The story of believers hiding in the basement of the US embassy in Moscow

October 7, 2010 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

An article by Lev Simkin about believers who sheltered in the basement of the American embassy in Moscow for five years, seeking asylum in the USA from persecution of their faith in the USSR, was published in the magazine “Znamya” 2010, No. 7.

About the author | Lev Semyonovich Simkin — Doctor of Law, Professor, specialist in the legal regulation of church-state relations, author of a number of scholarly works and the story collection “Socialism with a Legal Personality” (Moscow: Spas, 2009). In “Znamya” his article “Jurors at the End of the Beginning” appeared. — 1993, No. 5.

Lev Simkin

Embassy Story

Characters

For some reason this passed me by. And indeed, whoever I ask, no one can remember a thing. Hazy recollections, something about some sectarians living in the American embassy. But for five whole years — that couldn’t have happened.

The only clear mention of what took place can be found in L.M. Alekseeva’s book History of Dissent in the USSR1: “… members of the Pentecostal families Vashchenko and Chmykhalov from Chernogorsk burst into the American embassy in Moscow, hoping that their direct testimony to American diplomats would reach ‘their’ president and that he would help these families and their fellow believers obtain permission to emigrate. However, closeness in faith to the President of the USA (Jimmy Carter. — L.S.) helped only in that, when persuasion to leave the embassy failed, the Pentecostals were not put out on the street into the hands of the KGB, as happens with such ‘visitors’ to embassies of free countries in Moscow, but were given a room in the basement, where they spent five years in voluntary confinement.”

Surprisingly, almost nothing turned up on the Internet; I found the names of the embassy stayers only with great difficulty, and exclusively in English transliteration. The only valuable thing I managed to discover on the Web was a video interview with Avgustina Vasilyevna Vashchenko, made by the American Christian TV program “Ugol-TV.”

“…We went through the archway (of the U.S. embassy building. — L.S.), and my son remained outside on the other side; they stopped him, he was carrying a suitcase with our things. The last we saw, they had knocked him down and were beating him. We ask the consul: find out about our son. He calls, and the answer is — nobody has detained anyone.

Then we declared that we would not come out until our son was brought. We understood, of course, that as soon as we came out we would be arrested.

…The consul says to my master (husband. — L.S.):

— Well, what did you come here for?

— God sent me.

— And how long are you going to sit here?

— Well, as soon as He says — go home, I will go.

He found this funny. We can’t, he says, start a war with Russia on account of you.“

I imagined how one summer’s day (it was June 27, 1978) eight people — a man and two middle-aged women, three girls and two lads — were walking along the Garden Ring. They must have stood out in the smart Moscow crowd with their modest clothes; provincials were especially noticeable back then. The policeman in his booth by the American embassy, sizing them up, took them for ordinary “guests of the capital” and so missed how, on reaching the arch, they all rushed into it as one. Only one of the boys, who lagged behind because of the heavy suitcase, was tripped up and prevented from entering foreign territory. He was taken away, and they began waiting for the Americans themselves to turn the uninvited guests out. The wait stretched into years.

Finding myself in Washington on a research fellowship, I discovered a multitude of press publications and some archival documents about this event. I tracked down Avgustina Vasilyevna herself and wearied her with questions. Her family tried to dissuade her from being frank with a stranger, probably an emissary of the KGB or whatever they call it there now. At first other people connected with the incident, from among her fellow believers, were also sparing in their words — the passing years had not erased the Soviet-era fears. But gradually they opened up (they wanted to speak out), and from the fragments I got, a kind of puzzle came together, albeit with some missing pieces, still, it seems, more or less complete and reliable.

To begin with, let me give a list of the main characters in that drama, who are also the performers of their roles. In time, actors may perhaps act it out, not soon, of course, not before “sectarian” ceases to be a bad word among us and the audience is capable of feeling sympathy for them. So:

Pyotr and Avgustina Vashchenko, husband and wife

Lidiya, Lyubov and Liliya, their daughters

Mariya Chmykhalova

Timofey, her son.

Of those who did not get into the embassy but play an important part in the plot —

Pavel and Anna Vashchenko, Pyotr’s parents

Khariton Vashchenko, Pyotr’s full brother

Grigory Vashchenko, Pyotr’s cousin

Yan, Alexander, and the other, younger children of Pyotr and Avgustina.

“What is this unhappy Stunda?”

The Vashchenko family is hereditary, if one may put it so, sectarians. Pavel Antonovich Vashchenko became a Baptist in the First World War, in German captivity, on a farm in Austria.

Russian evangelicals were called Stundists. This name was based on the study (from the German Stunde — “hour”) of the Bible; study circles appeared in both urban and peasant environments.

“What is this unhappy Stunda? A few Russian workers toiling for German colonists realized that Germans lived better than Russians, and that this was because they had a different order. Pastors who happened to be there explained that these better ways were because the faith is different2.”

However disparaging these words of Dostoevsky may sound, in a way they are not far from the truth. Proof of that is the two thousand Russian soldiers of the First World War who returned from German captivity as converted evangelicals3. The prisoners saw a well-ordered European way of life and naturally linked the differences in living standards with religion. The prosperity of bourgeois Europe turned out to be founded upon a different attitude to work, and that attitude was laid down in the era of the Reformation — the great Protestant ethic.

In 1927, Pavel Antonovich with his family, including the one-year-old Pyotr, set off from Ukraine to Siberia. Soon his brother’s family joined him. With him were seven children, among them his son Grigory, a year younger than Pyotr, who later played an important role in the family history. His mother Fekla was a fervent believer, loved to sing hymns, and one fine day experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in unknown tongues.

Here a brief explanation is unavoidable. There was no Reformation in Russia, and the role of Protestants in a certain sense fell to the lot of the conservative Old Believers and those who broke away from Orthodoxy, the Khristovovers (Khlysts) and other sectarians. They, like Western Protestants, rejected the ritualism of the traditional church, but, unlike them, moved toward “spiritual Christianity,” unconstrained by anything, even Holy Scripture. Each considered himself entitled to turn directly to God without intermediaries in the form of the church and priesthood.

In the 19th century, Baptism came to Russia, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism. Evangelical Christian Pentecostals professed the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which, as happened on the Day of Pentecost with the apostles, descends upon the souls of believers and teaches them other tongues. Something similar was encountered among Russian mystical sects with their faith in prophecies, raptures, and the descent of the Spirit. The foreign faith converged with the passionate Russian striving to escape from formal religion to “pure” spirituality—for “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6).

…In 1931, collectivization reached Siberia. Pavel called it nothing short of robbery. As a “religious person,” they stripped him of his voting rights and at the same time “dekulakized” him, confiscating food supplies, grain, and indeed everything that was in the house. His brother, fortunately, was not touched. The horse that remained with him was harnessed to a cart, they loaded their belongings, and set off, without documents, deeper into Siberia. They traveled for two years, and along the way each family lost one child. They settled in the south of Krasnoyarsk Krai, in Gorlovka, then in Chernogorsk, and lived there for the rest of their lives. Only two years did Grandpa Pavel absent himself, for a valid reason—he was in prison.

