Emigres, Visitors in O.C. Cheer at Collapse of Coup

Dread turned to jubilation Wednesday morning for Soviet emigres and visitors across Orange County when they learned that an attempted coup had failed in the Soviet Union. And many called it a historic turning point that spells better times ahead for the nation and its people.

“We are really glad and really proud,” said an elated Marina Ouzdin, a Russian graduate student at Cal State Fullerton who is living in Irvine. “We are going to celebrate with good conversation and dinner with the American family we are living with.”

Ouzdin still has been unable to reach her parents in her hometown of Yaroslavel. But the 33-year-old linguistics student was buoyed by the swift rejection of the hard-line Communist leaders, something that had seemed impossible only two days earlier to both Ouzdin and her husband, Vladimir, who is visiting her this summer with their 9-year-old daughter.

“We think the democratic process will move really fast after this victory,” she said. “The people showed that they cannot live anymore under a government that wants to be a dictatorship. It could be done even five years ago, but now there’s no way back.”

Angela Nelsas literally jumped into the air when she saw the morning news Wednesday in her daughter’s home in New Jersey.

“This is a very heady feeling,” said the Fullerton woman, who is president of the Baltic American Freedom League and a leader of the Lithuanian independence movement in the United States. “I saw that finally the shadow of fear has fallen away. Once and for all, we see that the people are for democracy and against the old ways.”

The turn of events bodes well, Nelsas said, for independence movements in her native Lithuania and the neighboring Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia.

“If the Soviets move toward democracy and law and order, they will have to recognize that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied illegally (after World War II), and they will have to resolve this before they can be accepted in the world community,” she said. “The old empire will have to be dissolved.”

Boris Gurevich was equally thrilled, but for a different reason. The takeover had initially halted business transactions in Moscow for his Irvine firm, BG International, a marketing and distribution rights company that also seeks joint manufacturing ventures between U.S. interests and the U.S.S.R.

He was awakened at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday by faxes from Moscow that said everything was fine and “let’s proceed with business.”

“We will celebrate tonight--you know, vodka and dancing, the normal thing,” said Gurevich, 45, a Muscovite who came to Orange County 10 years ago. “This is history. It’s really exciting.”

Remembering the Soviet Union he left a decade ago as a Jew immigrating to the United States, Gurevich had feared that glasnost and perestroika had not been around long enough to change the nation or its people.

“I was worried because I felt that 5 1/2 years of a taste of freedom would be not enough for the people to really fight,” he said. “Obviously the taste of freedom is so sweet that they came into the streets and fought to support Yeltsin, and I feel very good about that.”

Ari Khagi was driving to his pharmaceutical engineering job in Irvine Wednesday morning when he heard the coup had failed.

“I was so happy and so proud,” said the 30-year-old El Toro man, a Soviet Jew who immigrated to the United States with his engineer parents, his wife and their two small sons in 1989. “This is just great because it means the Soviet Union has become a civilized nation that values freedom. I don’t think any country can achieve anything without freedom.”

Khagi said the flight of the coup leaders and the return of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the face of a popular uprising caught him by surprise. His native Tashkent, a major city in central Asia, was not so glasnost- minded when he and his family left there two years ago.

“I just felt then that I could not live in a country where every day you expect something like what happened on Monday--something like a civil war,” he said. “If you can measure freedom, you must remember there is much more freedom in Moscow and Leningrad than in Tashkent.”

That is also why Khagi remains worried about his grandparents, an aunt and an uncle who were scheduled to immigrate to the United States this Friday. Neither he nor his mother have been able to get a phone call through to learn whether the quartet were able to leave Tashkent for Moscow on Monday.

But the Khagi family is hoping for the best. Now that the rightist coup has failed, even if their relatives were unable to leave on schedule, he believes any delay will only be for a short time.

All in all, Wednesday’s news seemed cause for thanksgiving.

“We’ll celebrate it somehow,” Khagi said.