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."SAVE"

Rt. I Box 49-A

Pike Road, Al.

36064 USA.

P3.

Moscow. Embassy of the USA
November I. 1981.

Dear Cecil, Janie and Babette,

We, the Vashchenko family, ask and trust you to intercede for the emigration of our family. We trust you to express the opinion of our family to the people and governments on the religion as well as political questions as they arise and about which we will inform you.

It is possible that our opinions sometimes will ber different from yours but we ask you to express our opinions as they are.

We thank you very much for your kindness, work, prayers and intercession for the emigration of our family That you were doing during the past 40 months.

We ask you please, continue to intercede before both governments, the American and Soviet, so that our whole family could come to your country.

May God bless and help you.

Respectfully Yours,

Vashchenko.

The Vashchenko family.

This letter of attorney from Nov. Ist 1981 concerns to
Rev. Cecil Williamson, Mrs. Jante Trake and Mrs. Babette
Wampold who at the present tine are leaders of the SAVE
organization that located in Alabama, USA, and the address
of which is: SAVE, Route I Box 49-A, Pike Road, Alabama.
36064 USA. Telephone: (205)-272-3208 or (205)-272-7349.

STATEMENT BY THE SOCIETY OF AMERICANS FOR VASHCHENKO EMIGRATION
Jane Drake-Spokesman

For the past 20 years Peter Vashchenko has been trying to emigrate from the U.S.S.R.. In 1962 he realized that it would be impossible to bring his children up under the Soviet regime. In the U.S.S.R. it is against Soviet law to teach one's children about God in the home. It is against Soviet law for a child below the age of 18 to attend the Soviet State Churches, and atheism is taught as a vital part of the curriculum of all Soviet children. Because of these three conditions existing in the Soviet Union, Peter Vashchenko along with a few of his family members made their first trip to Moscow in October 1962 to ask instructions from the Kremlin and the American Embassy on how a Soviet citizen might emigrate from the Soviet Union. The Soviet militia barred his entrance to the American Embassy and the Kremlin gave him and his family a KGB escort back to his Siberian home in Chernogorsk. Consequently, on his return home, Peter was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.

Throughout the following 20 years Peter and his family have continued through legal channels their struggle to emigrate from the U.S.S.R.. Instead of being granted emigration, he spent in addition to the mentioned three years in prison, a couple of months in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, used to contain those dissenting from the Soviet system, and two more years in a labor camp. His wife Augustina spent three years in prison and three of her daughters were taken from her and sent to state boarding schoèls for reeducation in the atheist doctrine for a period of eight years.

In 1977 Cecil Williamson, pastor of the Cresent Hill Presbyterian Church of Selma, Alabama, became aware of the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union. He was told that one way he could help these Christians was to send them an official invitation of emigration. This is a document the Soviet government requires a Soviet oitizen to have, actually inviting the citizen to leave the U.S.S.R., before he may present himself to the Ovir Emigration office of the Soviet Union to "apply" to leave. The Vashchenko name was picked at randon from a list of 1,000's by the Tolstoy Foundation in New York and was sent to Cecil Williamson as a Soviet family which wished to emigrate. The formal invitation to the Vashchenko family was prepared and filed through the U.S. State Department. Contrary to the rule, the Soviets delivered this invitation to the Vashchenko family in April of 1978. When Peter presented Cecil Williamson's invitation to the Soviet Ovir offices, the Soviets informed him that the invitation was a trick and that he should get further information about emigrating from the Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Peter decided to make the trip. On June 27, 1978, he and seven others arrived at the entrance of our U.S. Embassy. Although Peter had a document given to him by an American vice consul in 1975 which should have allowed his entering the U.S. Embassy, Soviet soldiers attacked his family and two members of the Chmykhalov family, who had accompanied him to Moscow. Young John Vashchenko was brutally beaten at the entrance of our Embassy and was taken away by Soviet soldiers. He was tortured for a week, suffering kidney damage, and was returned home to Chernogorsk.

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