to get as much gold to America as we could, to make things a little easier for us there, and also to have some presents for Aunt Anastasia and Aunt Maria. Nice idea. But the customs agents wouldn`t let any of the gold through. Here`s where the neighbor came in. He took the jewelry back to Uncle Dmitri in Sambir.
Next stop: Passport Control, where KGB border guards, the ”Green Hats,” gave our passports a real going over. This was scary. Standing in little booths, they took our passports and just stared for 10 minutes apiece at them. They finally stamped a lot of papers and shoved them all back at us.
We spent some time in a waiting room and then boarded a bus to go to the plane. There were guards all around, like we were criminals headed for prison or they expected spies to attack the airport. But they just looked at us as we were driven out to a big white jet with red and green stripes and got aboard. It was an Alitalia plane, not Aeroflot. It turned out we were going to Rome before America.
Since I`d never flown before, it didn`t make any difference to me what airline it was or where we were going. When we took off, I felt so strange I thought I would throw up.
I looked out as the land fell away. Then we were in thick clouds. After a long time we were up above them, and the sun shone brightly. I felt bewilderment, fright and joy all at the same time.
It was Nov. 25, 1979. I was with my family, and it was dopobachenya, Soyuz-goodbye, Soviet Union!
Italy was real interesting but real dirty: garbage in the streets, papers and trash flying all over. I thought it was a lot dirtier than Moscow. But everyone had a car, the clothing was a lot nicer, the stores were crammed with things. The restaurants didn`t mind having customers. Despite the dirt, people were living better. Explain that one, I said to myself.