From there Pyotr went into the army. He served in the navy and in 1948 in Sovgavan he met Avgustina. At first he hid from her, a nineteen-year-old Komsomol girl, that he was a believer. Only in 1952, when they came to his parents’ home in Chernogorsk and Pyotr started working in the mine, did the girl find out that she had fallen in with Baptists. Avgustina lived in the house where Grandpa held services; there faith came to her too. With her fervor, the newly converted, as often happens, surpassed her teachers.

The Bulldozer Story

In 1954, thanks to Grigory, they all left the Baptists. In Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Grigory became acquainted with Pentecostals and, like his mother before him, experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Pyotr and Avgustina went to Anzhero-Sudzhensk, and there a Pentecostal presbyter baptized them in the river.

In Chernogorsk, the family began to gather for services separately from the Baptist community and chose Grigory as pastor. He turned out to be an outstanding preacher. At first eight families joined them, and by 1961 the number of Pentecostals in the city had grown to almost two hundred people.

Here the authorities took alarm and began to act. All sorts of things were done to them: summonses to the police and the KGB, fines for meetings of an unregistered community, comrades’ courts. There were no results; the believers continued to gather several times a week.

Archival documents have preserved reports of how citizen militiamen blocked the entrances to houses where believers gathered for prayer meetings, and then the Pentecostals changed the days and times of the meetings and began to hold them in several places at the same time. When they still could not get into the premises, they started singing psalms outside the house, on the street.

Once a notable event occurred, described more than once in human rights sources. True, the dates differ, whether it happened in 1961 or in 1971, whether in winter or in summer. But the circumstances are all described the same. A fire engine was driven up to the house where a meeting was taking place, and water from the hoses began to be sprayed into the windows.

Avgustina recalls that it was in 1962, at Easter, and when it started, the brothers shielded the window openings with their bodies. The little house was small, with only three windows. None of the believers left the meeting.

Actually, the firemen came later, and at first a bulldozer was brought and they tried to push against the wall of the house, counting on the believers coming out so as not to be crushed under the rubble. However, they did not come out, and the tractor driver’s nerves gave out.

Another time the men were forcibly dragged out of the meeting and taken one by one in the back of a truck across the fields; they returned late in the evening.

Arrests began. In 1961, Grigory was given five years under Article 227 of the just-adopted Criminal Code for “creating a group whose activity, carried out under the pretext of preaching religious doctrines, is associated with causing harm to the health of citizens.” The initiators of the new norm (it was devised specially for the Pentecostals) believed that participation in the rites of these “fanatics” leads precisely to such consequences.

However, when it came to specific cases, the evidence was rather weak. Recently an archival document prepared in 1963 by the KGB directorate for the Khakass Autonomous Oblast has been published: “Many of the Pentecostal sectarians in Chernogorsk suffer from various kinds of illnesses, including nervous disorders. …Some of these illnesses could have arisen as a result of performing fanatical rites in the sect. However, not a single convincing criminal case confirming such a conclusion is available…”4. The document’s publisher also refers to local psychiatrists who were unable to recall clinical examples related to the Pentecostals.

The phenomenon of glossolalia as a means of communication with God was known long before Pentecostalism, but no one had ever thought of depriving people of freedom for it. As for the presence of the nervously ill among believers, it is not surprising—many of them from time immemorial have sought refuge in religion.

Nevertheless, in the early sixties in Chernogorsk, besides Grigory Vashchenko, another fifteen people were convicted for “causing harm to health.”

It was then that the community members conceived the wild and unthinkable—from the standpoint of both the authorities and the people—idea of emigrating from the USSR. In those years, no one had yet emigrated anywhere; Jews began to be let out little by little only five years later.

The First Attempt

The archives preserve information that in October 1962, Pyotr Vashchenko and his family tried to get into the Israeli embassy. Augustina does not confirm this. At first they indeed wanted to go there, but someone told them there was no Israeli embassy in Moscow (in fact, it was there until 1967), so they decided to go to the American one.

They arrived in Moscow and saw for the first time that building with an arch on the Garden Ring, with which so much would later be connected. It looked like an ordinary Stalin-era apartment building, and indeed it was, until 1953 when it was turned over to the embassy.

A policeman stopped them to check documents; at that moment a car drove up to the arch and stopped, and Augustina rushed to it.

“Do you work at the embassy?” she asked the driver, intending to hand him a letter she had prepared in advance, but the policeman pushed her aside.

They were taken and brought before the procurator of Moscow’s Kuybyshev District. Augustina remembered his first question to Pyotr: “So, do you have two wives?” With them was the wife of Pyotr’s brother Khariton. Then the procurator said that in America they would have a life under a fence. Pyotr answered: God gave us our direction, and we will not turn back from it.

They were put on a train, given an escort from the security organs, and returned to Abakan. From there, in a smoke-filled Black Maria, they were taken to Chernogorsk, and a local KGB man by the name of Ikonnikov mocked them: “You ran and fell to your knees before the Americans, and they didn’t even want to see you.” He also told Pyotr that if he found an American spy-parachutist in the taiga, he would surely hide him. Let me remind you, this happened a little over a year after the plane with the spy-pilot Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk.

In December 1962, Pyotr was arrested on his way home from work at the mine. Grigory at that point had already been in prison for almost two years. His wife went to visit him and found him emaciated from hunger. Returning home, she told everyone that Grigory might not live to the end of his term. All this served as a spur for a new trip to Moscow.

The Second Attempt

On December 29, 1962, relatives of the arrested Pentecostals—fourteen adult members of the community, taking eighteen children with them—set out for Moscow to complain. They chose the American embassy as the addressee of their complaints.

The Vashchenko family was widely represented; they even took the grandfather and grandmother—Pavel and Anna. The delegation was headed by Pyotr’s brother Khariton, who had initiated the preparation of a letter about the persecution of believers. However, for some reason the KGB considered the seventy-five-year-old Pavel Antonovich the mastermind. According to archival materials, despite his advanced age and thus his invulnerability to judicial prosecution, he actively influenced the group of “extremists.”

Note the words about the “invulnerability” of an elderly man—the Chekists of the early sixties respected old age. Yet not long before, in the fifties, they did not distinguish between old and young. For example, in the Khmelnitsky (then Kamenets-Podolsk) region, all Pentecostals were swept up in their entirety (in other regions only preachers were taken), regardless of age. When old men and women were given twenty-five years in prison (tried for anti-Soviet propaganda), the accused would smile and thank the judges for adding years of life they did not expect to live5.

…The time for the trip—December—was not chosen by chance by the Chernogorsk believers; the organs overlooked their departure, apparently preparing for the New Year. They gathered in small groups at the railway station, boarded the train, and arrived in Moscow on January 3.

