Journey Of Faith Journey Of Faith The Chance To Worship Openly Brings Thousands Of Russian Refugees To Spokane, Where Many Struggle To Build New Lives And Learn New Ways In The Name Of Their Faith

The fifth hour of the Slavic Pentecostal Church service begins with more singing and witnessing, crying and healing.

A couple hundred people are on their knees: men in old dark suits, women wearing print dresses with scarves on their heads. Some lean over the balcony and reach out with their arms in pleading, Russian prayer.

Their pastor wipes his brow and takes a deep breath. He calls out a long Russian sentence that ends dramatically with an English word: “…Spokane.”

At the back of the church, a 15-year-old boy translates: “He is saying God has delivered us here. Now we must make this home.”

They have.

More than 3,000 Russian-speaking immigrants have moved to Spokane in the last six years. Some estimates are as high as 5,000.

The sudden flood of Russians has made them the city’s largest immigrant group, outnumbering a 20-year stream of Southeast Asians in a third the time.

Fleeing decades of religious persecution and a crumbling economy, they come to Spokane because of the cool climate, low crime rate, generous welfare laws and affordable housing.

They come because of energetic Christian sponsors like Linda Unseth and charismatic Russian pastors like Viktor Vyalkin and Peter Datsko.

And many come to fulfill prophecy.

“God wanted me to come here,” says Yuriy Fomenko, one of the first refugees to arrive in Spokane, in 1989. “What other thing would I need to know?” Their adjustment is frightening and difficult.

Refugees stare open-mouthed at packed grocery shelves and two-car garages. They frown at immoral television shows and become depressed trying to decipher long, English-language job applications.

Some huddle in crime-plagued neighborhoods and refuse to let their children go outside.

They are part of an exodus of 300,000 refugees who moved to the United States for religious freedom and economic opportunity.

About 80 percent are Jewish and live mainly on the East Coast.

The other 20 percent - about 60,000 - are evangelical Christians, some with histories of persecution in the old Soviet Union.

They flock to the West Coast, to a handful of magnet cities like Sacramento, Portland, Seattle and Spokane.

When the flood began, in 1989, there were only a few Russians, mainly political refugees, living in Spokane.

By 1992, Washington state was the third most popular destination for Russian refugees and the most popular for Russians moving within the United States.

Spokane’s Russian-speaking people come from every part of the former Soviet Union, from republics like Kazakhstan, Moldova and Ukraine, from cities like Moscow, Vladivostok and St. Petersburg.

Here, they call themselves Russians because of the language that unites them.

They are mostly blue-collar workers from smaller towns. Many were barred from universities because of their beliefs, and are not well-educated.

Opposed to birth control (which usually meant abortions in the Soviet Union), they often have huge families - six, eight, 10 children packed into two- and three-bedroom houses in low-income neighborhoods.

To get here, they sold most everything they owned and left family and friends, sometimes with no idea where they’d end up.

“We left almost all,” says Ludmilla Perelekhov, from the Crimean region of Ukraine. “We brought only four suitcases, our best clothes, the most important books.”

The Russians enrich the Spokane area with six churches, a store and a restaurant. Many are expert masons, carpenters and electricians who work 60-hour weeks and worship eight hours on the weekend.

American friends are inspired by their sincerity. Religious leaders marvel at Russian churchgoers’ devotion and morality.

Yet some aren’t coping as well. They strain the region’s food banks, its schools, its charities. Some are unemployed and bitter, stuck supporting their large families on welfare.

For every Russian family with warm American friendships, another is aloof and suspicious, isolated from the rest of Spokane by language, unbending religious beliefs, and dark memories of oppression back home.

There are struggles within the Russian community as well:

Young people anger their parents by swallowing too much decadent American culture.

Earlier immigrants criticize newer ones for relying on welfare, for not working hard enough, for their “easy” migration.

Churches are split by religious differences, disagreements over whether to use English in church and lingering hard feelings over politics in the former Soviet Union.

