Divorce, Glasnost Style : Families: A child-custody battle between an American and his Russian-born wife takes on international proportions.

It began as a tender Moscow love story, shades of “Dr. Zhivago” on the eve of Gorbachev. She was a young working mother who wrote poetry, divorced with a daughter, a budding computer engineer with “my future all mapped out” and no desire to leave Mother Russia.

“But I fell in love,” says Inna Yur-Evna Carver, 26. “I missed him when he left.”

He was an “exotic” American student traveling in the Soviet Union that spring when he glimpsed the petite Muscovite at a party and pursued her to the altar, promising the American Dream. “We were sitting in the kitchen,” reflects Paul Carver. “I asked her for a Russian beer.”

She obliged, and now, four years later, their one-time dream has broken both their hearts, as the bittersweet saga of a young marriage has turned into a down-and-dirty custody dispute. This international soap opera has transfixed this belly-up heartland of Cadillac cowboys and oil-bust survivors.

Afraid she was about to take their Russian-born son, Tristan, then 14 months old, and run home to Moscow, Paul Carver bundled up the child and disappeared. Suddenly, she found herself lost in America, but caught on quickly as she grappled with the law to make a new system work, tromped on toes all the way to Washington, then turned amateur private eye to fire up a glasnost manhunt.

“It’s been a cause celebre in the media, it’s so unusual,” says Ed Livermore, publisher of the weekly Edmund Sun. “Our laws seemed so powerless to help her. It was often said that if this were Russia, it would have never happened, the KGB would have called a few people in and gotten answers fast. Only the KGB wasn’t on this case.”

What began as a common domestic dispute, was catapulted into a diplomatic incident, as the Soviet Embassy protested quietly but persistently that a Soviet child (considered a dual citizen by U.S. authorities) had been kidnaped and urging the State Department to pull out all stops to find him, sources say.

“I’ve never seen such cooperation between the U. S. and Russia on a case like this,” says Washington lawyer Philip Schwartz, an expert on international child custody who entered the geopolitical fray on behalf of the mother.

To further muddy matters, all this was unfolding against a bizarre backdrop of an FBI national security probe of the Russian mother--triggered after in-laws claimed she was a KGB spy plotting to murder her husband. Calling that notion ridiculous, she says her husband physically abused her and “treated me like a Russian slave,” which he denies.

Wherever truth lies, a showdown is scheduled for an Oklahoma divorce court on Monday for a case that highlights the dilemma of disillusioned newlyweds caught between superpower rivals exploring Cold War meltdown--and, for the Russian, the flip side of freedom.

“It certainly summed up the difference between our two systems,” says Livermore. “It was awfully hard to convince a Russian mother whose baby is (taken) that the American way was better.”

“It may have started as two college students chasing idealistic romance,” says Jon Hester, Inna’s divorce lawyer. “But what you’ve got now sounds more like a glasnost ‘Kramer vs. Kramer.’ ”

When they met in May, 1985, English was the rage in Moscow. Her language study group devoured U.S. pop culture, playing “Jesus Christ Superstar,” dancing to Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, viewing “Casablanca” and “Gone With The Wind.” At one class soiree, Paul Carver, traveling with American students, dropped in, then asked for a date, she laughs. “But I didn’t know what he meant, my English was so bad. I gave him my teacher’s phone number.”

At the next party, three weeks later, Paul “kept trying to talk to me,” she says. “I was flattered. He seemed so exotic, speaking English. It was a sexy language.” At first, she says, “I probably liked him because he was an American.” She “idolized” American values, its literature, its artistic expression. “I invited him to spend a Sunday with us.” They spent his last week in Moscow together.

“He was so sweet to Anna,” she said of how he treated her 7-year-old daughter from her first marriage at 17. “He told me he was going to be a good father, that he loved children. He sounded very responsible. He said, ‘I love you.’ ”

But she didn’t see how that was possible; they’d just met. Then he popped the question: “Will you go to America with me?”

“I was shocked,” she says. She was then halfway through graduate school and working at a research institute for children. “I wasn’t thinking about getting married again. I didn’t want to leave Russia.” Then he was gone and she was surprised at how she felt. “I started to miss him very much,” she says.

They wrote furiously. He flew back to Moscow twice. They attended ballet, concerts. Mid-romance, she became pregnant and they were married on Aug. 19, 1986. Her mother, a radiologist, and her father, an aeronautical engineer with a top security clearance, hosted a reception with caviar, fish, cold cuts and vodka.

But an exit visa was denied, as Paul lobbied officials, even writing then-Vice President Bush, who Inna says interceded with a letter.

