Elian Case Parallels Saga of 4 Russians
By Daniel Williams. Washington Post Foreign Service. Sunday, April 2, 2000; Page A01
MOSCOW –– Pyotr Kozmin was only 9 months old when sheriffs snatched him from the hands of his mother at a Chicago train station and turned him over to child welfare officials.
It was 1957, deep into the Cold War, and Pyotr's parents, Georgy and Nadezhda, refugees from World War II Europe, were trying to return to the Soviet Union. But the Cook County Family Court objected to them taking Pyotr and his three brothers.
The weeping parents continued with their journey. It would take two years of tedious custody hearings, framed by heated diplomatic give-and-take and propaganda volleys, before the four boys--all wards of the court because their parents had been treated for bouts of mental illness--joined them in
Moscow. "The beginning of my second life," Kozmin recalls, musing over a tangled saga of family ties, politics and law.
Back in Russia, the family's celebrity status won them a new apartment in downtown Moscow while the boys, steeped in American culture, were educated at a special school. But the spotlight dimmed, and the family descended into poverty, moving to Ukraine to join family there. Pyotr Kozmin and
another brother differ today on whether the momentous move from America was worth it.
The case of the Kozmin boys, as Chicago newspapers then called them, suddenly sounds like today's news. Their odyssey in some ways parallels the tug of war over Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old who was shipwrecked as he and his mother fled Fidel Castro's Cuba and whose relatives want to keep him
in the United States against the wishes of his father in Havana. Both cases were colored by Cold War-style rivalries and politics, and both raised a basic question: Do American notions of freedom override the desire of a parent to raise his child, even in a dictatorial state?
In the case of the Kozmin boys, a judge ruled that they could not be kept in the United States just because the parents "embraced a creed not in keeping with our own"--that is, communism. "Although we feel our principles and philosophies are better for the civilized, peace-loving
world, it is not in keeping with the American principle that we should force . . . belief in them."
That ruling set a new course for the Kozmin brothers, whose lives already were ruled by dramatic twists of fate.
The boys--Pyotr, Yuri, Pavel and Rostislav--are the sons of a Russian soldier and a Ukrainian mother, both of whom were slave laborers in Nazi Germany. The parents were stranded in the American-occupied zone of Germany at the end of the war, and arrived in the United States in 1950 after winning
asylum. Three of the boys were born in Germany, Pyotr in the United States.
In Illinois, the parents suffered from mental illness, and two of the boys, Rostislav and Yuri, were placed in an orphanage by the Cook County Welfare Department. The younger ones, Pavel and Pyotr, spent time with a foster family. Their memories are of baseball and football, cowboys, Elvis and
the Mickey Mouse Club. "The culture was printed on us," Pyotr says.
After their release from treatment, Georgy and Nadezhda Kozmin decided to return to the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was gone, replaced by the reforming Nikita Khrushchev. But Illinois contested the parents' demand to take the children with them. A family court judge said that if the Kozmins
left, "We can give them no guarantee when or if the children will be united with them."
Chicago newspapers referred darkly to the parents' desire to "return behind the Iron Curtain." Stories hinted at cloak-and-dagger pressure on the Kozmins by Soviet diplomats. Meanwhile in Moscow, Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, complained that the children were being
left "to cannibals in Chicago." Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko wrote Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that keeping parents and children apart "violates the generally accepted principles of humanity."
Finally, the family court reversed itself, and the children--all sporting baseball caps--flew to the Soviet Union on Aug. 26, 1959. A Chicago paper reported the story glumly under the headline, "Kozmin Boys Bid Good-by [sic] To Baseball." In Moscow, officials, well-wishers and
photographers rapturously greeted their arrival at Vnukovo Airport.
The celebrity status won in the United States carried over for a time in the Soviet Union. At a special boarding school, teachers took care to develop the boys' command of Russian, which none of them spoke. "We were made into a showcase," Pyotr says.
The brothers were considered--and thought of themselves--as different. Friends nicknamed them "the Americans." As teenagers, they took an interest in Western pop music and grew their hair long, hippie-style. "I think we were more individualistic than most Russians," says
Rostislav, the oldest of the brothers, who lives in Ukraine.
But the celebrity faded, and secret police inquiries into their activities and censorship of their mail began. A life of poverty followed. Forty years later, the question lingers: Would the boys have been better off in the United States? For Pyotr and Rostislav, at least, opinion is split.
Pyotr believes he benefited from the Soviet Union's attention toward artistic development. He is a ceramist and painter, with a studio filled with boldly colored paintings of nudes and cats. Observers, he says, claim to see Western and Russian influence in his work. "I was able to realize
my potential," Pyotr says.
Pyotr, 44, enjoys a bonus from his status as a native-born American. He holds a U.S. passport, making travel outside of Russia easy. He has shown his paintings in the United States and lived in New York for 18 months in the early 1990s. "I liked it, but I am more comfortable here. A little
money goes a long way. Moscow, New York. It makes no difference. Both have an exciting pulse," he says.