Many of the experiences of Spokane’s Russians are common to all immigrants.

But the Russian migration is unlike any other in history. These are not boat people, displaced by war or famine, happy with any new scrap of life.

Many followed prophecies that called them to the U.S., or chased missionaries’ stories of God’s bounty in America.

They come to Spokane ready to collect on decades-old promises of freedom and wealth.

“Many of these people thought of themselves as Americans before they got here,” says Susan Wiley Hardwick, author of “Russian Refuge: Religion, Migration and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim.”

“Their adjustment is more confusing, more overwhelming and, therefore, more disappointing. They had a powerful sense that they were coming to the perfect promised land.”

A PROPHECY FULFILLED

America has always been a homeland for the two largest evangelical churches in the former Soviet Union.

Started initially by Germans, the Russian Baptist Church was supported throughout the 20th century by American missionaries and donations.

The Pentecostal Church is a completely American export, spread by missionaries and, later, underground Bibles and audio tapes.

The evangelicals thrived until the late 1920s, when the Communist government began cracking down on religion in the Soviet Union.

Churches became dance halls, social clubs or offices for the new League of the Militant Godless.

Religious education was outlawed. Hundreds of thousands of believers - evangelicals, Jews and the majority, Orthodox Russians - were sent to Siberian prisons or killed.

During World War II, churches were allowed to return as long as they registered with the Soviet government. Evangelical leaders who refused were jailed or killed.

Persecution continued for 40 years: Believers were imprisoned for refusing to carry arms in the military, prevented from attending college, ostracized in school, denied good housing.

Thousands disappeared.

“People were arrested,” says Yuriy Perelekhov, a 54-year-old Ukrainian who worshipped in an unregistered church. “Our church met in basements and people’s homes. Every day, we changed places. It was dangerous.”

But most evangelicals faced a more insidious kind of discrimination.

Olga Nekrasova, a teacher in Russia before she moved to Spokane, remembers being required to mark a check by the names of students who believed in God. Those children were turned down if they applied to college.

Yet the Russian evangelicals thrived - if not in numbers, in intensity.

“Russians are very stoic,” Hardwick says. “When I was in Russia, if you wanted to see emotion, you went to the ballet, the theater or the Pentecostal Church.”

By the early 1970s, prophets in Soviet Pentecostal churches began sharing a common vision.

“There was a prophecy in our church that there would be freedom for a short time,” says Yeuginya Dydik, who was an English teacher living in Nakhodka, near Vladivostok.

Freedom came in 1985, with the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and the beginning of his reforms. Within three years, Gorbachev called for an end to religious persecution and opened Soviet borders.

Soviet Jews took advantage, fleeing to Vienna and Rome to await resettlement in Israel and the United States. When American officials met them, they were surprised to find another group seeking refugee status: Pentecostals.

By law, refugees must have sponsors in the United States. So American evangelical groups like World Relief began finding sponsors.

World Relief’s Serge Duss interviewed about 100 families in Rome who left the Soviet Union for the same reason: to fulfill church prophecy. The prophecies always ended with a warning.

“When the window opens, you must leave because when the window closes persecution will be even worse than before,” Duss says.

Making matters worse was the failing economy in the Soviet Union. For many, the only way to escape bread lines was to move to America.

Entire churches with congregations of 70 to 150 people uprooted and left. In Nakhodka, Yeuginya Dydik’s church, which worshipped in a tent, dwindled to almost nothing.

Dydik’s friends and family lived in Nakhodka and she resisted going to America. But like other Pentecostal churches, Dydik’s had a prophet, who cornered her one day.

“Our lady prophet came to me and said, `You should go,”’ Dydik says. “It was confirmed by my dreams. And so I came to America.”

She landed in Los Angeles in 1992.

She was miserable.

“I couldn’t find work in Los Angeles, even as a cleaning woman,” Dydik says. “In Los Angeles, I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t go anywhere because of the shootings.”

Other emigres from Nakhodka had been placed in Eastern Washington and they invited her to Spokane.

