Miller Trial Focuses on Soviet Pair’s Woes in U.S.

As the second espionage trial of Richard W. Miller opened in Los Angeles federal court, the focus turned first to the two Russian emigres already convicted of conspiring with the former FBI counterintelligence agent to pass secret documents to the Soviet Union.

The story told by the first prosecution witnesses last week was how the immigrant dreams of Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov turned to bitterness toward the United States--and finally to betrayal--amid the grim realities of their new life in the Russian emigre community of West Hollywood.

Court documents submitted to the jury told of the original hopes of the Ogorodnikovs after obtaining Soviet exit visas in 1973 during a relaxation of Soviet restrictions on emigration by Soviet Jews.

The Ogorodnikovs had traveled first to Vienna and then to Rome, where they applied at the U.S. Embassy for permission to immigrate to the United States with their 2-year-old son, Matvej (Matthew).

Nikolai Ogorodnikov, then 41, told of a harsh life inside the Soviet Union. He said he was the son of Soviet Jews and said the entire family had been persecuted after his father was shot to death “by Communists” in 1938.

‘Racial Discrimination’

As a boy of 11, Ogorodnikov said, he had fought the Germans on the Byelorussian Front with the Russian Army in 1943. Later, he said, he was imprisoned for four years by the Soviets for failing to return his military service revolver, serving his sentence in a labor camp in Sulikamsk.

“I left the U.S.S.R. because of the racial discrimination and persecutions which I and my family experienced there,” Ogorodnikov told U.S. officials. “I wish to be free and to live in a free country.

“One of the main aims of my leaving the Soviet Union is the desire to get rid of the Soviet authorities, which do whatever they want. During the epoch of Stalin, they killed my father. . . . That is why I beg you not to make me to recall all these tragical events.

“I ask you very much to give the opportunity to go to the U.S.A.--one of the most democratic countries in the world.”

Ogorodnikov had been a taxi driver in Kiev after he was released from the Soviet labor camp, he said. He had divorced his first wife, and he was leaving a 7-year-old daughter, Viktoria, in the Soviet Union.

His new wife, Svetlana, was then 22. She had grown up in the small town of Iefrimov near Kiev, and was working as a laboratory technician at the Institute of Hygiene in Kiev when she married Ogorodnikov.

“I wish to be free and to bring up my son in freedom and democracy,” she said.

But life for most of the 60,000 Russian emigres in Los Angeles did not match the expectations of the Ogorodnikovs.

They settled in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on Gardner Street in West Hollywood, and Nikolai worked as a meatpacker in Vernon. Soon they were openly complaining of the high crime rate, drug use and social injustice they saw in their new country.

The first prosecution witness last week was Michael (Mischa) Markarian, owner of Mischa’s Restaurant in Hollywood, a few blocks from the Ogorodnikovs’ apartment. He recalled the Ogorodnikovs as frequent customers.

By the time he opened his restaurant in 1977, Markarian said, the Ogorodnikovs already had grown so disillusioned that they were openly courting Soviet officials in the hope that they could return to the Soviet Union.

Accompanied by Official

On one occasion, Markarian recalled, the Ogorodnikovs came into his restaurant with a vice consul of the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, who suggested that Markarian open a similar restaurant in Soviet Armenia.

“I asked him who would be the boss of the restaurant,” Markarian said. “He said the state would be the owner, and that I should do it out of patriotism. They pretty much echoed whatever he said. They were like puppets.”

Over the next few years, Markarian added, Svetlana Ogorodnikova became increasingly anti-American and pro-Soviet. She and her husband screened Soviet movies for the Russian emigre community in Los Angeles that she obtained from the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco.

Markarian said she also brought around Soviet propaganda magazines, trying unsuccessfully to leave them in his restaurant.

‘Crime-Free Society’

“She spoke of the U.S.S.R. as a crime-free society,” he said. “She always brought up the negatives about the United States--the crime, the drug abuse, whatever.”

Along with their unhappiness over life in the United States, the Ogorodnikovs were increasingly unhappy with each other. Ogorodnikova started coming into the restaurant with girlfriends and other men, Markarian said. She told others she remained with her husband only because of their son.

Gregory Shenderovsky, another Russian emigre, had been one of Ogorodnikov’s neighbors in Kiev, and he ran into him one day in Hollywood in 1978 as the Ogorodnikovs were showing a Soviet film at the Oriental Theater on Sunset Boulevard.

“Ogorodnikov try to tell me I make a mistake coming to this country,” Shenderovsky said in broken English. “He say it will be hard to find a job. You could be killed in this country just for a dollar.

“I say, ‘You have been here longer than I. Why don’t you go back?’ He say, ‘I’m working at it.’ He had gone to the consulate and was told, ‘You have to earn your way back.’ He say that was why he had to show the movies, and that now they were going to let Matvej go to camp in the Soviet Union.”

More and More Tasks

The next witnesses called by U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner and Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Hayman told of the escalating tasks the Ogorodnikovs performed for the Soviets as they worked toward their goal of returning to the Soviet Union.

Karine Madevossian, a defector from the Soviet Union, described how Ogorodnikova tried to persuade her to return to Moscow in 1979. Alexander Polovets, publisher of a Russian-language newspaper, told of spotting Ogorodnikov photographing anti-Soviet demonstrators in front of Hollywood High School in 1983.

From 1980 to 1984, the jury was told, the Ogorodnikovs and their son had made nine trips back to the Soviet Union at a cost of more than $12,000. Matvej was now spending a month each year at an exclusive Communist youth camp on the Black Sea, the prosecution said.

The Ogorodnikovs are now in prison after pleading guilty last year to conspiring with Miller to pass secret FBI documents to the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikova, 35, was sentenced to 18 years and Ogorodnikov, 53, received an eight-year sentence.

As he pleaded guilty last June 26, Ogorodnikov’s bitterness exploded into a tirade against both his wife and the country he once saw as a haven.

“I lost my son. I lost my wife,” he said. “Who raped my wife? FBI agents. They used the American system, but they took my wife, used her as a prostitute and I ended up outside like a dog.

“That is just not nice.”