CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 4, 2000



Elian's case echoes past

Daniel Williams Washington Post. Chicago Sun-Times. April 4, 2000

MOSCOW--Pyotr Kozmin was only 9 months old when sheriffs snatched him from 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 returning to the Soviet Union. But the Cook County Family Court objected to them taking Pyotr and his three brothers.

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 their parents in Moscow. "The beginning of my second life," Pyotr Kozmin recalls, musing over a tangled saga of family ties, politics and law.

In Russia, the family's celebrity status won them a new apartment in downtown Moscow while the boys, who spoke no Russian and were 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.

The case of the Kozmin boys--Pyotr, Yuri, Pavel and Rostislav--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 Cuba.

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 a child, even in a dictatorial state? The judge in the Kozin case, Circuit Court Chief Justice Thomas E. Kluczynski, said no.

"Under our law . . . there is a presumption that the parental right to the care and custody of children is good against all the world unless that right is forfeited," he said.

The boys left Chicago in 1959, wearing new gray suits and baseball caps and bearing gifts from well-wishers. The lead of the the Sun-Times story the next day was, "Chicago's White Sox lost four young fans Wednesday to Soviet Russia."

More than 40 years later, the question lingers: Would the boys have been better off in the United States?

Pyotr, 44, believes he benefitted 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. "I was able to realize my potential," Pyotr says.

But Rostislav, 53, thinks it would have been better for him to stay in Chicago. His education was hampered, he believes, by his American background. The KGB "misplaced" key documents, which kept him from getting higher education in Moscow. "The KGB ruined my life," he says.

He now is a fisherman on the Sea of Azov in Ukraine. Yuri is in business in Ukraine; Pavel works there as a waiter.

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."

Copyright 2000, Digital Chicago Inc.

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