Children were staring. Parents were peeking. The fifty-odd people milling together in the departures area here seemed just a little . . . off. It was not that some were speaking Russian—this was, after all, the international terminal. It’s that this crowd seemed not so much Third World as Old World. Many were dressed in sturdy, unattractive clothing, and a little too much of it, like 1910s immigrants at Ellis Island. For the few men who were bewhiskered, it was in one of two styles: Marx or Rasputin. Nearly everyone wore a woolen muffler around the neck, as though it were part of a dress code. Both men and women had positioned themselves beneath big cylindrical Cossack-style fur hats.
Just a little . . . off.
As it turned out, their story was compelling, not comic. These were unwitting political pawns during the final momentous, pitiful last days of the Cold War.
All fifty were Russian émigrés who, years after coming to the United States in search of freedom and plenty, had chosen to return to the Soviet Union. Many had become U.S. citizens. This was not the ordinary direction of immigration between the Soviet Union and the United States—it was essentially a rare reverse commute—and it was no accident it was happening all at once, the largest one-day repatriation of Russians from the U.S. in anyone’s memory. The flight would be briefly delayed when Aeroflot realized it needed a bigger plane.
For years, the Soviet Union had been denying the vast majority of return-home requests from those who had emigrated to the West. Shrewdly—cynically?—the Soviet government had now decided to honor most of these requests on the same day, with prearranged transportation, which meant there would be a long line of people disillusioned by life in America, all together in one place waiting for the same flight, and all available to the U.S. media, who had been tipped off and were there to witness this unusual scene and dutifully record the kvetches. Many of these returnees were Jewish.
It was a double propaganda bonanza for the Soviets. First, it suggested that America was not the Shangri-la it was widely rumored to be—that to Russians accustomed to a certain way of life, the United States could be inhospitable and disappointing, even terrifying. Second, it demonstrated that Russia was serious about glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s social reform policy relaxing Soviet-era limits on personal freedoms. In the past, émigrés to the United States had been regarded as turncoats. The fifty at the airport were, at least publicly, being welcomed home warmly.
So yes, it was something of a manufactured event. These people represented a minuscule proportion of Russians who had come to the United States; virtually all of the thirty-five thousand who had arrived here since 1981 had chosen to stay. But those facts didn’t complicate the news reports of the weekend of December 28. For the Russians, as they say, the optics were great. As was the audio.
‘‘I’m really anxious to get back,’’ Taras Kordonsky told The New York Times at the airport. ‘‘I felt immediately I didn’t belong here. I felt so negative emotionally, so homesick.’’
“America for Americans, Russia for Russians,” Vladimir Troshinsky succinctly informed the Associated Press. He’d worked in the United States as a taxi driver and auto mechanic, but said he wanted to be a chemical engineer and felt he had a better chance at an education in Russia.
The AP quoted a limo driver named Alexander Cherkasets complaining that life in New York was “harsh,” with too much greed, crime, and poverty.
The Soviets seized on this sentiment and ran with it. Aleksei Zhvakin, vice consul for the Soviet embassy, told the media in a sonorous voice that the émigrés were “afraid of destroying their children.” The United States is too violent and too permissive, he said: Russian parents “don’t want their children to be criminals.” Soviet radio in the United States concurred. The people who were returning, said the announcer, could not bear “the ruthless competition, the spirit of money-making, crime and drug addiction.”
It may have been managed news, but it was effectively managed news. In the ongoing game of propaganda points, the Soviet Union had just raked in a pile of red chips.
Lost in the crowd at the airport was a colorful family of four. Valery Klever and his wife, Lidiya, were with their two children, chestnut-haired daughter Karina, who was sixteen, and two-year-old son Nikita, a winsome tousle-haired blond.
Even at first glance, the Klever family seemed nothing like the homogenized Cleavers from the 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver. Valery was pale-skinned, projecting a dignified melancholy. He wore a drab trench coat like McGruff the Crime Dog and one of those Rasputin beards that tapered down a half foot beneath his chin. No one could mistake Valery Klever for a local. His wife, part Greek, part Ukrainian, was darker of skin, and similarly somber of mien. The baby was a baby. But daughter Karina seemed from another world altogether, even at first glance. She wore faded jeans and a fashionably sloppy top; she’d been in the United States since she was eight years old, and it showed. She was an American teenager.
