Word: vashchenkos
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When Lidiya Vashchenko, 30, was admitted to Moscow's Botkin Hospital Jan. 30, her weight had dropped from 115 Ibs. to 84 Ibs., and she was dehydrated. Still she refused to eat until doctors threatened force-feeding. A visitor from the Illinois-based Christian Legal Society last week reported that Vashchenko was out of intensive care and "in good spirits...
...recovery was a new twist in a particularly sensitive diplomatic stalemate. The Siberian Seven-Vashchenko, four family members and two friends-have lived in a 12-ft. by 20-ft. room in the basement of the U.S. embassy in Moscow since they crashed past embassy guards in 1978. They had hoped, vainly, that U.S. diplomats could arrange their departure from the Soviet Union, where they have suffered persecution for their Pentecostal beliefs. On Christmas Day, Vashchenko's mother Augustina began a hunger strike, and Lidiya joined three days later. As her health deteriorated, embassy officials decided to have...
...world as "the Siberian Seven," they are Russian Pentecostalists, revivalist worshipers who want to emigrate to the U.S. with the rest of their families. Thus far, the Soviet Union has blocked their efforts. Last week, in the most dramatic in their 20-year battle, two of the seven, Augustina Vashchenko, 52, and her daughter Lidiya, 30, were on a hunger strike and failing fast. "Lidiya is down to her last reserves," said visiting Pennsylvania Congressman Bud Shuster. "It could become a life-threatening situation...
Back in June 1978 the seven crashed past Soviet guards and into the U.S. embassy, seeking to go to the U.S. Pyotr Vashchenko, now 55, Augustina, and their three daughters, Lidiya, Lyubov, 29, and Liliya, 24, along with Fellow Believers Mariya Chmykhalov, 59, and her son Timofei, 19, had traveled 2,000 miles by rail from the Siberian town of Cherno-gorsk. Thwarted by Soviet intransigence since then, the dispirited Augustina and Lidiya have now stopped eating in a desperate bid to win world attention and shame the Soviets into relenting...
What they do mostly, though, is hold prayer meetings and silently hope they will eventually win the right to emigrate to the West. All of them-Pyotr and Augustina Vashchenko, their three adult daughters, and a mother and son, Mariya and Timofei Chmykhalov-are Pentecostalists, a handful of the millions of Christians who have suffered religious persecution in the Soviet Union. For the Vashchenkos, the struggle to emigrate began 16 years ago in the grim mining town of Chernogorsk after the government seized children from supposedly "unfit" Pentecostal parents and sent them to be reared by state agencies...