From Kazansky Station they went out onto the Garden Ring, reached Uprising Square, and approached the familiar arch. They struck up a conversation with an unsuspecting policeman. While one of them carried on a leisurely talk, the others slipped through.

The Americans were apparently taken aback by such a numerous visit. Our people, it seems, were no less flustered. Augustina insists that first the American ambassador met with the Chernogorsk believers, and then “Minister Kuznetsov arrived at the embassy with a retinue of seven or eight assistants.”

The ambassador at that time was Foy Kohler, appointed to Moscow in October 1962, on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis; I know nothing else noteworthy about him. But even less is known about “Minister Kuznetsov,” that is exactly how this figure appears in the literature about the “Siberian Seven.” Most likely, it referred to Vasily Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, at that time the first deputy minister of foreign affairs. A completely forgotten figure.

Meanwhile, he subsequently headed the Soviet state three times, albeit for short periods. This happened during vacancies caused by the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. The fact is that Kuznetsov had held the post of First Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR since 1977. This post—first deputy chairman—was introduced immediately after the adoption of the Brezhnev Constitution, when Brezhnev became de jure head of the Soviet Union; someone was needed to handle current affairs in the Supreme Soviet. And the former chairman of the Presidium, Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny, was quietly driven out. The people did not notice this; no one stirred, as if he had never been there.

But let us return to the events of that January day. The visitors asked the Americans for political asylum. They told their story, and then, in Kuznetsov’s presence, repeated the Chernogorsk events. He said he hadn’t known about the fire hoses and the rest, but would certainly look into it, and promised to set up a commission. According to Avgustina, he even apologized to the Americans, saying he had no idea why it had happened. In the Soviet Union, the “minister” assured them, religious freedom was guaranteed for everyone. But if they still wanted to emigrate, they would have to complete all the necessary paperwork in Chernogorsk. No one would lay a finger on them.

The guests shouted, “We don’t believe you.” Pavel Antonovich added, “They will kill us.” But the ambassador explained that they could not be granted political asylum in any case, and they were persuaded to leave.

They were put on a bus and taken to Kursky Railway Station. There, in some room, many important people gathered, as Avgustina put it. She especially remembered one man who immediately began to scold them: you are Soviet people and you come to the Americans, our enemies, to complain. You ought to be put in prison for that.

After the lectures, return tickets were bought for them, and the KGB man escorting them told the conductor, “Don’t open the carriage doors; they’re crazy.” In Abakan, a bus was brought up to the station; the same Ikonnikov, who had missed their departure and was therefore especially angry with them, was waiting.

The promises were not kept. Three months later Khariton was arrested. But before that there was one more, a third attempt.

Khariton had blazed a trail there

That’s what Avgustina said, mentioning the next trip, which took place in March of that same year, 1963. Not waiting for results from the previous trip, Khariton with his wife and Avgustina with six-year-old Vera flew to Moscow. This time they couldn’t approach the embassy unnoticed, so they lay in wait for one of the American diplomats and approached him as he was coming out of the barbershop opposite the embassy. They easily identified him, but how he recognized them was at first a mystery to me.

Avgustina revealed the secret: “By that time, everyone at the embassy knew us by sight.” The diplomat arranged a meeting with them at the Izmaylovskaya metro station. There, under the statue of a World War II partisan, they gave him papers, more requests for exit. The whole way, the KGB men silently followed them, but did not interfere with the meeting.

Khariton then went to a reception at the Foreign Ministry to ask for emigration; there they advised him to go home — your matter must be decided in Chernogorsk.

The women returned right away. At Krasnoyarsk airport they were met and taken in for interrogation. The same thing happened in Abakan when they flew in. They were thrown out of the local KGB office in the evening, when buses to Chernogorsk were no longer running. The hotel was full, so they slept at the station.

On March 21, 1963, Pyotr was sentenced to two years, Khariton to five.

Schism

After the trip of the thirty-two to Moscow, the local officials were corrected. A commission from the Council for Religious Affairs came to Khakassia and gave the local officials a mild scolding for the “administrative overreach” they had allowed.

“Well, they overdid it in Chernogorsk,” N., who was a lecturer for the “Znanie” Society in Krasnoyarsk in those years, told me. “They were corrected. But if it were up to anyone, those people had completely lost all shame — they refused to vote, wouldn’t send their children to school, hung an American flag in their yard.”

We will talk about the children and the American flag later. As for the authorities’ reaction, at that moment they changed tactics, initiating a schism in the Pentecostal community. Grigory and three others from among those imprisoned were released early from the camp.

To describe the subsequent events, I will refer to the book by John Pollock, who visited the American embassy in Moscow in those years6. His work is based on interviews with the prisoners and, more importantly, on their own handwritten materials recounting their life “before the embassy.”

John Pollock, quoting Pyotr’s notes, writes that they were released on condition. They promised to put their church in order and to prevent any new appeals to the embassy that would disgrace Soviet power. As a result, “at the instigation of Satan” the community split.

It is hardly likely, of course, that it was exactly as Pyotr saw it. Nevertheless, Grigory suggested to his uncle Pavel Antonovich that he and his followers hold worship services separately. “So as not to confuse the others,” Avgustina recalled his words. The core of those who separated were those who had traveled to Moscow.

Other church members were against them, because they wanted reconciliation with the authorities7 — this is Lydia Vashchenko’s explanation, from her published memoirs.

Those who separated believed it was necessary to fight the evil that opposed good, that prevented the free exercise of religious rites as Scripture requires. And to fight by any means necessary. Grigory, however, at that time thought it possible to use only legal means of opposing the authorities.

On the question of emigration, however, oddly enough, they seemed to have no disagreement with the “moderate” majority. All the others also wanted to leave; they simply did not dare to flee to the embassy. The “emigrants” were in the minority, but for all that they remained flesh of the flesh of the rest of the believers. Outcasts among outcasts, they increasingly withdrew into a narrow circle of like-minded people.

It has also been said that the split was caused by disagreements over the interpretation of religious dogmas. Pyotr and Khariton, unlike Grigory, believed that Salvation awaited not everyone, but only the most fervent believers.

Pastor Sergei Ivanovich Vashchenko from Sayanogorsk, their grandnephew, told me that they did not attend church, kept to themselves, because they considered the rest of the community too liberal.

Let me jump ahead. In 1981, when the Vashchenkos had already been passing their third year in the embassy, Grigory emigrated to West Germany — his wife had relatives there. I was told, citing the words of a State Department official from that time, that his departure was helped by Americans who had made arrangements with the German government. The idea was that he could send an invitation in his own name for Pyotr Vashchenko’s family. That would help the Soviets save face — everyone would see that they had not given in to the Americans, but had let the Pentecostals go to another country. And the American embarrassment could end — as things stood, the sufferers for the faith were on their territory, and the Americans could do nothing for them.

