A Home in the U.S.S.R. : American Gets Father an Apartment With Pools Gift

In the Soviet Union’s rush toward Western-style free markets, this will not go down as a historic deal. But for Santa Monica businessman Conny Klimenko, his recent wheeling and dealing in his native Ukraine discharged a 44-year personal debt of huge proportions.

Out of it, Klimenko’s father gets a new, hard to come by apartment. The Ukrainian city of Lutsk gets two French swimming pools. Klimenko, for about $10,000, wins the satisfaction of making the last years of life a little easier for his 94-year-old father, whom he had not seen since the family was broken apart at the end of World War II.

The loosening of travel restrictions in the post-Cold War Soviet Union prompted Klimenko to return early this month to the Ukrainian house where he was born, and to the father he once thought was dead. The visit was hailed by the Soviet news agency Tass as a product of the “thaw of perestroika. “

The 54-year-old Klimenko returned to the Ukraine Sept. 2, full of memories of fruit-picking trips, blooming gardens and poetry readings with his father outside their quaint house in Lutsk. The joy of the reunion was blunted by Klimenko’s shock and outrage over finding his father living in a fly-infested, creaky, cramped old place with uneven floors and no running water.

The son moved quickly, banging on doors--of the Red Cross, doctors, city officials--trying to find a solution. The answers never varied: Get your dad in line behind the other 26,000 residents in Lutsk who are waiting for apartments.

Finally, Klimenko went to the mayor of Lutsk, carrying a plea for help and brochures for the company that he heads, Sevylor USA. The City of Commerce-based firm makes inflatable boats and is owned by Zodiac, a French aerospace and marine firm.

What will it take to get my father an apartment? Klimenko asked the mayor.

“Four large Zodiac Hippo pools,� came the response from the mayor. The pools--which are portable and can be used indoors or outside--are sold by Zodiac for $10,000 each.

After some bartering, a deal was struck: Klimenko’s father, Peter, would get a new two-bedroom apartment. The city would get two 35-by-30-foot pools, instead of four. In a sign of the new emerging from the old in a society that does much of its business under the table, the deal was even notarized by city attorneys and recorded on paper, to be signed by all parties, Klimenko said.

Klimenko said he will end up paying about $10,000 from his own pocket for the deal. As a director of Zodiac, he arranged with his firm’s parent company to buy the pools at half price.

The Santa Monica man, who came to the United States 33 years ago via West Germany, heard some caustic comments in conversations with Lutsk old-timers. Some called the deal “shady� and questioned whether the children of Lutsk would ever get to use the pools, as the mayor had promised.

Klimenko still worries that local newspapers in the city of 200,000 may portray him as a pushy American who flashed his money and his silk suits to achieve his ends.

Still, he says, what he managed to do for his father made the effort worthwhile: “This is at the top of any deal I’ve ever made. It’s a tremendous high for me.�

A reunion with his father would not have been possible even three years ago, Klimenko said. U.S. State Department officials and Soviet diplomats agree, saying that such experiences are becoming increasingly common in this age of Soviet liberalization.

“We’re certainly seeing more freedom both to travel in the Soviet Union and enter it from the United States, and vice versa, and family reunification is part and parcel of that larger movement,� said one State Department official.

According to San Francisco-based Soviet consular officials, who are responsible for the review of visa applications from California and four other Western states, visas for business, private and other travel to the Soviet Union from Southern California surged in recent years, climbing from 38,000 in 1988 to more than 50,000 last year.

Already this year, the figure stands at 48,000. Pre-1988 statistics are not available.

Separated for four decades after the Allied occupation of Germany in World War II, the Klimenko family faced Cold War-era travel restrictions that posed a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to their reunion.

Part German, the Klimenko family relocated to northern Germany from the Ukraine during the war to make “a better life� for themselves outside of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Klimenko said. His father, who worked from 1943 to 1946 in a German meat-packing plant, was taken from him and his mother by Soviet soldiers and forcibly returned to his native land while the rest of the family remained in hiding, the son said.

Years later, Klimenko and his mother moved to New York City, then to Santa Monica, trying to keep contact with the father through relatives but eventually losing touch. Before her death in 1977, Klimenko’s mother told him: “Don’t go back to Russia. Don’t look for your father. They’ll never let you out.�

Klimenko obeyed her wishes, thinking it was too late to do anything anyway. “A point came when I thought my father was dead, or maybe he has a whole new family--I didn’t want to know.�

That changed in late May, when a letter came from Klimenko’s cousin in Poland; it said his father was alive.

He remembered his promise to his mother but decided to try to find his father anyway. “With glasnost, I figured, what could go wrong?� he said.

Even in the new Soviet system, there were complications. To get his visa, Klimenko had to call in an old favor from a Soviet consular official who once bought a boat from him.

When he finally found himself face to face with his father in Lutsk, on Sept. 3, Klimenko was at a loss for words.

“I pictured this big emotional scene, with profound statements and all that. But all I could say when I saw him was: ‘So you are my father?’ We cried. I was numb. After so long, it was like a fairy tale.