Emigres in Orange County Voice Worries

Across Orange County, anxious Soviet emigres, university professors and Jewish community leaders expressed fear Monday that the coup in the Soviet Union could jeopardize resettlement of more Soviet Jews and promising ties with Soviet science and community groups.

And many tried frantically to reach relatives and colleagues in the Soviet Union to be assured of their safety in the wake of the takeover by right-wing leaders.

“I was terribly scared . . . scared for my homeland, and I was scared for the people in the Baltic states,” said Angela Nelsas of Fullerton, a native of Lithuania who is president of the Baltic American Freedom League, which seeks independence for the three Baltic republics now under Soviet control.

The fate of more than 100 Soviet Jews scheduled to come to Orange County is also in question, said Charlene Edwards, director of special services for Jewish Family Service of Orange County. Jewish Family Service estimates it has resettled between 500 and 600 Soviet Jewish families in Orange County over the past 14 years.

“We have approximately 130 people in the pipeline to come to Orange County as of today, and we don’t know now whether they will come or not,” Edwards said. “In the past, when there is a change in government or a change in policy, the doors are slammed shut and people aren’t allowed out. We saw that happen in the early 1980s. We are very worried it might happen again.”

Marina Ouzdin, 33, a linguistics graduate student at Cal State Fullerton, has been trying without success to get a telephone line to her parents in the Russian town of Yaroslavel.

Given the situation in her homeland, she said, her husband, who is a computer programmer, and 9-year-old daughter may have to postpone a trip planned for Aug. 23 to Yaroslavel, about 3 1/2 hours northeast of Moscow, until they can better assess the situation.

“We wish we could do something,” Ouzdin said. “People there must be very worried, especially in the provincial cities like Yaroslavel, because I’m sure (Soviet television) doesn’t show what we can see from here. . . . You see, independent TV has been seized.”

Ouzdin’s husband, Vladimir, who arrived from the Soviet Union for a visit two months ago, is pessimistic about the fate of democratic reforms and glasnost. “He says the (Communist) Party bureaucracy is still very strong and that only they control all the main channels of information,” Ouzdin said.

They were encouraged, however, by signs that some military leaders support the recently elected Russian Federation government of Boris N. Yeltsin. “We know the military is split in the Soviet Union . . . , but most of the people who serve in the military, not the officers, are drafted. We are hoping they won’t go against the people because they are of the people.”

UC Irvine lecturer Paula Garb was desperately trying to get word of her 19-year-old son, Gregory Danilenko, a sound technician for ABC-TV in Moscow.

“It’s not that he’s going to go looking for trouble, but his job requires him to be where trouble is,” said Garb, 42, an anthropologist who is to go to the Soviet Union with another UCI professor in September.

Garb and her older son, Andrei Danilenko, 24, who is visiting her this summer, were riveted to the radio and television Sunday night for news of events in the Soviet Union.

“Andrei is expecting the worst scenario, that people will fight this pretty much militantly,” Garb said of the change in government there. Garb is a U.S. citizen who is married to a Soviet man and who lived in the Soviet Union for 16 years. She came to Orange County in 1990.

Garb said that when she was working as a translator CBS television during the Bush-Gorbachev summit in July, many Muscovites spoke to her despairingly about the future.

“I think there are a lot of people who are ready to give up their lives right now,” she said. One young driver told her at the time: “ ‘If I see somebody out in the streets shooting, I’ll go follow them and get killed just because it’s better than living like this,’ ” she said.

But Garb hopes to go to the Soviet Union next month to continue work on her project with UCI professor John Whiteley. They are studying people and non-governmental organizations near the Ural Mountains, where a large nuclear weapons plant has been the source of radiation contamination since the 1950s. The exchange is one of several research and cooperative projects UCI has under way with two Soviet institutes whose leadership has been closely tied to the reform movement.

“I hope to God we will be able to continue,” Garb said. “It won’t be as easy now.”

Vladimir Sakharov of San Clemente, a former Soviet diplomat and KGB agent who defected to the United States about 15 years ago, said reversing the right-wing shift in the Soviet Union now depends largely on Russian republic President Boris Yeltsin’s ability to consolidate supporters.

“I just wish there’d be no blood shed,” said Sakharov, who has been unable to contact his mother and daughter in the Soviet Union. “I don’t particularly care what government is in power.”

“Nothing could have prevented (the coup); that was the pain of it all,” Sakharov told reporters at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where he has been an adjunct professor of history for more than a year.

At Cal State Fullerton, members of a group of 25 Soviet engineers and scientists participating in a three-week exchange program spoke cautiously about the events back home.

German Surgutchov, a professor of the Moscow Institute for Steel and Alloys, said he did not have enough information to assess the situation in Moscow. But he offered the opinion that the health of the Soviet economy will depend on continued technical and economic exchange with the West.

“We have a huge market” of potential buyers, “while your market (in the United States) is full,” said Surgutchov, who is scheduled to return to Moscow with his group on Sunday.

Rein Taagepera, a political science professor at UC Irvine who was elected to the Estonian Congress in March, 1990, is worried about the possibility of a military crackdown in his homeland now that the right wing has moved so decisively to take charge of the Soviet government.

“Within Estonia, it is estimated that there are 50,000 Soviet soldiers, or one Soviet soldier per 10 inhabitants,” said Taagepera. Taagepera is a Canadian citizen who fled Estonia at age 11 with his parents after the Russian occupation in 1944.

Although Taagepera has watched the rightward political shift for the past year, he said, he did not expect a coup. “It is like earthquakes in California: You are aware that they might happen at any moment, but when one actually does, it is a surprise. Everyone knew . . . there was a danger of a reactionary rebellion at any time. But this is a surprise.”