But they could not come to an agreement with Grigory Vashchenko. Having arrived in Germany, he said that Pyotr Vashchenko held a different view on one of the biblical doctrines and therefore must repent of it before he would sign any documents.

Lydia

Lydia believes that the idea of emigration was suggested to her father by education officials who said: “If you want your children to attend religious schools, you’d better emigrate.” Avgustina, on the other hand, relates that Pyotr also received a revelation: “You will not find protection here, but there My people are.” “There” meant America, but at first any other “non-communist” country would have done.

Anyway, it all began in 1962 when Pyotr and Avgustina were deprived of parental rights to their three older daughters because of the parents’ refusal to send them to school. Khariton and others followed their example. After the winter holidays of 1962, four families made that decision, and eight children stopped attending classes.

Pyotr especially disliked history lessons devoted to the Communist Party. Avgustina is still indignant that children at school were forced to sing worldly songs. And Lydia remembers how she refused to sing the Internationale. After all, it contains blasphemous words: no one will grant us deliverance, not god, nor tsar, nor hero…

Despite the parents’ written statement, the Vashchenko daughters were not excused from singing lessons. But they still refused to sing songs that contained words about Lenin and the Party.

“Father was a free man,” Lydia recalls, “ready to fight for freedom. He wrote to the Ministry of Education and received a reply — we have one program for everyone.”

“Your children are holding the class back,” they were told at school. And they added: if you don’t like it, leave.” Notice that those words were spoken for the first time, and not by them.

Lydia relates that she herself refused to go to school. Her classmates insulted her and even beat her. In 1961, at the age of ten, the girl laid her head on the rails, but railway workers discovered her and saved her.

At the age of eleven she was placed in a children’s reception center in Abakan. This happened after the Vashchenko children were taken out of school to be taught at home themselves. They were taught by a neighbor, Maria Chmykhalova, and they also hid at her place when people came for them. In the end the girls were found — according to Lydia’s recollections, ten militiamen came for them. “Father told us to pray before the journey, we prayed, and they took us away…”

From the children’s reception center in Abakan, father stole Lydia, but she was soon returned. Then they took her to a boarding school in Achinsk, this time for a long stay.

Avgustina: “We didn’t know where the children were. We searched. We feared the worst. Suddenly a letter came from a cook at the Achinsk boarding school — your children are here with us, they are crying. That same evening we went there, they allowed us a visit with the children, in the presence of a teacher. They warned us — no talking about God.”

The children spent six years there, far from their mother. However, during that time she gave birth to more children — she and Pyotr had thirteen children in all. And not everything at the boarding school was so bad. For instance, Lydia spent a whole month at a Young Pioneer camp on the Black Sea. In 1968 she turned seventeen and was allowed to go home.

Moscow-1968

Pyotr recalled in his manuscript that in May 1968 he was summoned to the city executive committee.8 There was a Moscow guest there from the Council for Religious Affairs. I will not name him, because I am not entirely sure of the accuracy of words passed on secondhand.

An experienced lawyer, though a former militia worker, he hardly spoke as bluntly as Pyotr Vashchenko transmitted it, and later John Pollock. Supposedly he demanded that Pyotr break with his religion and threatened: “It doesn’t matter if you read the Bible or not, we’ll lock you up all the same.”

But something similar may well have been said, and coming from an official of the Council, so closely connected to the KGB, those words sounded very serious indeed.

Pyotr sold a cow and with the money bought tickets to Moscow for himself and four daughters, aged from twelve to seventeen. As Lydia recalls,9 on May 29 she and her father were detained by militiamen as they approached the embassy, while the younger girls broke through. However, the Americans quickly turned them out. The father was arrested, and the daughters were sent to a children’s reception center.

The father, as soon as he was released from arrest, set off home and on June 18, 1968 returned to Moscow together with the mother. This time they managed, after breaking through a militia cordon, to enter the embassy and even to speak with the ambassador himself.

Llewellyn Thompson, an experienced diplomat, served twice as ambassador in Moscow; his tenure spanned the U-2 spy plane incident with pilot Powers, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Vietnam War. The first question put to him was, where are our children, they haven’t returned yet. The ambassador made a call somewhere and found out that Lida and her sisters were still in the Danilovsky children’s reception center.

As for emigration, he advised them to find an American sponsor who could send them an invitation to the USA. One of the consular staff members present at the conversation immediately volunteered to serve as such, and they and the guests filled out the necessary paperwork.

Their parents were arrested as soon as they left the embassy. At the 11th police station, the American invitation and accompanying papers were confiscated. Pyotr was placed in mental hospital No. 15 on Kashirka, and for the rest of his life he recalled with horror how he swallowed a bunch of colorful pills and what happened to him afterwards. The doctors’ words stuck in his memory: opposing Soviet power is like beating your head against a wall. Those who behave that way are crazy, and that’s why you are here.

Avgustina was put in a temporary detention facility and had her head shaved. On September 20, 1968, for resisting a lawful order of a government representative (meaning the break‑in at the embassy), she was sentenced to a full three years of imprisonment.

The warden of the Mozhaiskaya women’s correctional labor colony talked to each new inmate. Reading the summary of the charge in the verdict, he laughed — how could she have beaten up a policeman? But then he grew serious when he got to the three‑year term — for that mild article of the Criminal Code, such a maximum sentence was an exception.

The colony where Avgustina ended up was considered a model institution. Foreigners were brought there — to show how wonderfully Soviet prisoners lived. I happened to visit it while accompanying foreign guests of the ministry where I worked. That was already in the seventies, a few years after Vashchenko’s release. I remember the women in the sewing workshop, following us men from the outside with dull eyes; they sewed underwear for the entire GULAG.

The permanent warden of the institution struck me as a not‑unkind man, which matches Avgustina’s description. Though I may be biased — he sat at a table with me and kept pouring vodka.

As for Pyotr, after a month and a half he was returned to Chernogorsk and sentenced there to a year for violating the passport regime. Back in March 1965, he had sent his (internal) passport to the OVIR in order to obtain a foreign passport with an exit visa, which no one was going to give him. He refused to take it back. Then all the “separated ones” came to the city council with a collective application to register the community and open a school for the children of believers. After being refused, they wrote a letter to Brezhnev asking to be stripped of their citizenship and allowed to leave for Israel.

Aaron

At seventeen, Lida was released from the boarding school and went to visit her mother and then her father, though their camps were thousands of kilometers apart. Then she gathered her younger brothers and sisters from neighbors who had taken them in. The grandparents were old, couldn’t handle them, but she could.

Lidiya loved children. In 1975, while working at a maternity hospital, she took home a sick seven‑month‑old baby who had been abandoned by a young mother — in Avgustina’s words, a woman who had gotten the child from a visiting man. Lidiya decided to adopt him and named him Aaron. She completed all the paperwork, found a woman from whom she could get breast milk.

Three months later, when the authorities found out about it, the police started coming to her demanding that she give up the child. Soon legal grounds appeared for that: the biological mother was persuaded to demand him back. The house was stormed and the child was taken.

Pyotr and Avgustina again went to Moscow. This was on September 5, 1975. Once again, they submitted their documents at the embassy and immediately returned. They were gone for two weeks. They came back and began to search for Aaron, went to the city executive committee, where they learned that he had died and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Before the Departure

This time they had a properly issued invitation, received on April 20, 1978, from a Presbyterian pastor in Alabama, the Reverend Cecil Williamson Jr. By the way, the invitation had taken four months to arrive by mail. Pyotr at first thought it was the same consular officer who had written them the first invitation ten years earlier, but it was not.

The pastor learned about the situation from the Tolstoy Foundation and decided to act. It must be said that he did not stop there; later he established an organization in his city, Selma, Alabama, called SAVE (which means “to save” in English). This acronym stood for Society of Americans for Vashchenko Emigration. The committee formed there to provide possible assistance for their move to the U.S. included two congressmen, a senator, and a rabbi. In America, voters take religious freedom seriously — the state governor also became a member of the committee.

Lidiya’s account: “After three days of prayer and fasting, Mama and I decided to go again. Papa objected. He was afraid of ending up in the mental hospital again. They had told him that next time he would stay there forever. What to do? We decided to trust to lot. The parents and the older children wrote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on pieces of paper, put them in a hat, and Father drew ‘yes.’ It was decided that six would go — Papa, Mama, me, Lyubov, Liliya, and Yan. We did not intend to ask for asylum; we only wanted to remind them of our existence and move our case forward a little.”

Maria Chmykhalova asked to be taken along with her sixteen‑year‑old son Timofey, who, like Yan, was soon to receive his conscription certificate from the military commissariat. This was an important circumstance, since the community members considered military service contrary to their Christian convictions.

Timofey, whom I managed to locate, recalled: “Father and Mother were taken from home before my eyes when I was seven. The family knelt down, prayed, and then the parents were led away.”

In 1969, they were tried for violating the passport regime. Maria received a suspended sentence for refusing to consider herself a Soviet citizen. Her husband got a full year, the maximum the article of the Criminal Code provided. Timofey remembered how at the trial he hid under a bench with the adults, and how he traveled with his mother to visit his father in the camp, where there was a dense forest.

…Before leaving for Moscow, they again prayed and fasted. To avoid attracting neighbors’ attention, they left in small groups, the girls on foot, the boys on a motorcycle. They took different roads to the station. For secrecy.

The First Month in the Embassy

From the very first day, June 27, 1978, consular section staff urged them daily to leave the embassy. Rank-and-file staff. Ambassador Malcolm Toon, acting, apparently, according to instructions, as John Pollock believes, did not meet with them.

I find Timofei Chmykhalov’s supposition more likely. When I asked why they weren’t simply thrown out right away, he replied: “They didn’t turn us over because at that moment neither the ambassador nor his deputy was on site.” That sounds closer to the truth. Apparently, no one still in the embassy had the authority, or no one wanted to take responsibility.

Our Foreign Ministry refused to discuss the matter of the uninvited embassy visitors with the Americans as long as they remained inside the embassy. Let them go back to Chernogorsk and submit their paperwork through the normal channels.

Where were they at first? Sitting on sofas in the waiting area of the consular section. They worried about Yan, who hadn’t managed to slip into the archway in time because of a heavy suitcase. Pyotr had a Bible with him, and they read it. They ate nothing for the first five days. They did drink water, though — from the tap, in the restroom.

Augustina: “…At first the Americans didn’t want to help us. ‘Go on,’ they said, but we refused — we won’t leave. We sat on the sofas for a month and a half. Right in the consular section. People come to submit their paperwork, and there we are, sitting. We washed in the restroom, did our laundry.

We weren’t fed for five days. Water was left out, but no food. Then American families started feeding us. Each one brought whatever they had. One family brought ‘Parmesan’; we turned up our noses at it, said it smelled like unwashed socks.

They wanted to throw us out. We answered: ‘We’re not going anywhere. Throw us out like Jonah — grab us by the hands and feet and heave us. They threw him into the water, and you — just throw us out. We won’t go ourselves.’”

As soon as the news spread around the world, foreign correspondents descended on them, interviewing them.

On July 10, they were allowed to phone Chernogorsk. At the Vashchenko home, Pyotr’s parents, who were well into their eighties, had remained, along with ten children, the youngest four years old. When they would return home five years later, that nine-year-old boy would not recognize his parents.

They spoke with the eldest of the daughters who stayed behind, Vera. She said Yan had returned from Moscow beaten, his kidneys hurt. And she added: “Don’t leave the embassy! Whatever happens. If that’s what they did to him, what will they do to you?”

As Lidia recalled, the consular staff, on their way to work in the morning, would hold their noses when they walked past them — the visitors hadn’t washed for many days. Visitors to the section also gave them a wide berth. Those were Soviet citizens holding a foreign passport with that treasured exit visa in it.

On the morning of August 26, an officer from the political section, together with one of the consular staff and escorted by Marines, came and told them to pack their things and leave the embassy by evening. They replied that they would not go on their own. The next day the same thing happened. And on the third day.

They prepared for the worst; they knew a Black Maria was waiting around the corner, but to their surprise, they were all moved to the basement. There they were given a separate room, or even, as people used to say, a small apartment where couriers had previously stayed. Two beds, a refrigerator, a stove, and “combined amenities” — a shower with a toilet.

Augustina: “We wrote a letter to Carter, and after that they gave us a room where the ‘Marines’ (marines — L.S.) slept. Two cots, a refrigerator. We slept two to a bed, the rest on the floor.”

That same day, the vice-consul sent a letter to a pastor in Alabama who was worried about the fate of the Russians he had invited. The pastor was assured that they could stay in the embassy as long as they wanted.

Lidia: “The only window, with bars on it, looked out onto Tchaikovsky Street — that is, onto the side where the police guarding the embassy kept watch. The police kept peering into it. At night they deliberately clanged something, talked loudly, wouldn’t let us sleep.”

Augustina: “The police knocked on the window and shouted: get up and pray, you dogs.”

Timofei: “The worst thing was hearing the cries for help from those who tried to break into the embassy following in our footsteps. They were snatched literally before our eyes. I immediately imagined their subsequent fate. When I was nine, my mother and I visited my father in the camp. Those scenes are still before my eyes.”

A consular section employee would bring them groceries from a Moscow store. They lived in isolation — no newspapers, no radio. They were not let out into the fresh air. They decided to complain to President Carter, and after that they were allowed a fifteen-minute walk in the embassy garden, and were provided with outerwear.

Encouraged by this success, they wrote a letter to the Pope, and they were allowed to attend the Sunday services of the embassy’s Catholic community. “The Word of God — it remains the same even in a foreign tongue,” said Augustina.

But it may also have been connected to the fact that in 1979 the American press began to criticize the State Department for the conditions in which the famous Siberian Seven were being held.

“He didn’t advise going”

Augustina noticed that on their first visit, in 1963, the entire service staff of the embassy had been American. Now, Russian cleaning women and security guards worked there.

The group in the embassy connected this circumstance with their suspicion that they were being watched by two sides at once — not only by the Americans, but also by the Russians. And not without reason.

Lidia’s book describes a curious episode. Once, they had visitors. Two Pentecostals — Boris Perchatkin and Vladimir Stepanov — came all the way from the Far East to urge them to leave the embassy. It was obvious they acted under pressure from the KGB. After loud pleas, Perchatkin said in a whisper: don’t give up, you are brave people and you give all of us hope.

This advice, in turn, reminded me of a story I once heard (possibly apocryphal) about how Stalin sent Korney Chukovsky to Finland to persuade Ilya Repin, who was living there, to return to his homeland. Upon his return, Chukovsky reported to the Kremlin that he had failed to carry out the Party’s assignment. Only years later, in Repin’s published diaries, an entry came to light: “Korney came. He didn’t advise going.”

One of the pioneers of the Exodus, Yevgeny Bresenden, describes the same story somewhat differently. Boris Perchatkin told him that he had written the advice not to leave the embassy on a scrap of paper and secretly passed it to someone in the Vashchenko family. But, one way or another, the main thing is that the story had a continuation.

When the visitors returned, Perchatkin was summoned where needed and reproached: you cheated us with our own money. Apparently, they were watching their meeting in the embassy not only from that side but also from this one. “Your money’s down the drain,” Perchatkin answered defiantly.

Alas, he who laughs last laughs best. Others had the last laugh. Soon the joker was given a hunting knife, and with the help of witness testimony he was locked up for illegal possession of weapons.

House Two

So, Big Brother was watching them; I would even say two Big Brothers at once. Augustina says they lived as if in a glass house, their whole room was transparent and bugged. No private life at all. And she adds, lowering her eyes: I don’t know how my husband endured it.

Two families lived in one room for five years. Twenty-four hours every single day. Three adults, all over forty, three young women in their early twenties and a youth. Let the reader imagine the rest. The author knows some unpleasant details that have come to light, but I do not wish to repeat them.

The participants themselves mention quarrels that occurred between them and, above all, hours of oppressive silence when everyone tried not to look at one another.

Augustina, in conversation with me, repeated more than once: “How could all this have been endured without God’s help!”

No One Wanted to Give In

A public movement in support of the Vashchenkos and the Chmykhalovs arose in the United States. In the fall of 1978, Soviet diplomats asked the State Department to stop the demonstrations outside the Soviet embassy in Washington. The U.S. President received fifteen thousand letters with questions about the fate of the sit-in participants; journalists were interested in it at nearly every White House press conference.

Choosing “quiet diplomacy,” Carter twice sent Dr. Olin Robison, president of Middlebury College, to Moscow on confidential visits to negotiate their receiving exit visas. What he achieved was only an oral promise not to persecute them if they returned to Chernogorsk.

Many believers of various faiths wanted to help them, but the embassy categorically refused to accept financial assistance in their name. Two American tourists in Moscow, unacquainted with each other, offered to marry the Vashchenko sisters in order to get them out. But the marriage would have been invalid under Soviet law.

They were visited by American senators and congressmen. On September 20, 1979, Ambassador Toon met with them for the first time. He personally came into their room.

At that time, all who sympathized with the Vashchenkos pinned their hopes on the Moscow Olympics. Pollock concluded his book with the following exclamation: “It is unthinkable that in July 1980, in Moscow, under the symbol of a smiling bear cub, the Olympic Games will take place, while in the very heart of Moscow the Siberian Seven will be languishing.”10

These hopes were not destined to come true; they were put to an end by the introduction of a “limited contingent of Soviet troops” into Afghanistan.

The Brother

At that time, Alexander, the eldest son of Peter and Augustina, was in a penal colony for refusing military service. He had been tried half a year before the last breach of the embassy.

The courtroom filled with the Vashchenko family and their neighbors, all believers. At the words “All rise! The court is in session!” those present did not react. Peter explained to the judge that the Soviet court consisted of atheists, and those who believe in Christ cannot rise before them. But he still rose, but as before people, not as representatives of a godless authority.

The trial did not last long. The military commissariat representative confirmed; Sasha did not deny his guilt and explained that, as a Christian, he could not bear arms. A witness from his place of work — a transport enterprise — characterized the accused as a good worker who, however, had refused to join the Komsomol.

When the court retired to deliberate, those present began singing hymns, one after another. The judge feared possible unrest and called for police reinforcements. Alexander was sentenced to three years, as the prosecutor had requested, and was sent to Minusinsk, to the same prison where his father had been held, and then to a camp. The family visited him there on April 7, his birthday. Less than three months remained until the breach of the embassy.

Igor Guberman, later famous as the author of “gariks,” ended up in the same colony with him. In his book “Walks Around the Barracks,” he writes: “Sasha Vashchenko’s situation was aggravated by the fact that a year earlier his father and mother had broken through — literally, for they ran past the guards — into the American embassy in Moscow, asked for asylum, and were now living there, waiting for their children. … Some messengers were already coming to him, persuading him not to go with his father and mother, sometimes promising all sorts of life’s blessings, at other times openly threatening.”

Later he told how they tried to force him to sign a letter stating that he refused to emigrate if his family did leave the country.

The aforementioned Sergei Ivanovich Vashchenko recalled in conversation with me how in 1981 he talked with his cousin about the necessity of respecting all authority, whatever it might be. Authority must be recognized, any authority, including Soviet, is from God.

Such admonitions and arguments were often voiced by the “moderates” in their conversations with the “emigrants.” Usually, citing the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans, they said that resistance to authority is a sin, for there is no authority except from God, and no one is given the power to change this order; one must humbly endure privations. They, in response, also referring to Holy Scripture, said that this was the authority of the Antichrist.

But Alexander answered differently: “I am angry at the Soviet government.” And he added that he would never forget how he was shuttled from one boarding school to another since childhood, barely seeing his parents.

The Hunger Strike

The Americans had their own hierarchy, their own priorities. The Vashchenkos knew they were not at the top of the American short lists. Divided families and individual political dissidents were ahead of them. Their move from almost last to first was preceded by the following event.

In December 1981, Augustina and Lydia Vashchenko began an indefinite hunger strike, demanding permission for their family to emigrate. The father objected, but the mother said that this time she obeyed God, not him.

Augustina: “We ask God to show us what to do next. We are fasting. Then a wave started, dissidents began to hunger-strike so they could leave. But ours was not hunger, it was a fast. We fasted for thirty days, and our daughter became ill. On January 30, 1982, Lida was taken to Botkin Hospital. All eleven days she was visited there by the embassy doctor together with the consul.”