A son was born on Feb. 23, 1987; Paul picked the name, Tristan, “because it sounded so British,” she says. “I told him it came from the fable about ill-fated lovers.” She tacked on a Russian “Nicholai.”

In Moscow, Paul was the ideal father, she says, walking the baby, changing diapers, tender. Suddenly, Inna was summoned to KGB headquarters. Officials demanded to know why she wanted to go to America. They pressed her for names of friends with similar yearnings. She refused to acquiesce, pleading she was simply in love and wanted to follow her husband to his home.

Eventually, the barriers crumbled, her visa came through and in July, 1987, the happy couple was off to this upscale Oklahoma City suburb, where Paul’s ancestors once lead wagon trains through prairie land that now boasts the “Cowboy Hall of Fame,” the Hot Rod Nationals, PGA golf classics, a mini-Statue of Liberty and watering holes with names like the Cattle Rustlers Steak House.

At first, they moved in with his parents--John Carver, a bespectacled chiropractor who raises goats on 10 acres, and his wife, Mary Jane. The local paper announced their arrival. Inna addressed the local chamber of commerce at a fancy lunch.

“She was a good ambassador, candid, but not critical of the Soviet Union,” says Livermore, who had the couple over for dinner. “People were fascinated.” He found Paul “pleasant, but very quiet, reserved, somber. Inna wanted to know all about how you live in America. She was intellectually superior.”

She was also “intellectually starved,” says one friend. By Inna’s account, she says that, as her English improved, she found herself married to a different man: moody, introverted, insecure with few friends, violent. “He beat me up, frightened my daughter,” she says. A friend, Susan Sturm, says she took Inna for counseling to a shelter for battered women.

She was not allowed to work, or learn to drive, which friends taught her secretly, she says. There were money troubles. Inna, who is Jewish, felt her religion under fire. “One night, we were watching a film about Nazis in World War II. He said, ‘Hitler was a talented general.’ I asked, ‘You like Hitler?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ve always been fascinated by Hitler. His army had discipline and order.’ ”

Carver, a soft-spoken “Star Trek” fan and college graduate with a degree in psychology who denies abuse or anti-Semitism, says he tried to make a go of running his parent’s Tulsa kitchenware shop that went bust.

He says his wife was prone to screaming and such “distraction” that the baby sometimes rolled off the bed, but was never hurt. As the marriage soured, he wound up sleeping at the store and began losing weight. They fought.

“She repeatedly threatened to take the child and go to Russia,” he says. “I called the state Department and asked, ‘What if she takes the child and leaves?’ And they said, ‘There’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it.’ I felt I was either going to lose my son or do the very same thing she was about to do. . . . I was damned if I do and damned if I don’t.’

She replies: “Maybe I did say it in the heat of a fight, but I told Paul I didn’t mean it, (that) I would never take his son to live in Russia and deny him (access). It doesn’t make sense. It would be too hard for me to start over there. . . .” “

Mere days before he split, Carver dropped into the Tulsa FBI office to confess his fears, his plan. “We advised him not to take the child and run,” says an agent. “But he told us his wife was poisoning him for the KGB. He couldn’t tell us why.”

Carver says it was the FBI that first put such ideas in his head. “After I’d explained her behavior, the agent asked me, ‘Do you think she has anything do with Soviet intelligence?’ Up to that point, I had not considered it.”

Whoever planted the seed, it took root. “We believe Paul was set up from the beginning,” says Paul’s mother, Mary Jane Carver, as she spins Ludlum-esque fancies of KGB moles targeting Americans for love and espionage. “We’ve been harassed and terrorized. I sleep with a loaded shotgun beside the bed.”

She rattles off a litany of death threats, break-ins, unmarked cars watching their store. But police say they have been unable to document any such charges, or lay them on the 95-pound daughter-in-law suspected by the Carvers as behind it all. How does she figure it: an impoverished 5-foot-1 mother with a heavy accent and a beat-up Chevy masterminding a campaign of terror from this unlikely spy central?

“That’s what we want to know,” Paul’s mother says. “It’s scary. I told the FBI she’s either disturbed or extremely well-trained. She’s dangerous, vicious. Someone better watch her. An FBI agent asked us, ‘Are you trying to tell me there’s some big conspiracy against you people?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.’ ”

Was anything behind such suspicion? “Unlikely,” says the agent. “They met by chance. . . . We checked it out.” But the Carvers remain unconvinced. “They’re paranoid,” he says.