The Klevers were not interviewed in New York. Whatever their story was, they would carry it back with them to Moscow.
As the fifty émigrés trundled toward their flight, you couldn’t help but notice something. Disillusioned though they may have been, they clearly understood there were trade-offs in what they were doing, that a different, more austere life awaited. Many were burdened with packages—electronics and other luxuries purchased in New York and in short supply in Russia. Taras Kordonsky, the homesick man who felt he didn’t belong here, carried a bass guitar. One woman had an electric typewriter and a videocassette recorder. These people were heading home voluntarily, but hardly naively.
Packages thumping against knees and thighs and walkway walls, they shuffled forward toward their plane and into their new, old lives.
TWELVE HOURS LATER the group was in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. In New York, the Soviet government had not been in charge, and things did not seem choreographed. Not so now. This was unapologetically stage-managed.
As the plane unloaded, a harried-looking silver-haired man in a platinum-colored suit and tie stood in the terminal with a megaphone, barking orders. Beside him, to get this all on record, was a woman wrestling with a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder—all but obsolete in 1980s America, but apparently still state of the art in Soviet Russia. Even before they went through customs, the émigrés were shepherded into a room filled with Western news correspondents. The returning Russians were urged: Talk, talk.
They talked. The first passenger off the plane was Rebecca Kotsap. She was crying.
“There’s nothing more important than your motherland,” she said, her voice breaking. “I kiss my native soil with happiness.” She said that in America she had cowered in fear of crime. “We cannot live there. It’s a foreign people, a foreign language, a foreign life.”
These were mostly blue-collar, working-class people for whom English was a second or third language, but they spoke it with poetic sparseness. A sad-eyed man with one of those Karl Marx beards, holding a three-year-old child in a gaily colored clown-face hat, told CBS with a shrug, in a heavy accent but without even a momentary break in cadence: “I miss my mother, my relatives, my friends, my culture, my city.”
The Soviets were adept at propaganda, and propaganda was deemed a legitimate tool of the state, but American news media felt manipulated and defensively swept themselves into the spin business as well. The CBS segment ended with correspondent Wyatt Andrews pointing out that international travel between the United States and Russia had historically been a one-way street. When the Russians decided to go back home, he said, the American government didn’t hassle them or move to block their departure. A lesson the Soviets never intended to deliver, Andrews dryly and accurately noted, was that “the émigrés had to use the freedom of America in order to leave it.”
It was here in the terminal that the American media found the Klever family and first began to puzzle out who they were. Valery—the melancholic father with the Rasputin beard—was part of a midcentury underground artistic movement in Russia called Nonkonformizm, a word that needs no translation. When Klever had been driven into exile in 1977 along with other painters, he was as famous among Russian artists as he was reviled by Communist party apparatchiks.
Under Soviet repression, Klever’s work had been exhibited mostly in secret, advertised by hushed word of mouth, often displayed in the homes of like-minded dissidents. Sometimes his pieces were confiscated. Once, famously, they were literally bulldozed.
When Klever left Russia, his work was mostly in oil or watercolor or charcoal on paper; his painting style was mainly an amalgam of the influential artists he admired: Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Chagall. But the artist he most resembled, perhaps, was not a painter but a writer from the 1930s: Mikhail Bulgakov, author of novels that savaged the Soviet government effectively but obliquely, through parable, metaphor, and allegory. In Bulgakov’s best-known work, The Master and Margarita, people aren’t “disappeared,” they literally disappear—poof!—in the middle of the street, and no one seems to think there is anything unusual about it, because it is the way of life. It was unsubtle, but also plausibly deniable.
In Klever’s painting titled No Trespassing, a man whose head is wrapped in linen, like a mummy—he is both muzzled and blinded by his bandages—lovingly holds a naked woman. They are behind the picket fence that surrounds their home, on which they have placed a NO TRESPASSING sign. But the fence has an eye in it. Message: Any effort at privacy in such a world is futile. Any effort at individualism will be in vain; all men’s faces are made to look the same, and all are silenced.