Here, she quickly found work as a social worker and translator. In less than six months, she bought a one bedroom house for $49,500.

Dydik was transferred to Seattle last year, but plans to return to Eastern Washington soon. With its growing Pentecostal Church, Spokane seems like the city promised in her church’s prophecy.

“Here is good city,” she says. “The air is fresh here. Nature is very close. Four seasons play an important role. People are good.

“It is not perfect, but here is freedom and less crime and a climate like ours. It was good fortune to find Spokane.”

THE CONNELL CONNECTION

For many Russians, the path to Spokane passed through Connell, Wash., and a preacher’s wife named Linda Unseth.

In 1988, World Relief was just beginning to find sponsors for Russians hoping to emigrate. That year, Unseth set up a World Relief office in Connell, a town of 2,604 near the Tri-Cities.

A year later, Yuriy Fomenko was wondering if he’d made a mistake. The carpenter was stranded in Rome after fleeing Moldova with his wife and six children.< Their money ran out as they waited with thousands of other refugees to be accepted into the United States.

Finally, after three months, Fomenko received a letter with the news. A sponsor would take him. His family was going to America, to the land of wealth and liberty.

To some place called Connell.

“No, I had never heard of it,” he says. “But when I got that letter, I know God is taking me there.”

Unseth placed 18 refugees in Eastern Washington in 1989.

Part of that first wave, the Fomenkos went to Coeur d’Alene, where they were sponsored by Steve Watt, pastor of Dayspring Foursquare Fellowship.

When they arrived at the Spokane International Airport in November 1989, members of Watt’s church met them with balloons and flags. A family of eight, the Fomenkos carried all their belongings in eight suitcases.

Just nine days after arriving, Yuriy found work building docks. Like other families placed in small towns, the Fomenkos quickly moved to the closest city, Spokane.

They went to American churches and, while the people were friendly, the services lacked Russian fire.

The handful of other refugees felt the same emptiness. If the Russian community was going to succeed in Spokane, churches would have to be established.

In 1990, Unseth settled another 144 refugees and Russian church groups began meeting. The next year, 28 Russian Baptists moved into an old church in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood and began remodeling it. Others moved into houses and apartments near the church.

They worked day and night on the church, as a three-block area of West Central filled with dour men, shy babushkas and squealing children.

“It really added to the neighborhood,” says Teresa Glenn, who helped one Russian family shop for food and find an apartment. “All of a sudden, you’re in the middle of Little Moscow.”

Peter Datsko, a Ukrainian pastor who’d been living in New Jersey, arrived at the church in August 1991 and the First Slavic Baptist Church was born.

Other Baptist churches formed and split like atoms, until there were four new congregations renting space from American churches.

New families arrived at the airport and were greeted by a familiar Russian welcoming party: a circle of serious men in bell bottomed suits, wives in overcoats and scarves, children in boots and second-hand coats.

The first days in America were filled with medical exams and welfare applications, school registration and Social Security cards.

In his first week, Andrey Meroshnik, 60, walked to the grocery store and stared at houses with perfect green lawns and spotless finishes. “Like toys,” he said.

At the store, Meroshnik dubbed his new home “the country of plenty.”

While religious freedom came easily, American riches were harder to get than many Russians expected.

In the Ukraine, Yuriy Perelkhov, a scientist and businessman with a master’s degree, worked with electronics. In Spokane, he uses a screwdriver to assemble lamps.

Vladimir Zidrashko, 33, owned two businesses in Kazakhstan. In Spokane, he looked for menial jobs.

“Many Americans don’t believe that I have very good - I would say excellent - skills in five different professions,” he says.

Unable to find work and struggling with English, many Russian men become depressed. Their encounters with Americans don’t always help.

Hardwick says Russian-speaking refugees are effusive when they first meet Americans, but become disillusioned and retreat from the fast American culture and empty relationships.

“Friends there were life and death,” she says. “If you trusted someone and they turned out to be KGB, it could mean your life.