As the marriage unraveled, Inna says she was lonely. She says Paul threatened she would be deported if they split, that he’d keep Tristan. Meanwhile, Sturm says Paul’s mother “started a whispering campaign, telling people Inna was a terrible person. I’m convinced they planned early on to take the baby by putting Inna in such a lonely, destitute position that she’d be forced back to Russia.”

Inna says: “He was paranoid I’d get custody. He told me, ‘If you take my son anywhere without telling me, I’ll kill you and then myself.’ ”

On May 6, 1988, he offered to baby-sit while she dropped by Anna’s school. “When I came home, they were gone, everything was gone,” she says. “My son’s bed, his clothes. I only found a dirty diaper that I kept.”

With Tristan gone, the domestic tragedy developed international overtones, as she grew so frustrated with local authorities telling her how little could be done since “the child was with his father” that she begged the Soviet Embassy for help.

“Under Oklahoma law, it wasn’t child-stealing or failure to comply with a custody order,” says then-assistant Tulsa Dist. Atty. Fred Morgan. “They were still married.”

In Washington, she found a sympathetic ear in Yevgeny Antipov, the Soviet consul general. “He is a hero to me,” says the mother, who feared she would be spurned for leaving her country. “He kept bugging the State Department. He told me an official complaint had been filed.”

Antipov recalls: “When (Inna) first told us of her trouble, the job for us was to go to the State Department. I spoke about this case to (their) Soviet Desk and their legal adviser. I was impressed by their reaction. It went to their heart. Certainly, when the destiny of a child is concerned, everybody (wants) to have the problem solved as soon as possible.”

Potentially, he confirmed, the Carver case could have been used as propaganda, affecting a host of U.S.-Soviet relations. But “we didn’t want to politicize this at all. . . . We tried to play it down. Why? Because there’s a new attitude between our countries.”

But back in Oklahoma, with rent and utilities unpaid, Inna wound up on welfare after rejecting the Carvers’ offer to take her in--an offer that was later withdrawn, she says.

She began pitching her plight to local media, children’s groups. Washington attorney Schwartz corralled Oklahoma lawyers to work for free in the spirit of glasnost. “We wanted to keep up our end of the bargain,” says Tulsa lawyer Bill Hood. A local synagogue, touched by the Jewish mother from the Soviet Union, threw in financial support.

Inna won a temporary custody decree, but her husband couldn’t be served--he couldn’t be found.

Suddenly, prosecutor Morgan came under fire. “Everyone wanted to know why we couldn’t help this poor woman,” he says. “She had lawyers calling me, the Soviets, the State Department. She’s a very bright, articulate lady who does her homework, but her case did not fit the criminal statutes of this state.”

Morgan concedes he was unaware of an archaic state law: wife abandonment, a felony with a maximum 10-year sentence, left over from frontier days in Oklahoma. It was Inna who dug it out after forays to the University of Oklahoma Law Library. “I found your law,” she informed him.

“We felt the criteria fit,” says Morgan, who filed criminal charges Aug. 1, 1988. She also pressed him to push the U. S. Justice Department for a federal warrant for unlawful flight, to allow the FBI on the case. Morgan doubted “such a request would be entertained. I told her, ‘It’s the kind of thing reserved for triple ax murderers.’ She wasn’t pleased.”

He laughs: “She bugged me a lot. I guess she complained again because I get a call from the U. S. attorney asking me if we’d request a federal warrant, so we did.”

Armed with her own suspicions, she stormed one local judge’s chambers, pleading for a subpoena to obtain her in-laws’ phone records. She got it and marched over to the telephone company. Records in hand, she tipped the FBI to curious calls to Mexico and a Dallas motel, but federal agents had little luck.

According to one FBI report obtained by The Times, Paul Carver apparently registered at a Dallas Red Roof Inn “around the Fourth of July weekend,” 1988, with his father, the chiropractor (who denies it), and a small boy believed to be Tristan. Other leads turned up dead ends.

Back in town, Inna leaned on friends like Sturm, and tacked up missing posters labeling Paul an “abductor.” But she ran afoul of Paul’s parents, who informed businesses where posters were up that their son was on the lam for wife desertion, not child abduction--and threatened to sue until they came down.

In the Soviet Union, the story was creating a stir. A Tass reporter’s piece ran with the headline, “They Stole My Son.” A psychic offered to rally soothsayers in the West. Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, expedited cheap tickets for Inna’s mother to attend the Sturms’ “Taste of Russia” fund-raiser featuring Inna’s borscht, blintzes and beef stroganoff.

Guests asked Inna, “America is a free country, what do you think?” she says. “And I’d say, ‘I’d choose to live here, but I felt freer in Russia--freer from worrying about the electricity (being) turned off. It’s a land of opportunity, but I have a lower standard of living here. I’m glad there is freedom, but not for criminals to commit crimes.”