Some of Klever’s art is more opaque but no less dark. A mother in a headscarf has four eyes. She stands disconsolately at the feet of a soldier who is also mummified—blinded and gagged. He holds a samovar. Upon a cross is a severed hand, punctured as from a crucifixion. Eventually Klever would explain to would-be buyers that this was retelling an incident he had experienced when in the Red Army, where good morale was considered patriotism, depression was seen as a weakness of resolve, and suicide on the battlefield was deemed a crime against the state. Soldiers who took their own lives were treated as “deserters,” Klever said, and were buried at night, in secrecy, often near the enemy dead.
Klever remembered a mother’s arriving at his platoon to ask about her missing son. Those multiple eyeballs suggested her confusion and agony. Klever’s fellow soldiers initially told her that her son had died but, following policy, did not tell her it was suicide or where he was buried. Afterward, the soldiers covertly erected a cross over his body—defying the government’s edicts against the practice of religion—and brewed tea at his grave in a ceremony of respect.
There was other Klever art that was not opaque at all: Joseph Stalin grinning grotesquely, with blood dripping from a tooth.
In the airport, the Klevers were interviewed by The New York Times’s Moscow correspondent Bill Keller, who would eventually become the newspaper’s executive editor. Considering their background, the Klevers’ explanation for their departure from America was surprisingly prosaic: They couldn’t make a go of it financially in a country where economic success depended not on talent so much as self-marketing. Yes, they’d been persecuted when in Russia, they said, but they hoped that glasnost would resolve all that.
The family was willing to renounce its American citizenship, Lidiya Klever said, a statement perhaps more directed at her Russian handlers nearby than at the American press.
Mordantly, Valery Klever said that in the United States, it was dog-eat-dog. “What kind of freedom is there? It’s tough freedom, you have to worry about your life and your apartment, your bills every month, everything. A man has to become a wolf there to survive,” he said. His wife added: “Every month, every day, I was waiting for the next dollar to pay bills.”
But the best ten seconds of screen time belonged to Karina, the pretty sixteen-year-old. She affected a modified pout and eye roll, familiar and not entirely repellent to every parent of American teenagers. Karina’s aim was to decry Western materialism and superficiality (though she seems to have managed to find the time to apply lipstick before letting the cameras approach). Positioned beside her baby brother, in a riveting, eloquent sound bite, Karina Klever said this about her life in high school, in perfect, unaccented English:
“They say that you can be with this group if you have eight pair of jeans. I say that I don’t have eight pair of jeans. I say I don’t even if I do, because I don’t want people to know me for my pants.”
They were Jordache’s.
KARINA KLEVER IS NOW FORTY-NINE. She has lived in the United States for more than thirty years. She owns a million-dollar five-bedroom house in the L.A. suburb of Thousand Oaks, a home she shares with her mother and Elijah, her son from a long-ago marriage. Elijah is a sound engineer—Karina converted a walk-in closet to a sound studio for him. Her brother, the baby Nikita, has legally changed his name to Nik and directs short feature films and commercials. Karina owns her own company, Klever Compliance. She is a highly sought-after consultant in IT management, with a six-figure income. She also administers a website, kleverart.com, which exhibits and sells her late father’s paintings. She is very much an American.
To understand how she got to this life, and why, you have to go back to 1986 to revisit from the inside out the confounding, deeply misinformed final days of the Cold War. Some of it touches directly on the events of Sunday, December 28.
IN 1986, in relations between the Americans and the Soviets, no one really knew what the hell was going on. Nothing was quite as it seemed to be.
Gorbachev and Reagan held each other in wary respect, but there was one enormous bone of contention upon which each man was intransigent—the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars. Star Wars was Reagan’s pet project, with the ambitious, arguably fanciful goal of establishing a land- and satellite-based defensive shield that could shoot down incoming ballistic missiles before they reached their targets. Reagan insisted that the United States be allowed to continue to develop the program for the next ten years; Gorbachev was amenable in theory, but only in theory. He insisted that this program be limited to laboratory work—in effect, that the United States could not build and test prototypes. Neither man would budge, and the summit broke up without any agreement at all—not on missiles or any of the other issues Reagan had hoped to slap on the table: human rights, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and emigration of Jews and dissidents.
