Journey Of Faith Early Leader In Russian Community Now Shunned By Many For Being Too American

Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” He could have been talking about Liuba Vashchenko-Luton. The Siberian refugee was an early leader among Spokane’s Russians, but now is shunned by some in the community.

She is one of the Siberian Seven, a group of Pentecostals who spent nearly five years beginning in 1978 holed up in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow seeking the right to leave the Soviet Union.

She also is the disenchanted founder of the Spokane Russian Community Center who closed the facility last August while complaining about the closed-mindedness of Pentecostal refugees in Spokane.

And she’s the mysterious, laughing woman who for two nights in September translated a local disc jockey’s rock radio show into her native tongue.

“I get the feeling she could adapt to any situation,” said KZZU disc jockey Casey Christopher, who bantered with her on the radio in a promotion for the Moscow Circus.

She has adapted all her life.

Born in the gritty mining town of Chernogorsk, Siberia, VashchenkoLuton was 9 years old when she and two sisters were taken from their Pentecostal parents and placed in a government boarding school. For five years she was “re-educated” in atheism.

Such religious persecution drove the Vashchenkos to seek the right to emigrate. In 1978, Liuba, then 25, along with five members of her family and two members of the Chmykhalov family, traveled 2,000 miles to Moscow and rushed past Soviet guards at the U.S. Embassy to plead their case.

Her brother didn’t make it into the embassy; he was beaten, tortured and shipped home to Siberia. The other seven spent the next 52 months as begrudged guests of the U.S. government. It took a month-long hunger strike by Liuba’s sister and mother, and years of negotiations, to extract an emigration agreement from the Soviets.

Attention from groups working against religious persecution in Communist countries brought fame, including three books, articles and mentions on Christian TV shows.

Vashchenko-Luton, who learned English in the embassy, became the group’s sometimes-outspoken spokeswoman. After Billy Graham visited the families, she proclaimed him “nothing special” to reporters. She clucked at President Reagan for not being interested sooner when he wrote them a letter during the hunger strike.

The Vashchenkos settled in Puyallup, Wash., in 1983. Liuba attended college, married and moved to Spokane in 1989. She put herself in a position to help new Russian-speaking refugees by opening the Russian Community Center in 1992 with a grant from Spokane County.

She soon clashed with the Slavic Pentecostal Church, the largest of the new refugee churches, over three Russian dinners the center put on at the Masonic Temple in 1993. The dinners were meant to give Spokane a taste of Russian-Slavic culture, but the Pentecostalists withdrew their support. They believed the Masons had connections with Satan.

More disputes followed. A Russian restaurant she opened with several Russian families in Medical Lake failed after four months. Vashchenko-Luton closed it without giving the other Russians much warning. She admits not paying their last paychecks. Her accountant advised her to pay the IRS first.

The Pentecostals shunned community center activities, and she closed the center.

The clash fits a pattern seen in each wave of newcomers to America: The earliest immigrants and their countrymen who follow often don’t get along. Vashchenko-Luton, with her hyphenated Russian-American name and her American ways, is half-fish, half-fowl to the new refugees.

They don’t trust her; she’s too American. She thinks they’re not adapting fast enough.

“These people have three interests,” she says. “One, their welfare check. Two, they would like to find some programs to help them buy a house. And three, their church where they are busy finding out who belonged to what church and whether it was registered or unregistered in the Soviet Union.”

The Soviets required churches to register with the government. Some churches stayed unregistered and underground. This created animosity between some congregations.

Some of the Russians who have dealt with Vashchenko-Luton return her bitterness. “I feel sorry for her,” one woman says. “The center could have been the center for the community. Saying, `If you don’t like it, go back to your country’ is not the way to deal with people. I have never heard an American say this, but I heard her say it.”

Vashchenko-Luton’s family was proud they never accepted welfare in their early days as refugees. Some of the more recent refugees have no aversion to welfare. She says the more she tried to help them, the more they wanted.

“Very often this help is not appreciated,” she says. “You simply get hurt.”