Asylum Granted to Moscow Circus Performers : Soviet High-Wire Artists Defect to U.S.

For five weeks, Nikolai Nikolski and his wife, Bertalina Kazakova, walked a perilous high wire here as stars of the visiting Moscow Circus. Then, on their day off, they walked from their room at the Liberty Hotel and asked for political asylum at the American Embassy.

The performers, both 35, were flown to Miami on Thursday and were granted asylum.

“We didn’t come here to buy blue jeans or clothes. We came here for freedom,” Kazakova told reporters in Miami. “We want to be free people. We don’t like our Soviet life,” she said through an interpreter.

Both said they would like to perform in an American circus.

Announcement of the defection was withheld at Argentine insistence until the couple had left the country. The Soviet Embassy here declined comment Thursday, referring callers to the American Embassy.

Nikolski and Kazakova left behind her brother and his sister, fellow performers in the family act, U.S. officials said.

U.S. Consul General Thomas Holladay said the couple appeared at the American Embassy on Monday afternoon with a grudge against the Soviet Union and a serious language gap. They spoke neither English nor Spanish. Non-plussed consular officials eventually found a newly arrived embassy economic officer who spoke some Russian.

Embassy spokesman R. Don Crider said that in framing their request for asylum, the performers complained of the restrictive Soviet political system and the absence of opportunities for those who are not members of the Communist Party.

The United States accepted a Soviet request for consular officials to meet with the couple Tuesday, Holladay said.

“It was not an acrimonious meeting,” the U.S. consul said. “The Soviets were interested in formally identifying their citizens and establishing that they were acting of their own free will.”

Nikolski and Kazakova told U.S. officials that they had performed with the Moscow Circus for 12 years but that the shows here, which began July 3 and are to end Sunday, marked the first time they had been permitted to leave the Soviet Union.

The couple, who were billeted with other members of their troupe at the $30-a-night Liberty Hotel six blocks from the exhibition hall, said they had been planning to defect for some time, according to Crider.

In silver costumes, Nikolski and Kazakova had opened the second half of the circus in a breath-taking performance that included Nikolski as fulcrum of a teetering seesaw near the the arena roof with Kazakova and Nikolski’s sister balanced on the end of a slender board slung across the high wire. They performed without a net.