The Littlest Defector Grows Up : Soviet Immigrant Walter Polovchak Chronicles His American Dream

At first glance it looks like any red-blooded, 20-year-old American male’s room. There’s a stereo system complete with compact disc, a 10-speed bike at the foot of the bed, football ticket stubs taped to the mirror. But, then there’s also that autographed photo of Ronald Reagan, a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence, blown-up news clippings about the room’s occupant, and a large American flag draped above the bed.

Welcome to the home of Citizen Walter Polovchak, the one-time baby-faced 12-year-old who made international headlines in 1980 by refusing to return to the Soviet Union from the United States.

Today that stubborn Soviet boy is an American man engaged in a truly capitalist endeavor. Like so many celebrity authors, Polovchak is working the talk-show circuit, hoping to boost sales of “Freedom’s Child,” a book written with former Washington Post Moscow bureau chief Kevin Klose that chronicles Polovchak’s efforts to stay here. And, as befits every celebrity author, Polovchak has a Hollywood agent looking over potential film deals.

“Obviously I’d like to see myself play me in the movie,” Polovchak said last week in the Chicago apartment he shares with his cousin and near-namesake, Walter Polovczak. “Who could better play me than myself?”

In Court With Parents

The story, even in an era of detente, seems made for TV. After living little more than half a year in Chicago, Polovchak’s Ukrainian parents, Anna and Michael, found themselves in a drawn-out court battle, fighting to take their son back to his homeland. Young Walter, at 4 feet and 82 pounds, said he would sooner die than return.

The case became a cause celebre-- the Soviet bear versus the American eagle, communism against democracy. It quickly attracted the support of Chicago’s Ukrainian community, of anti-communists throughout the country, and of the Carter and later Reagan administrations. Within 48 hours, the State Department granted the young boy asylum. And what began as a case of a runaway child became a quality-of-life showdown between the world’s mightiest powers.

The American Civil Liberties Union saw it differently, and took the parents’ case. They maintained--and in time the courts upheld them--that the parents had been denied adequate representation at the original hearings. Insisting the case was not about politics but of family privacy and family integrity, the ACLU eventually won almost every legal contest.

But the case dragged on for nearly six years and time eventually settled it in Walter’s favor. The 12-year-old child turned into an 18-year-old adult legally capable of determining where he would live.

Some may question the need for rehashing Polovchak’s story in an era of warming Soviet-American relations. But disbelievers and cynics have plagued Walter Polovchak throughout his relatively short but intensely scrutinized life here.

Eight years ago a psychiatrist suggested that Polovchak’s decision was the rebellious act of a preadolescent youth, like that of the child who locks himself in the bathroom. A newspaperman described him as a kid who preferred Big Macs to pirogi.

“The psychiatrist missed the point,” co-author Klose said. “Among the absurdities of a lot of the court hearings was the fact that the psychiatrist had never interviewed the child. He was responding to a hypothetical. This young boy made a profound decision.”

Bike and Important Things

“I was amused by everything when I got here, by Jell-O, bananas, the Three Stooges,” Polovchak said. “A lot of people say . . . I stayed here because my cousin gave me a bicycle. Sure, that was part of it. But there were other, more important things.”

Like freedom of movement, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Polovchak today insists that he was old enough “to see the difference between this country and the Soviet Union because I lived there for 12 years.” And though he lost his parents and a younger brother, Michael, when they returned to the Soviet Union without him in 1981, it was “without doubt the right decision with a good ending.” His older sister, Natalie, who was of age, also remained in this country.

“Of course, I love . . . and miss my parents,” he said, and would gladly see them again “on neutral territory.” They send telegrams on his birthday, he said, and write infrequently. Polovchak said he is not sure that his family receives his letters.

It was memories of teachers who made him kneel in gravel, scrub floors and recite Lenin’s rules as punishment for going to church that made him steadfast in his decision to remain here, he said.

Polovchak is studying broadcast journalism at a Chicago college and has dreams of becoming a television anchorman.

He wrote “Freedom’s Child,” he said, to make Americans more appreciative of their freedoms.

Polovchak is as high on the United States as he was eight years ago when, barely able to speak English, he told reporters “I like here.”

He said he was surprised, on his recent book tour, when callers asked him about America’s homeless and foreign policy. “There’s no such thing as perfect country,” he said. “America has the homeless and bums and shooting and drugs, but it’s still the best country there is.”

On glasnost and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Polovchak is less upbeat. “I think glasnost is big propaganda. . . . If they opened the borders for just 24 hours, they probably couldn’t get enough planes in to take the people out of there that wanted to leave.”

‘Freedom for Granted’

He is disturbed by Americans who “pick and dwell on the same old things that are wrong when nobody looks at the good things we have here. A lot of people take freedom for granted because they don’t have the chance to see how life is for people in other countries. Here we have toilet paper, cable with 65 channels, a phone and bathroom in every house.”

Polovchak said he holds no grudges against the ACLU, which represented his parents through the court proceedings. But his words betray a lack of understanding about the organization that handled the case.

“I think they kind of goofed up,” he said. “They usually take the stories of children. But when you’re trying to make money, that’s how it goes.”

In the end, despite a difficult start, “the littlest defector,” as he was called, is little different from other immigrants who come to this country searching for a better life.

“In America, you can go where you please, express your thoughts. . . . You can barely make it or you can live comfortable or you can be a millionaire,” he says.

“I want to live the American dream. A nice house, nice cars, a boat, maybe, a wife and two kids.”