Citizen Polovchak Is Happy He Can’t Go Home Again

--Nearly eight years after he refused to return to the Soviet Union with his parents, Walter Polovchak said he has no regrets. “As every day goes by I’m happier and happier I made the decision,” said Polovchak, a 20-year-old television broadcasting student at Columbia College in Chicago. In the summer of 1980, Polovchak ran off to a cousin’s house along with his sister Natalie, then 17, after his parents decided to leave Chicago and return to the Soviet Union barely six months after arriving in the United States. His sister, because of her age, had no trouble getting asylum. The younger Walter became the object of a legal struggle that was not resolved until his 18th birthday, when he became a citizen. Polovchak has told the story in a new book, “Freedom’s Child,” written with Kevin Klose, a Washington Post editor. “I wanted the American people to understand freedom a little bit better and appreciate it better and not take it for granted,” he said. Polovchak said he occasionally hears from his father Michael, mother Anna, brother Michael Jr., 12, and sister Julia, who was born after the family returned to the Ukraine.

--More Italians think Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is more believable than Ronald Reagan, according to an opinion poll by Italy’s Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies. When asked who was more credible, 36% of those polled preferred Gorbachev, with only 13% voting for Reagan. Nearly 40% said neither Reagan nor Gorbachev was credible. When given a choice of a number of real and fictitious American personalities, 24% of those polled said the ruthless J. R. in the “Dallas” television series was most representative of the American spirit. He was followed by Rambo with 22% and Donald Duck’s miserly uncle with 20%.

--Singer Dennis Day is out of the intensive-care unit at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where he was admitted March 9 with a head injury, but remains in serious condition, a hospital spokesman said. Day’s vital signs are reportedly stable, and he is responding to visitors. Day, 71, was hospitalized after falling at his Bel-Air home. He has since had two operations to relieve pressure on his brain.