Rostislav thinks it would have been better for him to stay in Chicago. He was 12 when he traveled to Moscow, and already highly Americanized. As a boy, he was quoted as saying he wanted to be a cowboy. "I liked the orphanage. The people were very good. I felt American," he recalls. "I
saw the square houses in Moscow and I thought they looked like jails. I spoke English here, and no one knew what I was saying."
His education was hampered, he believes, by his American background. The KGB "misplaced" key identification documents, which kept him from getting higher education in Moscow. He worked in photography and music recording and as a disc jockey. At one point, he lost his job because the
KGB accused him of playing unauthorized music, he says. "The KGB ruined my life," he says.
Rostislav, 53, now ekes out a living as a fisherman on the Sea of Azov in Ukraine. Going to America "is only a dream," he laments. He has no passport, no money. He still prefers to be called Richard, the name given him at the orphanage.
Yuri is in business in Ukraine; Pavel works there as a waiter.
Both Pyotr and Rostislav look sympathetically on Elian Gonzalez's plight. Despite differing assessments of their life in the Soviet Union, they believe the Cuban boy ought to be reunited with his father. "It's a hard question," says Rostislav. "But if the father is a good person,
the boy should go back."
"The boy must be returned," Pyotr says. "Maybe it will seem like a propaganda loss in America, but it is not important. Things change. Maybe things will change in Cuba. America can't decide for the boy."
But that won't be the end of the story, Pyotr cautioned. He predicts that Elian's life inevitably will be distorted by his status as a symbol, currently of exile freedom in Miami, later possibly of revolutionary steadfastness in Cuba. "Being a political tool," Pyotr says, "is not
something I would wish on anyone."
We've All Gone Boy Crazy
By William Raspberry. The Washington Post. Monday, April 3, 2000; Page A17
Juan Miguel Gonzalez: Come get your kid.
We in the United States mean well, but we are rapidly losing our ability to do anything that makes sense regarding little Elian.
The government, represented by Attorney General Janet Reno and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has been remarkably patient. Most of us armed with a court ruling allowing us to do what we had long since determined was the right thing to do might have moved in forcibly to take custody
of the 6-year-old. We would have been within our rights, but given the likelihood of noncooperation--perhaps even active physical resistance--exercising our rights in that way would have been a public relations disaster, not to mention a truly dreadful thing for Elian.
Reno, who comes from Miami and who knows that city's Cuban community, decided to try to let Elian's "protectors" come around. You want to appeal the court ruling? Go ahead, but at least promise me that you'll abide by the appellate judgment if it goes against you. You don't want to
make that promise? Well, let's not be hasty. Let's extend the deadline I gave you by another couple of days, okay?
Unfortunately, the people on the other side of the bargaining table seem to feel no need to change their position. They say they want what's best for the child. I think they want the child. Maybe, in their minds, there's no difference.
I mean, what is best for Elian? He seems to be having a terrific time, with more things than you could ever afford to give him back home. ABC Television--which must have violated some journalistic ethic when it undertook to interview a 6-year-old without the consent of his parent--says the boy
said he doesn't want to go back to Cuba.
That, if it is true, is sad, because what it means is that the boy has been "bought" with goodies and lavish attention by people whose motives must at least in part be political. As far as I can see, Juan Miguel, nothing in the record had suggested that he didn't love you or want to be
with you. The early hints of your unfitness never were backed up with either specifics or credible evidence. Only last weekend, some of the Miami relatives were suggesting that maybe they've turned up evidence that you've been an abusive parent--perhaps speaking too harshly to the boy, that sort of
thing.
Vice President Al Gore has weighed in with a recommendation that Congress pass a bill granting both you and Elian permanent resident status--thereby shifting the question of Elian's status from the federal immigration authorities to a Florida family court. It would be nice to believe Gore's
approach--which represents a break from President Clinton's stated belief that Elian ought to be returned to your custody--has nothing to do with the presidential election.
Just as it would be nice to believe that Cuban politics have nothing to do with the insistence by your president, Fidel Castro, of having you come to the States with a huge entourage of Elian's classmates, relatives, teachers, a pediatrician, psychologists, psychiatrists and maybe an armed guard
or two just in case you get any funny ideas about defecting.
To repeat: I don't doubt that a good deal of what the Miami Cubans have done--are doing--is out of genuine concern for Elian's well-being: his health, his happiness and his prospects for a bright future. Nor would I deny that he has a better shot at all those things in the United States than he
might in Cuba. (So would perhaps a majority of Third World youngsters be better off in America--hardly an argument for taking them from their parents to bring them here.)
But however well-motivated Elian's Florida relatives might have been at the beginning, there seems no doubt that at least some of them have come to regard Elian not merely as their spunky little cousin, but as a political trophy. They seem determined not so much to do what is right for the kid
as to do what is most effectual for their political cause.
Just the other day, Armando Gutierrez, a spokesman for the relatives, said your request to come to the States to get your son was complicating and "harming" the negotiations between the relatives and the U.S. government.
See how crazy it's becoming, Juan Miguel?
Come get your boy, before we go completely nuts.
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