The whole thing stank of failure. The participants seemed defeated. Their body language was revealing, and something they made little effort to hide. In the most widely published photograph from Reykjavík, Reagan and Gorbachev walk side by side. Reagan is in a white coat. His Soviet counterpart is in a black coat. Both are frowning, looking not at each other but gloomily at the ground.
Both men and their staffs claimed there had been incremental progress, but to many this seemed like wan, transparent face-saving. In the media, the event was generally interpreted as a blown opportunity. A dud.
As it happens, it was anything but. Obscured by the dispiriting atmosphere, something remarkable had occurred. During a trade of proposals to rescue the talks, both leaders had offered escalating disarmament concessions that went beyond anything many had thought possible. Reagan had broached the eventual goal of bilateral elimination of all nuclear weapons, and Gorbachev agreed. After the stench of failure had lifted, this realization led to a realignment of possibilities and priorities for both countries. In less than a year, it would result in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which led to the destruction of thousands of missiles. It is considered a historic breakthrough. No dud.
In late December, determined to persuade the world that glasnost was real, Gorbachev released Andrei Sakharov from his seven-year exile in the heavily policed city of Gorky. There the dapper, dignified political dissident had lived with his wife under constant surveillance and harassment—prevented from traveling, prohibited from speaking publicly. (None of this was new for Sakharov—it was merely more draconian than what he was used to. When Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, the Soviets did not allow him to leave the country to attend the ceremonies in Oslo.) His release in late December 1986 was instant, international news.
Sakharov had been an ingenious nuclear physicist, instrumental in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. In the late 1950s, aghast at what his work had wrought and also at the repression of free speech by the Soviet government, Sakharov became an activist for disarmament and human rights. In the United States, he was lionized—in 1983, Reagan declared May 21 National Andrei Sakharov Day.
And so three years later—on this Sunday, December 28, 1986—it came as something of a shock when ABC aired an interview with the newly released dissident. Speaking with authority in both his roles as a physicist and antinuclear activist, Sakharov essentially said he thought that Star Wars was an idiot idea, an enormous waste of time and resources that, if built, could easily be circumvented by Soviet science. He added, almost as an afterthought, that because of ill health he would no longer have a leadership role in the human rights movement.
What? Reagan was angry and unnerved. Many in the media were skeptical. Had there been a corrupt deal? Had the great man traded his integrity for his freedom? Sakharov was actually asked about this several times and denied it . . . but of course he would. What was really going on?
What was really going on was that Sakharov was still a man of honor and conscience. There had been no deal, as became clear by the scientist’s subsequent unalloyed criticisms of the Soviet Union. What he’d said about Star Wars was simply the truth, evident to anyone with the facts and training to understand them: It was an idiot idea, financially and technologically. Without ceremony, the program that had torpedoed an international summit was abandoned by the United States not long afterward, after having lost most political support.
And Sakharov was in ill health—he’d be dead in less than three years, at sixty-eight.
AS THE SAKHAROV INTERVIEW was being edited for broadcast at the ABC studios in New York, the ultimate in Cold War incompetence was bumbling out in a room at a Holiday Inn near Heathrow Airport in London. There, a polygrapher from the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service was interrogating a slight, frightened, naive young Native American U.S. Marine sergeant named Clayton Lonetree. Temperamentally, the twenty-five-year-old from St. Paul, Minnesota, seemed dull-witted, servile, and emotionally immature—somewhere between a schmendrick and a tool. He was also a depressive and an aspiring alcoholic. An eventual psychological study of him, conducted by the government after his case was over, concluded that “his capacity to feel is greater than his rational capability.” And: “He displays an unconventional thought process that is rich in fantasy.”
This was the man being grilled at the Holiday Inn. Lonetree had been a security officer in the U.S embassy in Moscow, and on this day, he stood accused of espionage: passing classified information to the KGB. He’d allegedly done most of it through an intermediary named Violetta Seina, a tall, dark-eyed, sultry Russian beauty who worked in the embassy as a translator and who had contacts with the KGB. She had seduced Lonetree in what people in the spy trade colorfully call a “honey trap.”
