Politics
Politics Red Square
Texas scientist Arnold Lockshin defected to Russia to find a new life. Has the collapse of communism shattered his dreams?
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Here in Texas their story seemed absurd, beyond comprehension. Their lives had been totally ordinary, hardly the stuff of spy novels. Lockshin was a well-paid cancer researcher who commuted from his suburban house in southwest Houston to his lab, which was affiliated with St. Joseph Hospital. His wife, Lauren, walked their three children to the bus stop every morning, complained about ragweed to her neighbors, and ran a small marketing company from their home that distributed food samples to grocery stores. The three Lockshin children—Jennifer, then 15, Jeffrey, 11, and Michael, 5—did what most American children do: They went to school, rode bicycles, played basketball, and were ferried to various activities in the family’s Chevrolet. Why would anyone trade that life for long food lines, bitter winters, and a cramped apartment? Moreover, why would a Jewish family move to a country whose own Jewish dissidents were desperate to emigrate? Lockshin himself provided an answer of sorts in one of his earliest Moscow television appearances. He said that he would rather wait in line five hours a day for bread and milk in Russia than face political harassment in the United States.
As my search for Lockshin went on, I learned that he and his family now enjoy lives of relative ease, at least by Moscow standards. They live in a section of Moscow called Lenin Hills, which isn’t exactly Highland Park or River Oaks but is still Moscow’s nicest neighborhood, situated on a bluff overlooking the Moscow River and surrounded by several large parks. The apartment complexes are large brick-and-concrete high rises, but they were not built as close together as the massive older apartment buildings in the center of the city. Most of the city’s intellectuals and ranking government officials live in Lenin Hills, and on Saturdays and Sundays newlyweds come from all over Moscow to have their pictures taken at a scenic overlook. The best medical facilities in the city are nearby.
Still, life in Lenin Hills is hard when compared with life in any middle-class neighborhood in Texas. There are no lush green back yards, grocery stores are empty of fruits and vegetables in winter, and stylish, well-stocked retail shops are nonexistent. Few people in Lenin Hills or any part of Moscow drive cars; they use the always-crowded subway. And they stand in line for everything from medical care to the latest museum exhibit. After all, how privileged can life be in a city without telephone books?
I took a taxi to the All-Union Cancer Research Center, on the outskirts of Lenin Hills. The center is in a new white concrete skyscraper, comparable in scale to the buildings at Houston’s Texas Medical Center. I knew that somewhere inside, Lockshin presides over a large cancer-research laboratory, but even though I was within a few hundred yards of him, I couldn’t find him, because I couldn’t make myself understood. Frustrated, I returned to the hotel and continued telephoning him daily. Each time, I got stiffed by his secretary. Finally, on my last day in Moscow, I called, and miraculously, Lockshin himself answered. His deep voice sounded rushed and impatient. “I don’t have time to talk to you,” he barked.
I had one chance, so quickly I asked Lockshin about his book. “It’s called Silent Terror,” he answered, “but you can’t read it because the FBI keeps blocking it from being published in America.” (A few weeks later I asked a spokesman for the FBI if this was indeed true. “It is not the policy of the FBI to review books,” said the spokesman, a bit amused by my question. “People write books about the FBI all the time, even our own people. We couldn’t stop it even if we wanted to.”) Apparently Lockshin’s book, which was published in the Soviet Union in 1989, tells the story of how he and his family lost everything when they were forced to leave America. “We were in fear for our lives,” Lockshin told me, “and they still won’t leave us alone.” I next tried to ask Lockshin exactly how the FBI had infiltrated the American publishing industry, but he was rambling and I was struggling to follow his drift.
How, I went on, was the FBI continuing to harass him in Moscow? “Tell ’em to cut the crap when I go to the American embassy,” he demanded. “What crap?” I asked, baffled. “The crap that Strauss gives me,” he replied, referring to Bob Strauss, the Texan who is the U.S. ambassador to Russia. “Strauss is an old man, a rich millionaire. Why does he need to hassle me?”
I tried to imagine what Lockshin meant. Visiting the American embassy is a hassle for everyone, not just for dissidents. Security is still extremely tight. The guards outside the front gates make you wonder if the Cold War is really over. You have to state your business, present a passport, and sign in. You’re escorted everywhere. The atmosphere is official, even tense; no one gets a welcome wagon. Is this what Lockshin meant by being “hassled”? “Just tell Strauss to cut the crap and stop hassling me about my citizenship,” Lockshin ordered when I pressed for details.
Again, I was mystified. I had already asked Strauss what he knew about Lockshin. Beyond what he had read in the newspapers in 1986, Strauss said he didn’t know anything. The issue of citizenship is fairly straightforward. As a spokesman for the state department explained, citizenship is a matter of birth or naturalization, not political ideology. Lockshin and his family are still American citizens, and like all citizens living overseas they are requested to register with the American embassy. This is a bureaucratic procedure, not a hassle. If he wanted to actually renounce his U.S. citizenship, however, that would be a bit of a hassle. He would have to take an oath of renunciation in front of a consular officer at the American embassy and then sign the oath. So far, Lockshin hasn’t taken that step. By now, though, I was no longer listening to Lockshin’s words, just the futility of his paranoia.
I had given up my nostalgic vision of Lockshin as a bold rebel. The view of the world that he holds on to is not only irrelevant but banal. Lockshin is a Cold War leftover. He may have imagined himself as heroic and romantic, but as the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union prove, there is no heroism, no force left in Marxist rhetoric. The Cold War is not something that ended just in Eastern Europe. It ended everywhere. Americans who cling to Lockshin’s ideals are just as obsolete as Russians who cling to the tenets of Marxism. Like everyone else, I watched on television as one Marxist capital after another crumbled beneath the realization that communism does not work and the power of ordinary people standing up to their own armies. But internally the Cold War did not end for me until I heard the hollowness of Lockshin’s accusations over the telephone in my Moscow hotel room.
“How much does it cost to fly from Austin to Moscow?” he asked as we concluded our talk. He sounded wistful, as if for a moment he understood that his move to the Soviet Union was not as grand or important as he had hoped. When I told him that a round-trip ticket cost me about $1,200 off-season, he couldn’t believe the price was so low. “I guess that’s because all the airlines in America are bankrupt, isn’t it?” he asked. I laughed, thinking he was making a joke, but on the other end of the telephone, Lockshin brooded in silence, still fighting the Cold War that now rages only in his mind.
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