“They are hurt by the vacancy of friendships here. They don’t understand, `Let’s do lunch. I love your hair.”’ David Corner, church administrator for Central United Methodist, home of the Pentecostals, says Russians have good reason to be more severe than Americans.

“All of them have a story of a grandfather, father or a son who was taken out of the family and disappeared,” he says. “They have learned to survive by their wits. They refer to us as the soft Christians, those who have not paid with blood.”

The Spokane Pentecostal Church grew even more with the 1992 arrival of Viktor Vyalkin, a fiery pastor who’d worked as a carpenter in Boston and Dallas.

Yuriy Fomenko believes the Pentecostal Church has been helped by God. If Russian churches hadn’t formed here, the community might well have fizzled, he said.

When his family first arrived, Fomenko took them to two American services every Sunday, hoping to make friends and improve their English.

Now, they have their own church, with services that last three, four, five hours, as long as members are touched by the spirit.

Still, the Fomenkos attend laid-back American church services on Sunday morning. And Yuriy teaches Bible study on weeknights.

“I have delivered my family into God’s hands and he delivered us,” Fomenko says. “It is not enough for a spiritual man to eat once a week.”

`MY AMERICAN MOTHERLAND’

Spokane’s Russian community took off in the last two years, with second and third waves of migration.

For a while, Linda Unseth kept tabs on the Korneichuks, one of the first families she settled in the Spokane area. Little by little, their relatives joined them.

Unseth stopped counting when the family topped 100.

Across the country, a web of former neighbors, co-workers and church members passed on information to other Russian refugees about cities like Spokane.

They bragged about its churches, its affordable housing and its climate. And other Russians have come.

Boris Shiva, his wife and 11 children moved from Novosibirsk, Siberia, to Hayward, Calif., in 1990. But rent was $1,300 a month there and “I can’t work because my language not good language,” Shiva said.

Some friends from Siberia wrote to him about Spokane. So, in March 1992, he moved. Shiva is now assistant pastor at the Russian-speaking Light of the Gospel Church.

“Spokane is very good place for me,” Shiva says. “Like Siberia for me. Summer and winter.”

Second migration goes both ways. But far more people settle in Spokane than leave it.

In 1989, Victor and Lydia Napelenok and their seven children landed at the Spokane airport and were driven to Endicott, a town of 208, two hours southwest of Spokane.

They felt isolated. So, in 1991, they moved to Sacramento, home of the largest Russian community on the West Coast.

But the Napelenoks couldn’t afford a house and became disillusioned.

In 1992, Victor and two of his children set out in a $175 car on a three-week, 25-state trip, looking for the perfect community: a blend of small town standards with a rich Russian community.

Napelenok said the states he visited were too hot and had too many mosquitoes. On the road, he remembered Spokane.

He talked it over with his family and they decided to move here, where there are “less people, more fresh air and nice nature.”

“It is my American motherland,” he says.

Others have come because their relatives agree to sponsor them. It can make emigration easier. Adjustment still takes time.

Last March, Nicolai Chernyy, his wife and five children, followed his brother from Siberia to Spokane.

“We learned very little about life in Spokane from his letters,” Chernyy says. “Maybe we wouldn’t go if we did.”

Chernyy was surprised how difficult it was to find work. And crime in his West Central neighborhood worries him.

“In the neighborhood there are drug addicts and police raids, yelling and screaming,” he says.

Still, it is better than the country he left. His four brothers and their families are also trying to come.

About 750,000 more Russian-speaking people have applied to come to the United States, state department officials said.

Most won’t make it because of changes in refugee laws. Where almost anyone could emigrate five years ago, only close relatives of those in America can come now.

The stream of Russian refugees to Spokane is smaller than a few years ago, but steady.

One day last year, Viktor Vyalkin asked his Pentecostal congregation - nearly 500 people - how many had relatives still trying to come to Spokane.

Nearly every hand went up.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Written by Jess Walter. Reported by Jess Walter, Carla K. Johnson and Margaret Taus