All of that was basically true. In the hotel room, Lonetree was admitting it, and further volunteered that the KGB had paid him $3,500 for his work. He’d done it, he said, because he was lonely and lovesick and vulnerable, and mostly because he was caught up in the intense, international drama of the thing. Temperamentally, he remained an adolescent.
But his inquisitor had a big problem: There had been recent security breaches within the American spy network. Some had dreadful consequences. The Soviet Union had apprehended and executed several Russian informants who had been valuable assets for the United States.
The United States obviously harbored a mole somewhere, with access to the most sensitive of data, but investigators had gotten nowhere in trying to ferret out who he was. Was Lonetree their man? Maybe, but the timorous sergeant was admitting to no such thing. The betrayals he acknowledged were mostly paltry. The documents he said he’d handed over to his Soviet contacts were items like the floor plan of the U.S. embassy and embassy telephone directories. Some of the stuff was technically classified but of no practical value to the Russians. He also said he had given documents to the KGB when he was briefly stationed in Vienna. None of it was big-deal stuff. None of it was likely to get people killed.
Lonetree was nearing the end of the third frustrating day of interrogation, and he still wasn’t budging. The questioners decided they would have to push harder. It would be a consequential decision.
According to journalist Rodney Barker in his 1996 book on the case, Dancing with the Devil: Sex, Espionage, and the U.S. Marines, here is how the subsequent questioning went:
“Come on, Clayton. If you don’t cooperate, we are going to burn your ass. We know you are holding back. Now tell me the truth.”
Lonetree answered that he had been telling the truth.
“Well, tell us more.”
“There IS no more.”
“Talk to us, Clayton. Come on, talk to us.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“Say something. Say anything. Say that the walls are green, whatever. Just talk to me.”
“Do you want me to lie to you?”
“Okay, make something up. Tell me a lie.”
Tell me a lie. It was a controversial challenge from a polygrapher to a suspect, and a potentially perilous one. The idea is that if you get a person talking more volubly, sometimes inventions lead to the inadvertent spilling of truth. “Tell me a lie” may sometimes work. Here it didn’t.
The suggestible and ingratiating young sergeant apparently tried to accommodate his interrogator: He said he had penetrated highly classified parts of the embassy, brought KBG agents in at night, and let them page through files. He said he had retrieved highly classified information and turned it over to Violetta and her “Uncle Sasha,” who was a KGB agent. The sergeant confessed to other heinous actions by saying yes, and even elaborating, when his interrogators suggested other crimes of which he might be guilty. Significantly, he wept, which was taken as an indelible suggestion of remorse. Most likely, what had actually happened was that this high-strung, emotionally stunted man prone to histrionics had become overwhelmed by his own fantasies. But some of the investigators believed they had their mole. They’d cracked the case! Lonetree was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty years in prison, and the big spy case was apparently closed. Unless it wasn’t.
It wasn’t. What eventually became clear was that although Lonetree had committed espionage, it was of the relatively benign kind he’d volunteered before he was urged to lie. Afterward, he had confessed to having entered embassy areas to which he simply had no access while giving “tours” to KGB agents, tours that never happened. He fingered a co-conspirator, a Corporal Arnold Bracy, and though both Bracy and Lonetree admitted to these supposed crimes under relentless questioning, Bracy immediately recanted his statement, saying he’d been coerced. Further investigation proved Lonetree and Bracy had never been together with an opportunity to do what they were accused of.
It just didn’t fly. Charges against Bracy were dropped, but initially no one seemed to wonder if Lonetree’s sentence deserved some rethinking. Eventually the American government stumbled on the right man: a crafty, incorrigible, Milquetoast-like CIA counterintelligence double agent named Aldrich Ames. Ames had turned over names. People had been executed.
An extensive follow-up investigation conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service after Lonetree’s sentencing concluded that though the sergeant had turned over some materials to the KGB, “he did not commit the much further-reaching espionage activities alleged.” Lonetree’s sentence was cut in half and he was released after serving nine years.
Did the rush to judgment on Lonetree leave the U.S. intelligence services complacent, confident that the bigger case had been solved? Some in the spy trade think so, and that the error gifted Ames with six more years of deadly treachery before he was caught.
That’s what 1986 was like in Russian-American relations: a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misrepresentations, misapprehensions, missed opportunities, and misguided hopes, a year that ended with the Klever family’s return to Russia in earnest search of a better life.
