Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism

Chapter Three. The Rewards of Suffering: The Last Soviet Refugees

Chapter Three The Rewards of Suffering The Last Soviet Refugees As the Soviet Union prepared for the millennial commemoration of Christianity in Kyivan Rus′, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 took the bold step of announcing that all victims of religious persecution could apply to emigrate as part of his greater campaign of glasnost. Soon thereafter, the U.S. Congress passed the Lautenberg Amendment in 1989, which made religion the cornerstone of Soviet refugee policy and extended the benefits Soviet Jews had already received to Evangelical Christian, Ukrainian Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox believers. Those people affiliated with any of these denominations who could demonstrate “well established histories of persecution ” under the Soviet regime became eligible to emigrate to the United States as refugees if they had family ties or some other form of sponsorship in the United States. Notably, they were not required to prove fear of future persecution; past membership in a persecuted religious group would suf- fice. That U.S. emigration policy recognized persecution in the USSR of a mainly religious nature speaks volumes about the priorities of governance here. Cold War tensions partially explain the preferential treatment Soviet citizens received along with the fact that they are Caucasian, of JudeoChristian background, and are usually educated or skilled. Approximately five hundred thousand Soviet evangelicals have immigrated to the United States, some as refugees, others through family reunification. The strong geopolitical implications of Soviet refugee resettlement remove it from the traditional academic rubric that frequently considers refugees and migration in tandem with issues of development. From 1945 to 1991, U.S. policies toward Soviet refugees were clearly a function of foreign policy interests that played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. For Americans, defections from the socialist Soviet Union to the capitalist United States were a reaffirmation of the righteousness of the West’s economic and political systems in spite of its social ills and shortcomings. For Soviet citizens, emigration had other, equally significant politicized meanings. It was an emphatic rejection of the Soviet system, one of the few possible forms of overt political protest that evangelicals in the Soviet Union ever engaged in. In other words, the adversarial relationship that certain groups had to Soviet authorities ensured that the U.S. government would view them favorably. Given the vibrancy of religious life in this country compared to other Western democracies, it is perhaps not surprising that groups from the Soviet Union who sought to emigrate in the name of religious freedom were preferentially selected for refugee status by U.S. lawmakers. Refugees from the former Soviet Union provide a particularly dramatic example of what a state must do to curtail outmigration and of the degree to which a receiving society, in this case the United States, has shaped the geography of migration by selectively accelerating the inflow of refugees from certain areas of the world and grinding others to a halt. By extension, emigration from the Soviet Union illustrates the compromised agency of individual refugees in determining equal treatment from state bureaucracies . Foreign policy priorities created the political possibility to emigrate and social institutions, in this case religious institutions, eased the settlement process for refugees. For Soviet believers, 1989 proved to be a historic juncture: remarkably, the Soviet Union was willing to let evangelical believers go, and the United States was willing to let them in. The political liberalizations that occurred in the USSR in the late 1980s, while welcome, had a sharp negative impact on all sectors of the economy. Nearly all Soviet citizens saw their standard of living plummet, which led to “instability emigration,” a desire to escape the economic chaos of the so-called transition to capitalism. In addition to economic decline, other linkages with the United States were occurring at this time, and they stimulated a desire to emigrate. A barrage of American missionaries promising salvation arrived in Ukraine, right alongside American media and popular culture displaying images of glamour and wealth and American multinational corporations offering a plethora of longed-for 98 Part Two: Missionizing and Movement consumer goods. They served as magnets, as cultural bridges, transporting Soviet citizens from the “proletarian paradise” to the perceived land of milk and honey. These bridges fostered the illusion of familiarity and fed the desire to emigrate. The approximately five hundred thousand Soviet evangelicals who relocated to the United States became members of transnational, linguistically based religious communities...