That December, the Carvers offered her a proposal to reunite mother and child that required her to post a $100,000 bond, stay within 30 miles of their home, drop criminal charges against her husband, waive Tristan’s Soviet citizenship and give up custody rights.

She accused them with holding her son “for ransom.”

In view of the settlement offer, her lawyers filed a $5-million damage suit against the Carvers to pressure them to deliver Tristan. It claimed that Paul and his parents physically abused her and Anna, which they deny. “They were pulling us into court for depositions as often as two times a week,” fumes Paul’s father. “It was malicious harassment using the courts to keep us from making a livelihood.”

By now, Tristan had been missing for 10 months, when Inna’s mother, on another visit, wound up at a local church last March 5. There, after the pastor prayed for help, Duane Adair, a boisterous wildcatter-turned-private eye, offered to take the case for expenses. Locals donated funds.

The FBI was making no progress.

It took Adair three weeks to crack the case. By tracking a Carver friend in Indiana, he located an Amish family who were horrified to learn they’d concealed Carver and the child under a phony name. Adair began following the Carver friend, explaining, “We were trying to flush Paul.” It worked.

Carver, his hair dyed black, surrendered to the sheriff of Goliad, Tex., claiming he held information vital to national security, that KGB agents were on his trail. Carver was arrested on the federal warrant but refused to reveal his son’s location.

Adair, meantime, flew down, and was tipped to an address in San Juan, Tex. He drove there, and, on a hunch, checked a nearby library where a clerk recognized Carver’s photo. Library records showed a telephone number across the border in Mexico.

Adair drove over and located a Mexican border guard and his wife, who had taken in Carver’s son while he traveled, believing the toddler’s mother was dead.

Elated, Inna flew down, moved in with the family and tried to prove she was the boy’s mother.

Tristan didn’t recognize her. He spoke only Spanish. “He had ringworm,” she says. “They loved him and spoiled him, but he drank Coca-Cola from the bottle and ate jalapeno peppers and popcorn off the floor.”

The family did not want to give the boy up. But the U.S. State Department had rousted a nearby American consul to produce documents verifying Inna’s custody claims.

After a four-day standoff, on Easter weekend last year, the Mexican family threw a barbecue to wish the boy they had baptized goodby.

Suddenly, the phone rang. It was Paul Carver’s father, who says he was urging the Mexican family to hold on to Tristan, as Inna climbed into the van with Adair and the boy, and eased across the border to America.

The next morning, March 28, she landed in Oklahoma with Tristan. Two days later, the FBI announced it was closing its “spy” investigation of her.

Out on a $1,000 bond, Paul defended his actions on a radio talk show. Panicked, Inna wanted her lawyers to promise Tristan would be safe but they couldn’t guarantee it, she says. “I’d gotten a lot of anonymous calls,” she says.

She asked and received permission to stay in the Soviet Embassy in Washington with her children for two weeks until her custody hearing.

Last April, she flew back to Oklahoma for a court date and won temporary custody and $400 a month in child support, an interim victory.

Paul Carver, at that hearing, was ordered to undergo psychological tests before he could visit his son again. He has refused, so far, to take the tests, saying he suffers from hypoglycemia and fears its symptoms may be misinterpreted as a mental disorder.

After a state appeals court rejected his constitutional challenge to the wife abandonment statute, he was ordered to trial in Tulsa County District Court on Dec. 4.

Judge William J. Musseman found sufficient evidence to convict him but withheld a finding of guilt and deferred sentencing for one year.

“Between now and then, Mr. Carver, you’re to be on your good behavior,” declared the judge. “That means no more trouble with the law. Do you understand that?”

“Yes sir,” said Carver, who can clear his record if he successfully completes the one-year probation.

With the divorce trial looming and lawyers discussing a settlement, Inna stays busy teaching Russian on an Oklahoma University campus, where glasnost is packing them in to overflow classes.

“She had quite an amazing introduction to a new country,” says department chairman Dragan Milivojevic, 59, who hired her to teach part time last fall, “but she’s really proved very resilient and very tough.”

She also faces an immigration hearing, which could wind up forcing her to go back to the Soviet Union with Tristan and Anna, although her lawyers are optimistic she will not be deported.

She hopes she has a choice. “I want to stay in America and show my children it’s possible to be happy here,” she says, “to live a noble life after so much horror. If I went back to Russia, I’d feel that our struggle had no meaning. But it’s made me feel like I can survive anything.”