A Soviet’s Sierra Option : Scientist’s Defection Means an Emotional Separation for Family

Boris Kazak came here last year in a historic exchange that allowed U.S. and Soviet scientists to monitor nuclear detonations in each other’s countries, and during his short time in the Eastern Sierra the tall, silver-haired Soviet found friends and an appealing way of life.

Last month, he arranged a personal invitation from Americans he met in Inyo County and returned from Moscow with his wife and son to this small Owens Valley community.

He had come for more than a visit. He had come, Kazak said, to defect.

“People are people,” he said of the United States. “What shocked me in America was the total disregard of all the titles, be he a baron or a count or a king. No difference.”

Last Friday, Kazak sat with an FBI agent in a car outside Reno’s Coffee Shop in the town of Mojave, south of here, and wrote in his own hand that he wanted to defect and had not been coerced. In exchange for this document, he received a packet of forms from the agent that Kazak must fill out and send to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Kazak made his decision despite failing to persuade his wife and 15-year-old son to stay with him. He bid them farewell at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday.

It was, he said, the “hardest part.”

Kazak’s visa expires in two months, and he has until then to apply for permission to stay legally in the United States. The FBI agent declined to comment on the case, saying that was against bureau policy. An independent FBI source confirmed that the Bakersfield-based agent had been contacted in regard to Kazak.

While Kazak would not be regarded as a prize defector in the struggle between superpowers, the civil servant’s decision to come to this country--and to allow a reporter to cover his defection--provided an instructive look into one Soviet citizen’s view of his homeland, the United States and the differences that separate them.

Kazak is a deeply disillusioned scientist who contends that the Soviet Union’s experiment with communism has mocked the socialist ideal. He sets little stock in perestroika, saying “it might take two or three generations” to fix the Soviet economy.

Nonetheless, he explained his decision to leave as one driven by a father’s need to teach by example. He has come here, he said, for the sake of his three sons--even though they are now all back in Moscow.

“I want,” Kazak said, “to open to them the possibility to choose either way, not to be programmed as it is now the fact in our country . . . but to have a choice of open doors.”

He said he has not betrayed his sons by defecting. Rather, “I feel I would betray them by staying. It’s a hard way but I feel it is the only way out of the situation.”

Kazak first started thinking about coming to the United States at least seven years ago. His wife was troubled by his talk of leaving the Soviet Union.

“She was very much depressed because we started this talk several years ago,” Kazak said of his wife, Ljudmila, a 44-year-old high school chemistry teacher. “She’s just of a different philosophy than myself.”

He came to the United States last spring and fall as part of an unusual exercise organized by scientists to demonstrate that the Soviet Union and United States can effectively monitor nuclear tests. The issue is an important one in negotiating treaties.

Officials of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based environmental group that helped organize the exchange, said the experiment demonstrated that seismographs can measure earth tremors accurately enough to distinguish between an underground nuclear explosion and such phenomena as earthquakes and conventional explosions.

Paul Allen of the environmental group said the data and conclusions were turned over to the U.S. government earlier this year.

“He did good work,” Allen recalled of Kazak. “We can’t imagine why he’d do this.”

After the scientific expedition, which consisted of two two-week trips in April and August of 1988, Kazak returned to his job at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth, which is part of the Academy of Science. A geophysicist and an electrical engineer, he specializes in the development of instrumentation to measure the earth’s movement.

Shortly after his return, one of two KGB officers, who Kazak said came to the United States with the scientific team, filed a report. He said they complained that Kazak had become too friendly with Americans, staying overnight at one of their homes.

While in Inyo County, Kazak, who speaks fluent English, as well as French and German, had met John Heston and Benett Kessler, co-owners of the Eastern Sierra News Service. The two journalists had done stories on the Soviet visitors and held a party for them.

One night, said Kazak, he and Heston stayed up most of the night talking about philosophy, politics and literature. This was pointed out in the KGB report as conduct unbecoming a Soviet scientist, he said.

No immediate harm would have come to him from the report, Kazak said: “I would not be fired from my work. I simply would be regarded as some kind of untouchable, some kind of bad citizen.”

The report, he said, only added to the disillusionment that he and other scientists in the Soviet Union experience daily.

“We pretend to be working and they pretend to pay us,” Kazak said of the salary that does not allow him to buy much more than food and shelter for his family. “I cannot do this. I cannot live like this. I cannot pretend working. I like my work.”

Asked about the reform movement in the Soviet Union, Kazak told a Russian fable about a greedy merchant who vowed to change his ways. The merchant invited people to his yard each week for a free dinner, but protected the feast with a pack of dogs.

“So when you think about things going right, and about how good a man is Gorbachev . . . and about how some reactionists . . . are trying to block his reforms, remember about the merchant.

“Because dogs are still there.”

Kazak smuggled out a letter to Heston and Kessler asking that they send a formal invitation to him and his wife and son to visit. Armed with the letter, Kazak obtained visitor visas for all three.

The family was allowed to take only $600 out of the country. They arrived here Oct. 15, and he went to work arranging to stay.

At the end of the month, Kazak’s wife and 15-year-old son, Juri, decided to return to the Soviet Union. It apparently was not an easy decision.

Heston and Kessler described a “terrible emotional crisis that . . . the family was going through and that we went through with them. We would sit at the dinner table at night toward the end and have heart-wrenching discussions about the fact that this family was going to be torn apart. Toward the end the wife would break into tears.”

Kazak said his wife was worried about the effect her defection might have on her mother and her brother, adding that she is also worried that he will not be able to establish himself professionally in the United States.

Kazak would not allow his son, who loves the Beatles and American rock music, to be interviewed about his decision.

(Kazak has two other sons, 19 and 24, by a previous marriage.)

At their last dinner together Thursday night in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Ljudmila Kazak’s eyes occasionally brimmed with tears, although Juri carried on conversations in his halting English, translated for this mother, and tried pesto sauce on pasta for the first time.

On Friday morning at Los Angeles International Airport, the family members struggled to maintain their composure. They hugged and, then, for a time, gazed silently at one another across the security checkpoint until wife and son turned and disappeared down the airport corridor.

Four hours after the airport departure, Kazak met the FBI agent who had accepted the scientist’s handwritten request for political asylum. And he returned here to begin his new life.

Kazak now faces a mound of INS forms and the need to find a job. He wants to establish himself quickly and start sending money home to his family. He is hoping to work in his field.

Kazak said that if he can show his wife that he can succeed here economically, and that life will be better for all of them, she might be persuaded to move to the United States.

In Independence, meanwhile, residents are just beginning to learn that their Soviet visitor has come for a longer stay than advertised.

“I’m happy. He’s very nice,” said Glorian Mairs, who with her husband has owned Mairs Market for more than 40 years. If Kazak wants to stay in Independence, she said, “I think everybody would accept him. I think they’d be very honored.”