Russia: Regards from an Outcast

The Soviet Union treats any of its citizens who choose to live in the West as traitors and outcasts, and to become involved in such cases is one of the riskiest things that a foreigner in Russia can do. That is precisely what happened to Peter Reddaway, a British exchange student, whose story once again dramatizes the continuing war between the Soviet government and the defectors.

Reddaway, 24, had done well at Cambridge University and at Harvard graduate school, was happily pursuing postgraduate work in Russian literature and history at Moscow University when, abruptly, he was accused by Soviet authorities of subversive activities and expelled. Reason: twice in January he had briefly visited plump, greying Valentina Lenchevsky and delivered regards from her scientist husband, now in the West. But then Oleg Lenchevsky is no ordinary scientist; he is one of the most unusual of the millions of Russians who since 1917 have left their families and their country to live in exile.

A Letter Undelivered. Lenchevsky’s physician father was killed fighting on the Red side during the Russian Revolution, and Oleg was raised by his dentist mother. He emerged after World War II as a Communist Party member and one of Russia’s leading experts on water purification. Leaving his seamstress wife and two teen-aged daughters in Moscow, he went to England in 1961 on a UNESCO fellowship. It took only a month for Lenchevsky to conclude that “though capitalism has more sores than dogs have fleas,” people here are good. Though tortured by the knowledge that his defection would leave his wife and daughters to face reprisals, he nevertheless decided that he could not go back, applied to British authorities for asylum. At the same time he sent a proud and patriotic letter to Nikita Khrushchev in care of the Soviet embassy in London, carefully explaining his decision and begging that his family be allowed to join him in the West.

When Lenchevsky rejected the thinly veiled threats of Soviet embassy officials designed to make him go home, he was informed that his letter would not be delivered. He thereupon published it in the London Observer. Acknowledging many merits in socialism, Lenchevsky declared himself “unable any longer to continue to subscribe to the doctrine of merciless and irreconcilable class and anti-religious struggles, which form the foundation stone of Communist teaching. For tolerance is the only salvation for humanity from mass fratricide and degeneration.” Resigning formally from the party and from Soviet citizenship, Lenchevsky concluded: “In Moscow, in Frunzenskaya Naberezhnaya 36, Apt. 81, live my wife and two daughters, whom I educated to unconditional support and approval of everything done by the Communist Party. I entreat you to inflict no penalty upon them, and to allow them to come to England to discuss with me our future in a proper manner.”

An Answer of Foreboding. Since then Lenchevsky has published three other letters to Nikita Khrushchev, in every case after waiting in vain for months for the originals to be delivered. Though letters and packages sent directly to his family were returned, he received two letters from them: one signed by his daughter Masha, 19, obviously dictated by Soviet authorities, charged him with “a serious crime” and urged kim to return “before it is too late.”

Now working in The Netherlands as an engineer, Lenchevsky had met Peter Reddaway during a visit to Cambridge. Learning that Reddaway was about to go to Moscow, he asked him to deliver news and greetings to the family from which he had been let off for three years. Reddaway paid the price for having done what he described, on his return to Britain last week, as the kindly thing. For millions in both East and West the episode was a reminder that, though Russian Communism has become less brutal, as witnessed by the fact that Valentina Lenchevsky and her daughters are still alive and working, Russia remains a closed society.