Thread by @callmevlad

Let me tell you a true story of persecution—and ultimately of luck, privilege, and incredible timing—that led to me and my family immigrating to the United States as refugees in 1991.

Teaser: both Joseph Stalin and Kevin Costner make an appearance.

A thread. 🧵

First, an aside into religion in the USSR. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the state adopted an official ideology of eliminating all religions, aiming to establish state atheism.

In 1925, the USSR created the League of Militant Atheists to intensify anti-religion purges.

In the beginning, they targeted the Russian Orthodox church, as it was the most influential.

As Stalin rose to power in the 1930s, the focus expanded to Baptists, Pentecostals, and other Evangelical Christians. Many were imprisoned and killed for their religious beliefs.

My family, going back to ~1900 (on both sides), were practicing Baptists, and they lived under constant fear of being discovered.

One day, my great grandfather's home was raided by a group of soldiers. Finding a Bible in the house, they immediately arrested and dragged him away.

The family of 6 kids—left without a father or any income—were told that he'd be sent to a Siberian prison camp as punishment. They never saw him again.

Decades later, unsealed Soviet records showed that he was shot by firing squad the very next day, in the next town over.

My grandfather (my dad's father; still alive) cries every time he recalls watching his mom in absolute shock as his dad was being dragged away by the soldiers.

The stories of desperation and survival for their family after the arrest are legion, and bring tears to my eyes.

As WW2 ended, the Soviet leadership relaxed their anti-religious efforts to a degree, and a relatively tolerant period lasted through the late 1950s.

The state formed the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, which gave Protestant churches some recognition.

When Nikita Khrushchev came to power, he began a new widespread campaign to eliminate religion from he USSR.

The thinking was in an atheistic society, the totalitarian communist state would be the sole source of faith and morality without competition.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti…

When I was born in 1982, the overt persecution was fading, but there remained a strong social stigma against religious people.

My dad dare not reveal his faith, fearing losing his job.

When my 1st grade teacher found out, she ridiculed me—before any students even had a chance.

But in other parts of the country, state-sanctioned purges continued.

In the town of Nakhodka, local judges put hundreds of Pentecostals on trial—some had their children taken away, some were sent to labor camps, and at least 4 were shot for their beliefs.

One of the residents of Nakhodka, a man named Boris Perchatkin, was able to escape the USSR and share his testimony with the Helsinki Commission on Human Rights in 1988.

His testimony sparked the compassion of many Americans, which ultimately led to the Immigration Act of 1990.

This opened up a quota of religious refugees who would be allowed to enter the United States from the USSR.

My grandmother, who lived several homes over in our small-ish town, heard about this quota the day after it was announced from a man visiting her church from Moscow.

He happened to have all the paperwork that families needed to fill out to apply for refugee status, and was flying back to Moscow the next day.

He had heard that there were already long lines outside the embassy there to collect & submit these applications.

My parents, however, had little interest in going to America. Maybe it was the Soviet propaganda that got to them, but they thought they had it pretty good in Russia... I mean, check out this "mansion" my dad built with his own hands!

google.com/maps/@44.11436…

But my grandma was undeterred—that same night, she typed up the refugee applications for my parents, as well as all of her other children (my aunts/uncles).

The next morning, she nearly forced my parents to sign the documents, and sent them along with the man flying to Moscow.

They were submitted that same evening to the American Embassy in Moscow, where many desperate people were gathering to seek asylum.

One of my aunts, who hesitated to sign the paperwork that day, instead sent her family's signed applications the day after.

Several months later, we were told that our family would be granted asylum by the United States!

Thanks to World Relief (worldrelief.org), my parents were able to borrow enough money to buy 8 plane tickets (2 adults, 6 kids) and we were off to America.

I was 9 when I stepped foot inside an airplane in 1991, and I remember my ears having this intense pain the entire time.

The movie "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" was playing, and I didn't understand a word.

(The only English word I was taught before was "cloud" - go figure!)

We landed in NYC in December 4th, 1991. Immigration processed us, and we flew to Sacramento – where our sponsor family was waiting to help us transition into our own home.

My aunt, the one who had mailed her application 1 day later, would not step on US soil until 8 years later.

When we landed in Sacramento, we discovered that 2 large pieces luggage (33% of our worldly possessions) were lost in transit.

(And by luggage, I mean the cheap rugs that my mom had sewn together with a zipper and two handles.)

Obviously, my parents were devastated at first.

But once we found someone to translate for us, the airline told us that we'd likely be paid $1,500 per bag!

A few months later, the money that we received for the lost bags paid for our very first computer (IBM 386!) – which was my dad's version of the American Dream!

The next few years were pretty tough, but they were marked by many highlights of kindness and generosity from many individuals and America as a nation.

While I spent many years being ashamed of my Russian heritage, I grew out of that phase and embraced everything about my past.

And now, I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be where I am. But it makes me think...

What if Boris Perchatkin didn't have the courage to speak up? His bravery (and suffering for years in a labor camp) set off a series of events that impacted hundreds of thousands of lives.

What if my grandmother didn't have the foresight and conviction to force my parents to fill out the application?

What if our luggage was lost in Russia, where "reimbursement" is not even a word? It would likely be years until I would have the chance to discover programming.

These are but a few pivotal moments that led me to where I am, out of thousands of other instances of luck and privilege that worked in my favor.

I can claim all day long that I worked very hard in my life, but clearly very little of where I'm able to be today was my own doing.