Lydia was sent home from the hospital by plane. She did not object. By that time, international publicity was so widespread that, in principle, there was no need to worry about her fate.

Solzhenitsyn himself mentioned this episode in one of his books—albeit in passing, in a polemic with his perennial opponent. He recounted how “Sakharov was doomed to become involved in yet another prolonged humiliation: in fussing over the departure for America of his stepson’s fiancée, whose marriage the latter had not managed to formalize in the rush of his own emigration… and at the age of 60 he declared the center of his highest tension, the highest risk of his life—the emigration of a girl who had never been imprisoned, never marked by any struggle, and he fasted for 16 days, and perhaps could have fasted to death. E.G. Bonner, upon arrival in Moscow, declared: ‘The victory of our hunger strike is a victory for human rights in general!’ Alas. The Pentecostal Vashchenkos naively believed that the world would defend them with the same fervor—they conducted a long family hunger strike, having already broken through into the American embassy, demanding emigration for themselves—and were deceived.”11 .

In reality, this was not quite true. Or even not true at all. It was precisely the hunger strike that brought the result they had been waiting for in vain for so long.

Moscow Tour

The noise was raised by Jane Drake, secretary of the committee to rescue the Vashchenkos from Alabama. In an old newspaper photograph—a thirty-five-year-old attractive woman with a short haircut, a housewife from Montgomery, who had dedicated five years to freeing strangers. She raised every alarm, gave interviews to newspapers, organized support campaigns for them, mailings to the American president, traveled with appeals from Americans to the Soviet embassy in Washington—and eventually reached the House of Representatives, eighty members of which finally sent a letter to Brezhnev asking him to release the confined people.

After the hunger strike was announced, in December 1981, thanks to Parade magazine, she met her clients for the first time. The magazine’s editorial office bought her and their correspondent Michael Satchell a tour to Moscow.

The tourist group had thirty Americans. Keeping to themselves, Jane and Michael, instead of the Bolshoi Theater and Moscow excursions, spent the first three days and three nights in the American embassy. The guide Svetlana expressed displeasure at their absence; for three days they played cat and mouse with her.12

The visitors immediately understood that the members of the seven were unwelcome guests in the embassy. The article describes their room, where Peter and Augustina sleep on one narrow bed, Maria on the other. The rest—on the floor, right up to the entrance door. It is emphasized that the television is not color, but black-and-white.

The atmosphere around was not the most friendly; they repeatedly heard angry remarks from the Russian embassy staff, who numbered two hundred—cleaners, drivers, mechanics, translators. The Vashchenkos did not leave the room without an escort of one of the Americans.

About Maria, it is said that she sits silently for hours on the bed, knitting sweaters, for some reason staring at the floor.

Saying goodbye, Augustina through them appealed, as if at a rally, for help to mothers all over the world: “Imagine being separated from your beloved children. My youngest son Avraam was 4 years old when I last saw him. Over 33 years of marriage, our family was together for 10 years.”

Having heard at parting the words “Don’t forget us!”, Jane and Michael walked out of the embassy directly—past the policeman—“into the cold Moscow night.”

At the airport, everyone else was passed through customs control easily, but these two were shaken down, searched, and questioned for an entire hour in a separate room. They insisted: “we are ordinary tourists.” An empty video cassette was confiscated; the real one—along with Michael’s notebook—was agreed to be carried through by two girls from the group.

Gentlemen’s Conversations

At first, I naively thought I would be buried in a great multitude of American government documents devoted to the attempts to free the Siberian Seven. But in the Library of Congress, there turned out to be very few. Here is the first of them—the record of the hearings of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugees of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held on November 19, 1981.

On the agenda was a bill (legislative proposal) on the possibility of sending them to the United States. It was warmly supported by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who reminded his colleagues (if any of them had forgotten) of the American tradition of supporting religious freedom in other countries. He reproached the State Department for not taking serious measures over three years to help the embassy occupants and, moreover, for viewing them as a burden for the American government. He was echoed by Senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa. The U.S. government cannot tolerate humiliation—he exclaimed—nor allow the Soviets to dictate what is to be done with those who stay on the territory of the American embassy.

In response, Thomas W. Simons Jr., director of the State Department’s office for the USSR, raised his objections—both legal and political in nature. The bill, he said, proceeds from the physical presence of Russians on U.S. territory, since they live in the American embassy. But it does not at all follow from this that American law can be applied on Soviet territory. Moreover, this would set a precedent, and refugees in Russia and other countries would start storming American embassies.

At that point, the discussion seemed to reach an impasse. The Senate returned to it only after the hunger strike of Augustina and Lidia, and on July 13, 1982, voted to grant them the right of permanent residence in the United States. The question of their physical relocation was no longer raised.

Another document is the protocol of a session of the House of Representatives from March 23, 1982. I was reading this for the first time and discovered to my surprise that members of the House actually refer to each other as gentlemen.

“The floor is given to the gentleman from New York, Mr. Garcia.” This gentleman began by saying a little about himself and his father, a pastor of a Pentecostal church in the South Bronx. The embassy squatters were not spies, and the only thing they wanted was religious freedom. And they deserved it. That was why he sent a letter to President Brezhnev asking for their release.

The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Smith, told how he met the seven in the Moscow embassy. As it turned out, he was not alone; others also began recalling their own meetings with them. It might have seemed that those who had not managed to visit them in Moscow were slightly ashamed.

Gentleman Smith described how he and Petr prayed together. Petr asked not only for his family but for all those in the world who suffer for their faith. “I believe in the power of prayer and believe that the Lord heard the prayer of His suffering servant,” exclaimed Smith, adding with a hint of menace: “I believe that in due time He will answer.”

Gentleman Kemp from New York reminded everyone that they had suffered not only from the Soviet government but also from the American one, which had confined them for the first two months in the embassy corridor, “without a bath or shower.”

Then they voted on Resolution No. 100, “expressing concern over the infringement of the right to emigrate of two families of believers.” All the gentlemen supported the resolution, so that it would show both the Soviet government and the rest of the world their readiness to defend religious freedom.

The Flag

After returning from Moscow, Lidia spent a whole year in Chernogorsk; it took that long to process the promised documents. She had to go on hunger strike again. The daughter starved in Chernogorsk, the mother simultaneously in Moscow. Lidia prayed fervently, asking the Lord how much longer to wait.

It was she who came up with the idea of flying the American flag from the roof. They sewed it together with the younger children under her guidance. Lidia had, of course, seen the American flag at the embassy many times, but it had completely slipped her memory how many stars it had. She decided to embroider thirteen, the number of the Vashchenko children. Here they are, eight of them, lined up in the photograph in front of the whitewashed Siberian hut by the flagpole, and behind them a foreign banner flutters high. A kind of surrealism.

