Soviet Coup Leaves Some Emigres Shocked, Fearful

The coup in the Soviet Union has shocked many recent emigres now living in San Diego, turning what were whispered fears into reality and raising new anxieties over the possibility of civil war.

“I am scared. Nobody knows what is going on, nobody knows what has happened. What has happened to (Mikhail) Gorbachev? Is he sick? Nobody knows,” said a distressed Rachel Radomyshelsky, who came to the United States from Kiev in 1976 and still has relatives there.

The not knowing is what bothers many of the recent immigrants, as well as others with relatives in the Soviet Union, and they hovered near televisions and radios Sunday night and Monday.

“With every minute, it was something new and it was more scary than the minute before,” said Helen Kaminsky, director of Russian resettlement at the East County Jewish Community Center.

“People are horrified. People are scared to death. They are trying to reach their relatives, their loved ones, their friends. Most of them were expecting something would happen in Russia, but I don’t know anyone who was expecting something like that,” Kaminsky said.

The Jewish community is keeping a watchful eye on changes in the Soviet Union’s policies on immigration and religious freedom, and leaders in the community are appealing for calm.

After years of struggling to win broader immigration rights, Jewish citizens were allowed to leave the Soviet Union in much greater numbers during Gorbachev’s regime.

“I think that this is the wrong time for hysteria. The situation is just too fluid, and in the next 48 hours we will have a much better sense of the scenarios,” said Nadja Frank, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Federation.

Some Soviet citizens in the United States, however, are neither alarmed by the changes nor anxious about the outcome.

“I think that it is nothing, just new names. For normal Russian people, it doesn’t matter who will be on top, Gorby or (Russian President Boris) Yeltsin or (former Soviet premier Yuri) Andropov,” said Yuri Ovchinnikov, a figure skater from Leningrad who coaches skating in San Diego.

The 41-year-old former Olympian said Gorbachev’s policies, although giving him the freedom to embark on figure-skating tours that would not have been possible under previous regimes, left the markets empty.

“Gorby’s ideas and talk about perestroika were great, and they were good plans, but they were just plans, not real life,” he said.

Before Gorbachev, “everything was OK. Not great, but OK,” said Ovchinnikov, whose daughter and mother still live in Leningrad.

“Just imagine a market without any food. You can’t,” he said. “But it’s normal there. Maybe these new names will bring something new. Just simple, simple things like normal food and jobs.”

But even Ovchinnikov vacillates between hope and despair.

“I hope, outside, that maybe it will be better, but inside I don’t believe it,” he said.

In the meantime, Ovchinnikov will continue teaching under his three-year contract with the San Diego Ice Arena and sending money home.

Elsewhere, a sense of alarm ran through San Diego’s Soviet Jewish community.

“I’m devastated,” said Dolores Miller, who runs the Little Cafe on 8th Avenue downtown, a gathering place for many of San Diego’s estimated 6,000 Soviet Jews.

“They all think that there is going to be a civil war. They just don’t think it’s going to be settled painlessly,” said Miller, who has relatives in Moscow.

“I don’t know if I should continue writing letters to there or hold up . . . will I get them in trouble or what?” said Miller, who writes to her cousins once a week.

Boris Vladimilsky immigrated to San Diego from Odessa six months ago because he feared a coup might occur.

“We expected it, but we didn’t want to believe. It was a struggle between the optimistic and pessimistic features in our soul,” said the 42-year-old former film and theater critic who now edits a Russian newspaper in San Diego.

Vladimilsky, who moved to La Mesa with his wife, mother and two children, sees a dim future for his country.

“I liked Gorbachev during his first years, and it seemed to me that something in our country could be changed very easily, similar to the way that we saw Germany change,” he said. “But it is not so in the U.S.S.R. It is a very big, very complicated country with a very, very heavy tradition and 70 years of Soviet power that’s embedded in the psychology, the soul and minds of millions of Soviet citizens.

“The people were slaves during the last seven decades, and when they felt an order of freedom, it was something like a shock, and six years was not enough to adjust this huge state,” he said.

Vladimilsky feels that the recent actions have pushed his country to the brink of civil war.

“It’s not the end, it’s only the beginning,” he said.

Kaminsky plans to hold a meeting today at the East County Jewish Community Center to interpret the news broadcasts for many of the Russian emigres who do not speak English.

“They are scared to death, and they want to know what is going on,” Kaminsky said.

Rabbi Martin Levin of the Congregation Beth El in La Jolla said the fact that 60,000 Jews who hold exit visas to Israel are still in the Soviet Union demonstrates that the Jewish people have not learned one of the primary lessons of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany.

“One of the major lessons of the Holocaust was that, when evil comes, get out, or when there is an opportunity to get out, leave,” Levin said. Many Jews living in Germany during the Nazi regime chose to stay when they had a chance to leave, hoping that the government would not turn on them.

“The developments in the Soviet Union today are an indication that history does not progress linearly up toward perfection, but is rather like the stock market--up and down, up and down,” Levin said.

Many Jews in the Soviet Union had received exit visas to Israel, but, instead of leaving, they were waiting for the crowded living conditions in Israel to improve or to receive permission to come to the United States, Levin said.

Whether those exit visas will be honored by the new Soviet government, along with many other issues relating to the Jewish community, is unclear.

“There are some very real concerns in the Jewish community of what this will mean across a broad span of issues, not the least of which is will the Soviets be cooperative in the U.S.’s attempt to bring peace to the Middle East,” said Morris S. Casuto, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s San Diego office.

“Being hysterical doesn’t help anything. We simply must say let’s wait and see,” Casuto said.