Siberian Youth Soaks Up U.S.

The future of Podgornoy, Siberia, sits like a lump of clay in Oxana Zykova’s young hands. But she isn’t intimidated.

“I am afraid if our generation, who remembers a dictatorship, will not continue changes, nobody will,” the 16-year-old girl wrote in an essay that won her a trip from Kellogg to Washington, D.C., this weekend.

Oxana is one of 1,000 students from former communist countries who arrived in the United States last August. American taxpayers paid the way under the Freedom Support Act so these children could meet the people they’d been taught to fear, and live in an experienced democracy.

Oxana came to harvest ideas that could ease her struggling central Siberian community’s transition into a free market economy. She wants to improve life for her parents, herself and the next generation and is willing to spend a year away from her family to learn how.

“I miss them,” she says, tears collecting in her eyes. They are an instant reminder that this architect of Podgornoy’s future is still so young.

Her family, like most in her region, was exiled to Siberia’s remote flatlands under Joseph Stalin. Her great-grandparents were farmers who didn’t buy into the collective farm idea. Unfortunately, they weren’t offered a choice.

They were sent north from their southern Siberian home in a horse cart. They weren’t allowed to bring any of their belongings. Several of their children died on the trip.

The family started over, but the exile designation was as damaging as the mark of Cain. Defeated, the Zykovas slowly swallowed communism until one generation knew nothing else.

Oxana learned in school to idolize Lenin without question. She watched her parents work 12-hour days for the state for small salaries that never increased. Her parents were forced to vote for the single candidate running for election so the party could show unanimous approval.

Oxana was under 10 in those days, but she knew something was wrong.

The neighbor girl, whose father managed a grocery store, ate candy and sausages in front of her and other kids who never had such delicacies. Oxana asked why, because she’d learned all people were equal. Her mother explained that people who worked for the government were special.

“I began to doubt what they were teaching me at school,” she says.

Then one day in 1990, Oxana’s teachers told the students they didn’t need uniforms anymore. Glasnost, the new political openness, and perestroika, the rebuilding of the economy, had finally reached Siberia.

All the rules suddenly changed. Oxana could read books and listen to music not created by Russians. She heard the Beatles for the first time. She could complain about the government. She could dream aloud.

Her mother quit her job, fed up with long hours for little pay. Her father’s job driving machinery fizzled out as the government ran out of money to build. Her family decided to visit relatives in the Ukraine, where glasnost had sunk its anchor years earlier. They liked what they saw.

“We saw capitalism, got a lot of ideas,” Oxana says.

They returned to Podgornoy, borrowed money and opened a consignment store and deli.

Since 1990, Oxana has watched her city of 17,000 people grasp for political and economic identity. American movies have given them a new perception of the world. She wanted to learn more, so she applied last year for the highly competitive study program to the United States.

Of the nearly 400 teenagers in her region who applied, six were chosen based on essays, language proficiency and interviews. Oxana promised her father she’d learn everything she could about computers on her trip.

She understood soon after arriving in Kellogg that her Siberian home still had much to learn about living without restrictions.

In Podgornoy, freedom is “like weak sunlight reaching a little piece of earth, fighting with black clouds around it,” she wrote in her prize-winning essay. “I was trying to think how we could make the sky more cloudless and let the sun of freedom and justice show us its face.”

Kellogg offered life American-style, but a trip to Washington, D.C., offered Oxana the chance to watch the experts at work. Only 140 students on her program could go, again based on essays. She wrote with her heart - and left for Washington, D.C., Saturday.

“I ask myself what going to Washington, D.C., would mean to me?” she wrote. “It is just a dream of an individual who wants to work in a governmental system in the heart of democracy.

“It would be an honor to me.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo