Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 14, 1990 TAG: 9004140354
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCIS X. CLINES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
He has obtained the rarest of prizes, a U.S. passport, but even so has not been able to get through the Soviet looking glass, through the truculent bureaucracy that has haunted and imprisoned him for half of the last five decades.
"I was born in America and all I want to do now is go there to die," he said, summarizing a hard lifetime of wandering across Soviet society, buffeted by a system that sloughed off his unyielding claim of American citizenship.
Now that he has finally grasped it, the system is spinning him again through the maw of paperwork of a half-dozen bureaucracies.
Hershman laughs richly at a fellow American's suggestion that with the new passport, he might now simply get on an airplane and fly from Moscow to Brooklyn, where he was born, or to the Bronx, where he was kidnapped by his own father six decades ago for a great leftist adventure with communism that turned into the son's long nightmare.
"The message from the system now is the same one I first got 45 years ago from Maj. Ryazantsev when I told him I was an American: `We do not recognize you,' " Hershman said, stressing his final critical need after 59 years of unwanted residence in the Soviet Union.
That need is somehow to persuade the still unresponsive bureaucracy to give him the Soviet exit visa he needs to get to the airplane gate.
Making his rounds week after week, he said, "I know exactly how the apparatchiks will say no to me, even before they say no."
"How do I get out of here?" he asked, grasping his new passport like a winning lottery ticket with no window for the cashing.
The question was finally posed on his behalf Wednesday by Max N. Robinson, an American consular affairs officer.
He paid a visit to the Soviet Foreign Ministry to complain Moscow has been unjust in detaining this long-suffering American citizen.
Robinson's staff at the American Embassy, which is inundated with Soviet emigration and visa cases, took special delight in shepherding Hershman to success last October and handing him his U.S. passport after careful research to verify his story.
"An American in the gulag," Hershman says now with a grin, summarizing his frustration.
His history, documented meticulously by a man who grew wily enough in the prison camps to study law, extends from the KGB's infamous Lubyanka cells to the Siberian camps of the gulag.
Hershman, 64, is an orphan of his father's leftist zeal, one of the people born in America and brought here as infants by Depression-era, Utopian-minded emigre families who then endured lives as outcasts through the xenophobic decades of the Cold War.
He was accused of being a spy solely because of his American birth, he says, then saw his sentences compounded for complaining.
But always, he recalls, he was encouraged by the daily heroic example of such fellow inmates as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great writer of the gulags.
"The gulag was my university," Hershman says proudly.
More than 100 similar cases involving Americans have surfaced here in the past few years as people long on the run have finally relaxed enough to apply, Robinson said.
Administering justice in these cases, he adds, will be a test of the Gorbachev government's proclaimed resolve to meet international human rights standards.
Hershman's well-kept records show he has always confronted the Soviet authorities with his American birth.
One of the Soviet domestic passports the authorities forced upon him listed his nationality as "Yanky," even as the authorities insisted he was Soviet.
Inspired by his years of wrangling in the prison system, he obtained a university education so he could become a legal counselor.
But he was denied the right to practice law because he had spent 24 years in 10 different prisons and labor camps.
After his release, Hershman took up art to make a living, married and had a son.
His family waits with him to see that place he has always talked about called the Bronx.
He remains Inmate No. IM-247 in his own mind, a survivor who smiles confidently at the sweet challenge of arriving penniless in America, should the Soviet bureaucracy ever let go.
"My father was a very kind, but very naive man," Hershman says of the Polish-born American immigrant who journeyed to Moscow to see the future.
Enlisting in the defense of Mother Russia in what is called the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union, his father soon perished at the front.
Alternately desperate and opportunistic, the boy with a muddled state pedigree endured an Oliver Twist existence in the worst decades of Stalinist paranoia toward foreigners.
All that left "a black mark on me" that today's bureaucrats can somehow spot, he senses.
"You may have perestroika and glasnost here in Moscow," he said skeptically, "but not out there."
He was speaking of the provinces, where he lives in Krasnodar on the Black Sea.
There he finds old Stalinist-minded bureaucrats are still in place and doubly incensed now when he reveals his exotic American passport.
After all the foreign excitement about Gorbachev's changes, it is the bureaucracy, the apparatus, the countless cubbyholed windows of government where citizens must stoop like serfs to be heard by indifferent fellow humans, that remains the Soviet reality for Hershman.
"Everything is so negative here," he said, finding the new freedom of the Gorbachev era an outlet mainly for candor.
He is finally dwelling on the fate he missed in the Bronx.
He thinks he recalls seeing the Hudson River. He wonders what would have been if his father had passed him by on the way to the brave new world.
He looked disbelievingly at his new passport.
"I've long since turned into a Russian," he said, shaking his head.
The strong gulag man looks doubting as he waits. "I understand. Nothing will ever change here."
by CNB