Emigres Give Another View of <i> Glasnost</i>

Don’t talk to Alexander Besbrozvanny about culture shock. Don’t try to convince him of the difficult transition from Soviet to American life. Just listen, and let him go on about the joy of the 50 states.

“The United States is power, energy and movement,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I am awed by its power, by the generosity and grandeur bursting forth. And this, this is a big town, so clean and beautiful, so homey and communal. . . . This, this is lovely.”

Besbrozvanny, 42, has been in the United States--in San Diego--for less than a month. Before that, he made temporary stops in Rome and Vienna, and before that he spent a lifetime in the Soviet Union. He is now a statistic, and happy to be one.

Besbrozvanny is one of 350 Soviet emigres who have settled in San Diego in 1989, according to the United Jewish Federation. (The number may double before the end of the year.) The figure compares with 153 who settled here in 1988 and 20 who came in 1987. The last significant arrivals before that were in 1979.

Besbrozvanny, his wife and two children, ages 15 and 18, are reaping the benefits of perestroika , the willingness of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to allow some citizens, particularly Jews, to immigrate to other countries.

The exodus is having an impact on several fronts in San Diego.

Howard Brotman, chairman of the Passage to Freedom campaign being orchestrated through the United Jewish Federation of San Diego, said his organization needs to raise $570,000 by the end of the year to augment local resettlement. The nationwide fund-raising goal is $75 million.

“The money is needed to fund the transmigration of Soviet Jews from Russia to Vienna to Rome to points in the U.S.A.,” Brotman said. “It’s an involved and time-consuming process, much more than the public would realize.”

Brotman said that San Diego is the nation’s ninth-most-popular destination for Soviet emigres, who “don’t look at a map and point to a city they’d like to go to.” Generally, they have families they want to see again or, as with Besbrozvanny, housing and employment are available here.

With a narrow, angular face, prominent cheekbones and hungry eyes that punctuate the severity of his message, Besbrozvanny could play the leading man in the movie “Emigre.” The story would be a tragedy, he said, with its only happy moment coming near the end, the

exodus to America.

Besbrozvanny acknowledges the favorable view of most Americans toward Gorbachev and the radical policies of glasnost and perestroika. To be sure, they are welcome advances, he said, and provide the only way Besbrozvanny could have been sitting in a classroom in the Jewish Community Center on 54th Street in East San Diego on a recent morning. But the truth behind glasnost is far more complex than Americans realize, he said.

For more than an hour, Besbrozvanny and six recently arrived emigres, with occasional help from an interpreter, described a ghoulish society in which Jews experience a chilling anti-Semitism not unlike Nazi Germany.

If anything, he said, glasnost fuels anti-Semitism.

It permits open displays of racism and hatred and protects the offenders from intervention by authorities. He said Skinheads are turning up even on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad.

“In Russia, anti-Semitism was, is and will be,” said Besbrozvanny, who comes from Leningrad. “Under the growing democratic movement, it is worse. It’s open season on ethnic groups. I have seen people beaten openly in the streets. Before, even with anti-Semitism, the government took a harsh view of such atrocities, only because they didn’t want the citizens being unruly. Now you’re freer to express yourself, in whatever way you choose.”

Besbrozvanny said glasnost has improved the Jews’ lot only in making it easier to leave.

“Gorbachev simplified the forms,” he said as he and his colleagues roared with laughter. “He has done nothing to improve the life of the Jews in the workplace or in the universities, where the stiff quotas remain. Maybe he will do something in time. I didn’t want to stick around to find out.”

Alla Belmes, 50, who comes to San Diego from the town of Baku, said that going to synagogue is a risk. The government keeps a record of who goes and how often, she said, and armed guards of the KGB line the aisles of the temple during services.

Despite being natives of the Soviet Union, Besbrozvanny and friends paint a picture of life behind the Iron Curtain as one of alienation and confusion, intensified for Jews. In a hero-worshiping society in which murals of Lenin line the streets, Jews are more apt to feel alienated than other Russians; unlike Christians, their perception of God is that he can’t be a man. To perceive the likes of Lenin as a god is to defy Judaism in a fundamental way, Besbrozvanny said.

Lois Bloom of Jewish Family Service, the organization that smoothes the sometimes bumpy road of transition from Russia to San Diego, said that until recently most of the emigres living here had never experienced a Seder--until Passover at the JCC.

Not all of the Soviet emigres living in the county are Jewish, but most of the 1,000-plus are. (About 150,000 Soviet emigres have settled in the United States in the past 10 years, and the vast majority of those are Jewish.) Bloom said that until their arrival here, most were forbidden--overtly or otherwise--to practice their religion.

The study of Hebrew was forbidden, until Gorbachev. And traditional Jewish observances were made in silence, if at all, Bloom said.

“The great thing about perestroika ,” said Jill Borg Spitzer, executive director of Jewish Family Service, “is that they’re actually letting them out, and that’s a real change in policy. But I’m not so sure Soviet life is any better at all for a person who’s Jewish.”

Besbrozvanny said that he, like many Jews--like many Russians --wanted to leave because work offered no mobility whatsoever, no sense of progress or hope. He feels that, because he is Jewish, he was periodically chastised in front of co-workers at the plant where he worked as an engineer. He said his children were forced to read the reprimand from their father’s employer in front of classmates at school.

He said that, when a would-be emigre tells the government he wants to leave, he is fired from his job immediately, as a matter of course. So the gamble, he said, is huge. You may not get to go, but you will lose your job. And while you remain, the treatment you receive won’t be pleasant.

Richard Little is a political science professor at San Diego State University and an observer of Soviet politics. During the interview with Besbrozvanny, he helped out with translation. Later, he said that men like Besbrozvanny have a great deal of courage.

“Just being a Jew in Soviet society is one thing,” Little said. “But to be a refusenik --to apply to leave the country--that’s something else entirely, because there’s no guarantee that you’ll get to go, and what may happen in the aftermath may be worse than anything you experienced before.”

Besbrozvanny said he has no fear of America, no culture shock, no pangs of homesickness for comrades left behind, no nervous apprehensions. Except for one.

Gennady Chertkov, 35, from the Ukrainian village of Zhitomir, answered for him.

“English,” he said. “We would all like to speak English better.”

“Americans have been extremely warm and helpful to us,” Besbrozvanny said moments after asking a reporter if he was an “interrogator” working for the government. (Assured to the contrary, he continued.)

He said that Jewish Family Service has been invaluable in arranging housing and get-togethers, day camps for children and, of course, all-important English lessons.

Besbrozvanny said he also has many other things he wants to learn.

“I have no Jewish religion, and want to know that,” he said. “I have to know my Jewish history. And I want to know American democracy. I want . . . freedom. More than anything, I want true freedom.”