“IT WAS A MISTAKE,” Karina Klever says today, echoing precisely what her father said upon his family’s return to the United States after only five and a half months in Leningrad.
The Klevers’ experience wasn’t atypical. The Soviet government would eventually confirm that by 1988, at least fifteen of the original fifty repatriates who’d left the United States with such fanfare had quietly returned. And those figures were incomplete—the actual total may have been closer to half. Among the returnees was Alexander Cherkasets, the limo driver who’d said at the airport that life in the U.S. was too “harsh,” filled with poverty and crime. His turnaround wasn’t quite as quick as that of the Klevers. He was back in the United States in sixteen months. That was about the average.
What on earth had happened?
KARINA KLEVER STILL BEARS the no-nonsense air of defiance that was evident at Sheremetyevo Airport, when as a sixteen-year-old she was bitching about the need to stockpile Jordache jeans in order to be socially accepted. Today she’s six feet tall, with lush shoulder-length hair that she wears swept up when she is at work, the better to command respect from the rooms full of men she advises. She loves the United States, but still finds some things infuriating: the same sort of trivial materialisms that bothered her as a girl, but have now matured into issues of adulthood. She’s mostly an American, but retains a bit of the Old World in her, too.
“I’m extremely socially inept here,” she says, laughing. “I can stand up and create IT environments for multimillion-dollar global companies, but I can’t do chitter-chatter noise. I don’t like that the first twenty minutes of a business meeting is talking about last night’s sitcoms, or how someone bought a fancy whiz-bang car. It’s not an efficient use of time, but, you know, I let it go.”
She laughs. She’s wrestling with a fundamental paradox.
“I don’t mean to be insulting. I just don’t get a lot of what Americans find important. I don’t think the Kardashians should be part of my life.”
No nonsense. No frills. No showing off. Karina Klever, stylish American, has never even gotten her ears pierced.
The Klevers had no choice about leaving the Soviet Union the first time, in 1977: They were kicked out by the government, along with other artistic dissidents. A planeload of a hundred-odd political pains in the ass were told, Karina recalls, that they could get dropped off at their choice of any of three cities: Jerusalem, Vienna, or Paris. The Klevers chose Vienna. It took two years to wend their way over the Atlantic, to L.A., to Maine, to upstate New York, and finally, to Flatbush, Brooklyn.
The departure from Russia that first time had been bittersweet and complicated. Yes, the Klevers were uprooted against their will, separated from everything they knew, and they were uprooted for patently unjust reasons. No, Karina would never again see her beloved maternal grandmother, a physician. Requests to visit, as the old woman lay dying, were denied by the Soviets. But leaving Russia had brought relief as well. Few in the West, Klever says now, knew the sorts of outrages that disobedient artists had to endure. Some of those outrages even reached a six-year-old, quite directly.
At six, Karina Klever slept in the bottom drawer of a dresser, acting as a human shield—or, more precisely, a human decoy. The idea was that her presence might dissuade any KGB agents who entered the apartment from pushing aside the dresser, behind which was a false wall, behind which was a trove of her father’s artwork. There were raids, but they never found the art.
Life in Soviet Russia, Klever says, was as threadbare and politically stifling as the rest of the world generally understood, but aggravated for some families, such as hers, by the constant threat of arrest, punishment, or deportation. Mostly, she said, the system did not even remotely prepare them for what they would find in the United States.
“The Soviet Union infantilized people,” she says. “The government issued you things, they gave you a place to live, they gave you whatever they felt you needed. You became entitled, dependent, compliant, and complacent. You were kind of on perpetual welfare—your basics are taken care of, but you are not well off. You learned to accept that. You remained a child. When my parents arrived here in 1979, my father was forty and my mother was thirty, and they didn’t know to put money in the bank, they didn’t know what real estate was. The adjustment was apocalyptic. It gave them a feeling of cultural incompetence.”
Plus, their source of income withered. Nobody wanted original subversive paintings decrying Russian totalitarianism, even by an artist who was famous in Europe.
