SCOTT LINGENFELTER

A (continued on page 16) t a point of deep disillusionment, Arkady Abramovich Polishchuk (1935-2020) found himself in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, the haunt of Russia’s chess champions. He had been invited to see if a late October’s icy rain might make for 

This story is a fine metaphor for Polishchuk’s memoir, Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter. Consisting primarily of dialogue, this first-hand account of human-rights work in the Soviet Union and beyond casts a zoom lens over the tens of thousands of people who were denied the right to emigrate in the 1970s. Soon after the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the Christian emigration movement—including some 30,000 Soviet Evangelicals (many being Pentecostals)—drew international attention to the U.S.S.R.’s human-rights abuses, surveillance, show trials, and forced labor. Polishchuk became a popular testimonial speaker for Amnesty International, and his work on behalf of human rights earned him the McWhirter Foundation Award in 1981. He then served as a broadcaster and correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Washington, D.C., Munich, and Prague. Eventually, he made his way to Vienna and thence to Santa Monica, California. Quite a journey, all told.

It began after graduation from Moscow State University with an advanced degree in philosophy. Twenty years as a journalist for Russian state-run media—notably, Asia and Africa Today—followed, with two books on Africa written along the way. Aside from twists of office politics, Polishchuk escorts the reader as he covers an anti-Semitic show trial; composes samizdat; is followed and arrested; and manages to collaborate with Jewish refuseniks—becoming one himself— in smuggling eyewitness testimony to the West. He admits that many of his colleagues were KGB operatives who meddled in international affairs, pushed Russian propaganda, and employed kompromat [compromising material] against enemies abroad along with pripiski (fake or inflated achievements) to make their way at home. His experience of Soviet Russia thus has a disturbingly contemporary ring. Still, if reminders of the particularities of Soviet life are needed, vivid examples also may be found here:

The Soviet citizen lived from paycheck to paycheck. Somehow the refuseniks continued to exist. People took up any job. Massive Russian corruption helped many to survive. A foreman and a plant manager enrolled his wife/mistress/niece to the post which was held by engineer Katz, expelled yesterday in disgrace. The work was still done by Katz and everybody was happy. A relative/mistress/friend received a salary and honestly gave half of it to the grateful Katz…. doctors washed floors in hospitals, teachers gave private lessons, and a surgical nurse continued to work in the operating room with a salary of a cleaning lady” (116-17).

The Pentecostal experience in this context was more dire. Exile, beatings at school of children aged five and six, and psychological and chemical “interventions” in mental hospitals were all commonplace. Polishchuk sympathized with them and their circumstances, if not their theology. Pentecostals Nikolai Goretoi and Feodor [Fyodor] Sidenko figure prominently in  this narrative. Polishchuk documents their experience and that of others in the Moscow Helsinki Group’s Document No. 23 (reprinted in the memoir), evidently compiled in the company of leading Soviet human-rights campaigners Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner. Document No. 23 was later recast, revised, and published by the Evangelical human-rights organization Door of Hope International, under the title Pharaoh, Let my People Go. The conservative U.S. publication National Review (which Polishchuk calls “the terribly reactionary American monthly”) published a related article of his on the persecution of Russian Christians in 1979 (287). 

Excerpts from Pharaoh, Let my People Go are reprinted as one of the memoir’s appendices, a short collection of images and documents. There, Polishchuk is identified as “The Western Representative of [the] Christian Emigration Movement and [of the] Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Pentecostals (CCECP).” An illustrative portion of this excerpt reads:

Why do so many Christians, particularly Baptists and Pentecostals, want to leave the Soviet Union? The answer is simple, because of incessant persecution. The Helsinki Final Act has encouraged emigration requests in that its signatories promised to promote “free movement… among persons [from]… the participating states” and to abide by their commitments in other international agreements. The problem of the seven Pentecostal refugees, members of the Chmykhalov and Vashchenko families, sealed inside the Moscow U.S. Embassy since June 27, 1978, remains unsolved. The Soviet authorities are persistent in their refusal to permit them to emigrate and in their continuous harassments of the other members of these families in Chernogorsk and [of] Aleksandr Vashchenko in a concentration camp. The seven in the embassy are permitted no mail through diplomatic channels, cannot meet with reporters in the embassy building, and live in relative isolation.

Studies of the so-called “Siberian Seven” offer more context than Polishchuk’s memoir. His contribution to this important chapter of Russian church history is in the juxtaposition of Jewish and Christian emigration stories on a personal and family level—with some attempts at humor, as is his wont. The following passage gives a flavor:

[Pentecostals] had begun talking about emigration soon after the [Second World] war. But they didn’t know the mundane word emigration and called it an “exodus,” just like the exodus of the Jews fleeing the Egyptian Pharaoh. “Since that time,” said Nikolai Petrovich [Goretoi], “we have been ready for the miracle of a Christian exodus from the Red Pharaoh. He’s been trying to destroy our faith since he seized power. He’s putting us in prisons and madhouses, he’s taking away our children and sending them to orphanages.” 

“To me the Jewish emigration is also a miracle,” I [Polishchuk] said. “It weakens this dragon. But you, you’re trying to kill it—you’re true fighters.” 

“For Christ,” Feodor [Fyodor] Sidenko added. And I made another discovery—they loved Jews. Nikolai Petrovich Goretoi, quoting the Bible from memory, was patiently explaining to me that the Jews were God’s chosen people and therefore should be particularly close to the heart of every Christian. 

“Chosen for what?” I said. “For suffering?”

“I know,” he said, “you’re thinking about the persecution which the Jews were subjected to for the rejection of Christ.” 

I could not help but observing, “If only for that! Jews had been persecuted millennia before Jesus came to this world. History has proved that there are more occasions to hate Jews than for a Russian to drink vodka.” 

The ingenuous Feodor Sidenko laughed hoarsely, “Russians drink more than anybody else in the world.” 

“Do you?” I asked. “No, we don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t steal, don’t swear, and don’t beat our wives.” 

“Such a boring life!” I said. “Now you have convinced me that you are American spies and more dangerous for this society than Jews who do all that you mentioned, maybe—except beating wives” (194-6).

There is much else crammed into Dancing on Thin Ice: Polishchuk’s participation in the Brezhnev Reception Room demonstration in 1976, interactions with Sakharov, fulsome commentary on the emigration-related trial of Dr. Mikhail Stern, a chronicle of family members killed in Kyiv, anecdotes about visiting (and fasting alongside) unregistered Pentecostals, and tales of reunion with old friends in the United States. The result is a memoir that is novelistic but also rambling, gritty, stark, and scatological. This reader found it revealing, but not necessarily a pleasant read. A Jewish refusenik instrumental in bringing the plight of Soviet Evangelicals to the world’s attention? An Africanist with an advanced degree in philosophy from Russia’s leading university, who survived the jungle of Butyrskaya Prison wiser about how to broadcast cutting-edge stories of dissent, suffering, and redemption? Dancing on Thin Ice reminds us that colorful compatriots may also be found in the Kingdom.

Scott Lingenfelter teaches Russian and European history at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.