THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508270046
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 191 lines
Viacheslav Pankratov is a casualty of the New World Order.
He fled the Soviet Union in the waning days of communism, looking for freedom and opportunity. His tortuous journey took him through 15 countries in 15 months. He traveled by foot, car, bus, boat and plane. Three times, he swam across rivers in the dead of night. He was jailed, robbed, and hunted by soldiers with guns and dogs.
In the Cold War's heyday, someone like Pankratov would have been hailed as a hero. America would have enfolded him as a trophy in the global struggle between capitalism and communism - as living proof that our system was better than theirs.
But when Pankratov finally reached the land of his dreams, he got a rude awakening. The Cold War was over. The Soviet empire was in shambles. The United States was becoming chummy with Russia, and across the land there was a rising tide of hostility towards immigrants.
Now Pankratov is battling a bureaucracy as faceless and unyielding as the one he left behind. The United States is trying to return him to his homeland, but Russia doesn't want him back.
He is a man without a country, just one in a swelling sea of foreigners chasing the American dream and finding that the welcome mat has been pulled back.
It was through music that Pankratov was first exposed to the ``decadent'' Western culture that lay behind the Iron Curtain.
Known as ``Slava'' to his friends, he was born in 1952 in the Soviet Asian republic of Turkmenistan. As a teenager in the 1960s, he heard the music of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other rockers played by radio stations in neighboring Iran before Islamic radicals overthrew the Shah and clamped down on Western influences.
He and some friends formed a band and began performing, but quickly ran afoul of authorities. The Western-style rock they preferred wasn't allowed. Their music had to follow prescribed themes of nation, work and party.
Pankratov applied to a music college but was turned down - a setback he attributes to discrimination against him as an ethnic Russian in a predominantly Muslim republic.
So he learned welding and went to work as a welder by day and musician by night.
In 1979, he migrated to Kaliningrad, a Baltic seaport in western Russia, where his independent spirit soon got him in trouble again. After standing up to his boss on behalf of himself and fellow workers in a pay dispute, he was fired from his welding job and evicted from his apartment.
In the late 1980s, reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of perestroika - ``restructuring'' - which allowed some semi-autonomous business enterprises. Pankratov and five partners pooled their resources and started a cooperative to manufacture boilers, piping and the like.
They found that they had to buy their supplies on the black market. When a Soviet official demanded a payoff to keep quiet about it, Pankratov said no.
Meanwhile, he had become involved with an anti-communist organization that was spreading the word about Solidarity, Lech Walesa's independent labor movement in Poland.
Once again, the authorities cracked down.
``I was told I was a bad example to lead the co-op,'' Pankratov said. ``I had put all my money in it. But I left, so the others could keep working. Then, I was evicted again.''
That was enough for Pankratov. Declaring he would never again work for a state enterprise, he renounced his Soviet citizenship. He told his story in an article published in an underground newspaper.
That left him with two alternatives: Go to jail or leave the country.
His odyssey began in the spring of 1990, while Gorbachev was still trying to reform the Soviet system from within.
Pankratov secured a temporary tourist visa and went to Hungary. Under cover of darkness, he swam across the Danube River into Slovakia, then part of Czechoslovakia. From there, he swam across another river, the Morava, into Austria.
In Vienna, he went to the U.S. Embassy to seek asylum, but was told he would have to make it to the United States first.
Out of money, he found a job in a factory, making window frames, and worked several months, saving $6,000.
Thinking he might be able to get on a U.S.-bound ship in the German port of Hamburg, he crossed the Danube again - this time on an inflatable mattress - but there were no ships leaving for two months.
Back in Austria, he found there was one country in the Western Hemisphere that would let him in: Argentina. So he bought a $1,500 ticket and flew to Buenos Aires.
He was befriended by an Argentine who gave him a ride across the Bolivian border, and from there he made it to Peru. In Lima, the capital, he was robbed by three street toughs, one armed with a knife, who tore up his Soviet passport.
