When Artists Valeri and Lidya Klever left Leningrad for the U.S. ten years ago, they left in anger. Soviet authorities had shut down exhibits of the couple's abstract paintings, which convinced the Klevers that they had to head for the West in search of artistic freedom. Last week the Klevers returned to the Soviet Union, sounding angrier than ever. While Valeri had at last been free to create, he had also managed to sell few works. That forced his wife to take menial jobs during an odyssey that led the Klevers from New York City to Maine to California and back to New York. "You have to worry about your life, your apartment, monthly bills, everything," Valeri said. "Every month, every day, I was waiting for the next dollar to pay bills. It's not freedom."
The Klevers were among some 50 disillusioned emigres who last week returned from the U.S. to the Soviet Union. Some spoke earnestly of homesickness. Others denounced capitalist competition, crime in the streets and public and private corruption. Most seemed eager to swap the hazards of American freedom for the gray certitudes of Soviet life. "I was afraid to go out in the street after 4 in the afternoon," said Rebecca Katsap, 67, who was headed for Odessa from New York City. "I kiss my native soil with happiness. Eight years of life in a strange land are behind."
Soviet leaders could not have said it better. Indeed, the returning emigres put a fine cap on the public relations success that the Kremlin scored last month when it allowed Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov to return to Moscow after seven years of internal exile in the city of Gorky. The Soviets lost little time in trumpeting the prodigals' homecoming. Their arrival at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport was prominently shown on the nightly TV news program Vremya. The TASS news agency gravely intoned, "Many former Soviet citizens, duped by Western propaganda into leaving for capitalist countries, have been allowed to return home." Taras Kordonsky, 39, a musician who could not find work in the U.S., was quoted by TASS as saying, "Ruthlessness and violence and the feeling that you could be kicked out of work or out of your home were depressing."
Ironically, most of those who were welcomed back to the Soviet Union last week had tried vainly to return for years. But they had been denounced as traitors for leaving their homeland, and many had all but abandoned hope of seeing it again. Under the liberalizing influence of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, however, Moscow has had a change of heart. Last week's returnees were the third group in the past three months to flock home. According to Foreign Ministry Spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, 1,000 more emigres are awaiting permission to make the same journey. "Now that we are opening our borders for them," Gerasimov said, "the number of such requests is growing."