“People wanted $29.99 posters of seascapes or flowers or an ocean scene,” Karina says, laughing. “Art can be about where you find your serenity. Americans tend to find it in nonstressful, feel-good things. Russians are very different. Russians take their stress with them and hold it close to their chest, like a badge. It delivers pride. Russians want Stalin, dripping blood from a tooth.”
So in the United States, the family was going broke. Lidiya Klever, ever resourceful, sewed clothing for Karina from curtains and draperies. This did not exactly help her fit in at school.
The worst part, Karina says, was when her classmates accused her of wanting to kill them.
It would happen fairly regularly, she says, particularly in L.A. around 1980, after nuclear readiness drills—during the very last days of those silly duck-and-cover exercises in the classroom. Teachers rolled out TV sets that displayed a cartoon image of a nuclear missile leaving the Soviet Union and then showed the children how to hide under desks and tables to avoid incineration.
“Those are the days I got punched,” Klever says. “Sticks to the legs, skin scratched, hair pulled out. I was called a commie. I was the girl who didn’t speak English well—maybe I had a nuclear weapon up my sleeve. I was nine.”
When the Gorbachev government started making noises about academic and artistic freedom, the Klever family applied to the Soviet Union for visas to return. For one thing, they had dozens of paintings stashed in the homes of fellow dissidents, paintings they wanted to recover. For another . . . maybe things had really changed in the last nine years. It took a while for the visas to be approved, until a whole planeload of returnees was ready to go.
WHAT THE KLEVERS found when they got back was bewildering. In some ways, things had changed profoundly. Restrictions on art and personal freedoms had been loosened, but a feeling of institutional dry rot remained, and, oddly, it seemed to have intensified. It hadn’t—it’s just that at this point, there was a comparison to draw.
As promised, the Klevers had been issued an apartment in Leningrad . . . which they had to share with another family. It was a large apartment, but the whole arrangement—enforced lack of privacy—echoed the sort of famously shabby, make-do subsistence accommodations of life in a shtetl.
For the returnees, there were creaky remnants of Cold War repression that were hard to understand and impossible to justify: Restrictions on travel remained intact, even within the country. Having the right papers remained essential. For some, having lived in the United States remained a stain on your work papers; despite having returned with a warm welcome, some of these people were denied jobs because they were deemed to be “traitors.” Jobs were scarce. Good jobs were scarcer.
The Russian economy remained a jury-rigged affair, but somehow now it felt more ratty and shopworn than before. In the United States the Klevers had gotten Americanized in ways they didn’t even realize. The family had gotten a lingering taste—sometimes literally—of what capitalism could provide.
“In the United States in 1986,” Karina Klever says, “if you wanted fresh watermelon at two o’clock in the morning in January, you could go out and get fresh watermelon at two o’clock in the morning in January. In Russia, in 1986, if you had fish but you wanted peas, you had to hope you could find a neighbor who had peas but wanted fish.
“Once we went to a friend’s house, and I remember this exchange, which seemed so normal to them: The sister came over, we were standing in the kitchen, and she said she’d give me three cans of peas for my two bags of beans. That was the state of the economy.”
In the space of less than a year, the Klevers had witnessed a collision of two philosophies of life. One was hard to navigate: It was outwardly implacable and heartless, and demanded extraordinary personal accountability—but it mostly worked. The other was outwardly devoted to social comity and shared bounty, offering people a protective cocoon—but the whole system was in extremis, on life support.
The United States offered opportunity that seemed absent in Russia. A practical woman, Lidiya Klever found herself thinking like a hesitant but hopeful entrepreneur—thinking like an American, pushed by fear and hope—wondering about taking IT classes, getting a job in a cutting-edge industry, becoming the breadwinner for the family. The United States could make that happen. (And this is in the end what happened. Karina would follow her mother into the IT field and get pretty adept at it.)
So, Karina, that is why your family went back? Because the economy wasn’t working?
“Not really. We might have stayed. There were things about Russia we loved.”
Was it still about artistic freedom?
“Not really. That was changing.”
Well, what was it about?
“It was mostly that the Soviet government refused to make us citizens unless we renounced our American citizenship. They forced us to make a choice.
“So we did.”
Forced to make a choice—and able to make a choice—they made a choice. When you think about it, this was pretty much exactly how the Cold War ended.