He took a bus to the Ecuadoran border, and for $5 the border guard let him cross. From Ecuador, he flew to Panama.
From there, he walked across the border to Costa Rica, and for $27 got a visa that allowed him entry into Nicaragua.
``Nicaragua is the worst country I've ever seen,'' Pankratov said. ``The streets are dark at night. There's no electricity. It's like the Stone Age. The huts are made of palm leaves.''
For $5, a man he met showed him how to cross the border into Honduras. It was a trap. His benefactor delivered him to the Honduran border patrol. He was jailed for three days and returned to Nicaragua.
By now he had no identifying documents, and he knew he would be an easy mark if somebody wanted to rob and kill him. He sewed up his remaining cash in five secret pockets in his pants and shoes.
He found another Nicaraguan who promised to help him across the border. This time he kept his guard up. Instead of crossing where he was directed, he hid in some nearby bushes and waited.
As he watched, a Jeep filled with armed, uniformed men pulled up at the border. The Jeep's headlights were off. The men got out and combed the area with flashlights and a dog. Pankratov stayed put.
He decided the only way out was via Cuba. After paying the authorities $50, he was allowed to fly to Havana.
From there, he hopped a ride on a friendly Englishman's yacht to the Bahamas, where he slipped into a group of Austrian tourists and boarded a cruise ship bound for Florida.
On Oct. 2, 1991, he stepped off the boat at Fort Lauderdale, walked up to the first policeman he saw and told him his story.
Two months later, Gorbachev, the reformist communist leader, resigned. The Soviet Union was history.
Pankratov's new adversary is the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency charged with safeguarding the nation's borders.
On the advice of the Fort Lauderdale policeman, he headed for the INS office in Arlington, Va., and applied for asylum. He found a welding job in Baltimore and waited while the wheels of bureaucracy slowly turned.
Three years later, in November 1994, the INS denied his application, telling him he had failed to demonstrate ``past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution,'' and signaled its intent to begin deportation proceedings.
Pankratov, who has since moved to Norfolk, is appealing the decision - but he is not optimistic. He knows the odds against asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union have risen dramatically.
The INS' ``well-founded fear'' test, which was never really applied to Soviet immigrants in the days of communist rule, is now being applied rigidly. The results are apparent in the agency's statistics. The approval rate for asylum seekers from the ex-Soviet republics dropped from 51.5 percent in 1992 to 37.3 percent in 1993.
Acquaintances in the illegal-immigrant community have told Pankratov that he is crazy to try to obtain legal status. He would be better off, they tell him, to get some falsified identifying documents - which are easily available - and disappear among the millions of illegals who have settled around the country.
He doesn't want to do that. He wants to be legal.
He had a welding job at Dynamic Manufacturing in Virginia Beach, but quit when his temporary employment authorization expired. He didn't want to get his employer in trouble.
His supervisor there, Barry Blue, said Pankratov was a good, productive worker with a positive attitude.
``We hated to see him go,'' Blue said. ``We were going to do everything we could do to keep him in the country.''
Pankratov has taken several temporary jobs while he waits for his case to run its course. Even temporary work is technically illegal, but he has to eat.
``I want to live honestly,'' he said, sitting in his bare, three-room apartment in East Ocean View. ``I want to feel good about myself.''
``I will try all legal ways'' to get documented, he said. ``Without documents, you are not a man. You are a phantom.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Viacheslav Pankratov
Graphic
STEVE STONE/Staff
THE WORLD'S MOST HOSPITABLE NATIONS
SOURCE: U.S. Committee for Refugees
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
Photos
MARK MITCHELL/Staff
Viacheslav Pankratov, a Russian immigrant living illegally in the
United States, journeyed through 15 countries in 15 months to get
here. His living conditions are spare, as he quit a steady job as a
welder so that his employer would not get in trouble for employing
an illegal immigrant.
Pankratov, known as ``Slava'' to his friends, takes a brief rest in
Panama.
KEYWORDS: IMMIGRANTS RUSSIA PROFILE by CNB