Immigrants keep eye on homeland

In the corner of Lidiya Medvedev’s living room, in the blue glow of a television that these days hardly ever turns off, there is a glimpse of tomorrow that frightens those who watch.

Words stream across the bottom of a screen in Russian, telling of a parliament that has fallen, a president who has fled, a country – Medvedev’s homeland of Kyrgyzstan – that is embroiled in revolution.

A new leader comes on the screen, one foreign to Medvedev and her family, who moved to Spokane eight years ago to avoid religious persecution. What the new leader says, Medvedev does not believe.

“Well, they promise the new president is going to be a good one, as always,” Medvedev said, speaking through her interpreter and son in-law Eugene Balakirev. “I’m skeptical.”

Phone lines between Spokane and Kyrgyzstan’s capital city, Bishkek, are burning with conversations between relatives separated by 10 time zones. They talk about the likelihood of violent racism or religious persecution. Relatives in Kyrgyzstan provide crucial subtext to news broadcasts that Kyrgyzs in Spokane watch on satellite channels to which immigrants subscribe.

Medvedev’s family is Russian Kyrgyz. They fled to Kyrgyzstan almost a century ago to escape Russian, and later Soviet, oppression. The Kyrgyzs now orchestrating a government takeover are native to the country, politically radical and hate their Russian neighbors. The minority Russian Kyrgyzs are mostly white; the majority native Kyrgyzs are Asian.

Bloodshed over skin color isn’t out of the question, although Kyrgyzstan’s self-appointed president of one week, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, said Monday that violence against Russian Kyrgyzs won’t be tolerated.

It isn’t as if the ousted president, Askar Akayev, was a strong supporter of Russian Kyrgyzs, Medvedev’s family said. Akayev belongs to the native Kyrgyzs, but he was educated in Russia’s St. Petersburg. The exposure to Russian culture seemed to soften his stance on Russian Kyrgyzs.

As Balakirev watches news coverage at his mother-in-law’s, he sees anti-Russian graffiti sprayed on the walls of Bishkek businesses, some of which are burning. When the cameras turn to protesters outside Kyrgyzstan’s parliament, Balakirev sometimes sees his old apartment in the background.

“Right now, you can see words like ‘Russians, go to your Russia,’ and ‘Russians you have to flee,’ ” Balakirev said.

But Russian Kyrgyzs have no place to go, Balakirev said. Many Russians, who fled to Kyrgyzstan more than 70 years ago, did so because they were viewed as outcasts by Russian society. Many were Christians migrating to Kyrgyzstan where they could be just out of reach of the strong Russian government. Even the Soviet Union softened its grip on religious control in Kyrgyzstan, which is nearly 2,800 miles from Moscow.

Animosity remains today between Russians and Russian Kyrgyzs, who are considered a watered-down breed, Balakirev said.

The native Kyrgyzs are also predominantly Muslim, which concerns immigrant Oksana Slisenko of Spokane Valley. Christians have never been on stable ground in Kyrgyzstan, Slisenko said. Under Soviet rule, Christians worshipped at the risk of having their school-age children shamed in class and their property seized by the state.

However, the Soviets also didn’t tolerate Kyrgyz Muslims persecuting Kyrgyz Christians. Roughly 75 percent of Kyrgyzstan is Muslim, 20 percent is Russian Orthodox and less than 5 percent is non-Orthodox Christian.

Slisenko said she was relieved to see on television that Muslim themes were not present in the protests by revolutionaries, though the potential is certainly there for future retaliation.

Slisenko has a cousin who is an auto mechanic in Bishkek. He told her recently he was more worried about being victimized by random violence than religious persecution at the moment.

The country has changed a lot since Medvedev’s family migrated there 70 years ago. As a girl in the 1950s, Medvedev said she didn’t see the native Kyrgyzs playing the societal role they do now. Today’s revolutionaries were mostly nomads who traveled the countryside with their families and livestock or lived in rural villages. The images on her television show no signs of that past time, nor signs of the stable – yet oppressive – government she left as an adult.