Naturally, the authorities could not tolerate such groveling before a potential adversary. Immediately, men in plainclothes came to tear down the flag, which was precisely what the Vashchenkos had counted on. They really wanted to capture this scene. And, imagine, they managed to film the performance they had staged themselves. How?

In advance, they made several toy cameras out of scrap materials and handed them out to the younger children. While the adults were tearing down the flag, the children ran up from different sides, pretending to take pictures. KGB officers chased them and snatched away the toys, while Alexander managed to take several photographs.

The family twice took part in demonstrations in Chernogorsk and Krasnoyarsk with appeals to Brezhnev to let them go free. Brezhnev died, and in April 1983 Lidia, alone, was permitted to emigrate. Not to America, no—to Israel. They bought her a ticket and sent her to Vienna and then on to Tel Aviv. From there she arranged an invitation for the remaining family members.

Departure

According to information from Lyudmila Alexeyeva, American diplomats managed to obtain a firm promise that once they submitted their documents in Chernogorsk, the Vashchenko and Chmykhalov families would be given the opportunity to leave for the West. This was one of the unspoken conditions for signing the final document of the Madrid Conference.

Augustina: “When Reagan said, ‘Go home,’ the Americans wept as they saw us off, saying, ‘They’ll deceive you.’ But we didn’t care anymore.

We returned to Chernogorsk in April 1983. And when they’ll let us go, nobody knows. We go around to all the city authorities, they remain silent. They don’t know. (Here Augustina added a significant phrase: ‘they got tired of us, and we got tired of them’).

What to do? We planted potatoes, wait for the harvest. We’d have to settle in again. Suddenly they said: you must leave no later than June 24, 1983. We began to pack. We didn’t know what to do with the dog. We said we wouldn’t go without the dog; she had been with the children in our absence. They gave her a second-class train ticket too.”

I specifically asked Augustina about the dog’s later fate. The shepherd-wolf mix named Vulcan became a great traveler. He visited Europe, the Middle East, and finished his service on the American continent.

On June 29, the whole family flew to Vienna, and from there to Tel Aviv, where, according to Augustina, “a man was sent from Washington and took us to America.”

Denouement

They settled in the city of Puyallup in Washington State. Those who met the Vashchenkos right after their arrival noticed some peculiarities. Petr insisted that he had invented a certain engine that would provide the world with free energy. To refine the device, he asked to be given a workshop with a milling machine and a lathe. Death, which came in 1985, thwarted his plans. The rest are alive and well.

The children settled nearby, all are established; among them is a medical worker (as we used to call nurses in the Soviet era), an accountant, a teacher, the others are laborers. Relations with the Chmykhalovs, once they dispersed to different oceans, immediately improved.

As for whether the children believe, Augustina answered evasively: “Some go to church, some don’t.” From others I heard that not all their children are active as believers.

Timofey Chmykhalov “does not regret that his mother took him with her to the embassy. Thanks to all of them, him included, the world learned about the situation of believers in the Soviet Union. However, nothing depended on them personally—what God ordained, that came to pass. The main thing is to trust in God; our paths are sometimes mysterious, but we must rely on Him.”

And he spoke more about the divine, and didn’t go into much detail about embassy life. Mostly about how much he studied there and how many books he read. The embassy wives looked after him, taught him English and math, and prepared him for college. Though, it seems, his studies didn’t work out later — it was limited to two semesters at a Bible institute in Texas.

At first, after arriving in America, Timofey traveled around Pentecostal churches and told about the persecution of Christians by the communists. Once the Soviet Union ended, the need for that vanished. For the last sixteen years he’s been living in Oregon, working as a secretary in a hospital administration. He has six children. He’s pushing fifty, and his mom is over eighty.

…A unique, astonishing story. The more details I learned, the more I was amazed by the quirks of its characters’ personalities and the twists of their fates. And, oddly enough, the less I wanted to place accents. Our authorities behaved, of course, horribly, but the Vashchenkos, hand on heart, more than once gave them reason, disregarding the legal norms of the time. The Americans come off somewhat cleaner, but in this story they also didn’t act in the best way — at the very least, they did everything possible to get rid of the visitors.

Having satisfied my curiosity, I began to doubt whether this story even makes sense. At first glance, yes, of course — let future generations know what people endured for freedom of conscience. On the other hand, does anyone need their horrific, savage experience? After all, Varlam Shalamov spoke of the camp as a negative experience for a person — “from the first hour to the last. A person must not know, must not even hear of it…” Freedom of religion is, of course, a necessary thing, but do the sacrifices made for it justify the cost? I dare not judge.

Or perhaps there was another, mystical meaning in it? There’s so much in this story that’s mythological. Starting with the number of participants — initially eight, but in the end, as always in legends and myths, exactly seven remain — a thoroughly mystical number. Like normal heroes, they strive for another world, an embodied earthly paradise, where the dream of future bliss seems already realized — more precisely, transferred from the plane of time to the plane of space, from East to West. They face the crossing of a border between worlds, an initiation. And the nature of time they get stuck in for five long years is quite mythological — time flows, but for the seven heroes nothing changes. And so it is until the very end, when they overcome chaos and achieve victory.

…Before my eyes stands a picture — evening, a corridor in the consular section, the windows are closed, the staff has dispersed, the Siberian seven are sitting all together on the benches for visitors, Pyotr is reading the Gospel aloud, everyone listens in silence.

What arose in their eyes? What images? Perhaps those seven who will one day trumpet the end of the world? “And I saw the seven angels who stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.”

It seems that, with their strange act, they indeed heralded something important — possibly nothing other than the imminent finale of Soviet power. Let me remind you that they were released half a year after Brezhnev’s death; right then the world order of that time began to slide downhill, and the year 1983 became the beginning of its end.

1 L. Alekseeva. History of Dissent in the USSR. M., 1992.

2 F.M. Dostoevsky. Complete Collected Works. 1983 L., vol. 25, pp. 10–11.

3 Nikolai Yarygin. The Evangelical Movement in the Volga-Vyatka Region. M.: Akademichesky Proekt, 2004, p. 49.

4 A.V. Gorbatov. The State and Christians of Evangelical Faith in Siberia (1945–1970). Bulletin of the Altai State University 4–3 (60), 2008, p. 70.

5 V. Franchuk. Russia Asked the Lord for Rain. Kiev, 2002, vol. 3, p. 316.

6 John Pollock. Siberian seven. Waco Texas. 1980.

7 Lida Vashchenko with Cecil Murphy. Cry Freedom Ann Arbor, Michigan 1987. p. 35

9 Lida Vashchenko with Cecil Murphy. p. 58.

10 John Pollock. p. 261.

11 A.I. Solzhenitsyn. The Grain Fell Between Two Millstones. Essays of Exile, Part Two (1979–1982).

12 Michael Satchell. They need your help. Parade, Jan. 10, 1982.

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