On Park Bench, Another Jolt in a Bumpy Life
By Nina Bernstein
Some Soviet dissidents became international symbols of human rights. Nikolai G. Tolstykh, like thousands of others, served his political imprisonment in obscurity. Confined for years in labor camps for anti-Soviet propaganda in the 1980's, Mr. Tolstykh was nearly 40 and estranged from his wife and son by the time a thaw in the cold war cracked open his cell door and sent him to America.
He had studied medicine, psychiatry and law in the Soviet Union. But in New York City, where his name became Tolstich, his broken English and bad health left him struggling in temporary jobs as a home health aide. He was depressed, friends said, and he drank. In late 1998, a decade after Mikhail S. Gorbachev ordered him freed, Mr. Tolstich entered a Manhattan homeless shelter.
By all accounts, he still cut a professorial figure on Dec. 6, when he sat down on a bench in a Chelsea park at noon in a light rain. A thin, neatly dressed man of 51 with short hair and a goatee, he had beside him a briefcase holding a Russian-English dictionary, a book of philosophy and a few personal items, including a hairbrush.
But two New York City police officers had reason to suspect he was homeless. His bench was one of a dozen in the park on Ninth Avenue and 28th Street across from the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, where 1,000 homeless people eat daily. Sure enough, when the officers demanded identification, Mr. Tolstich produced a homeless shelter ID card.
Mr. Tolstich said they ordered him to put his briefcase on the ground, stood him against a tree, frisked him and searched his pockets, according to an affidavit he signed on Dec. 29. Then they issued him a summons for a violation -- "obstructing park bench" -- because he had the briefcase on it. This month, lawyers for the homeless added Mr. Tolstich's affidavit and summons to a 1997 federal class-action lawsuit that has challenged the constitutionality of the Giuliani administration's crackdowns on the homeless.
But Mr. Tolstich himself has disappeared.
He was last seen at the 30th Street Men's Shelter in Manhattan on Jan. 7 -- three days before his court date to contest the violation. Letters from his elderly mother in St. Petersburg collect at the social service agency where he received his mail. And after fruitlessly searching the jails and shelter system, his lawyer and Soviet émigrés who knew him say they are worried that Mr. Tolstich may have found the revival of old fears unbearable.
In his affidavit, he wrote: "I now associate that park not only with the experience I had on Dec. 6, but also with my experience in the Soviet Union. There, because it was a totalitarian state, the police could treat anyone the way the police treated me on that day. On Dec. 6, I felt treated like somebody in the Soviet Union, because I am homeless."
A Police Department spokesman, Lt. Stephen Biegel, would not comment on the incident because a judge has not ruled on it. But he said that the police received many neighborhood complaints about homeless people spreading belongings on park benches. Park regulations prohibit the use of a bench in a way that interferes with its availability.
Douglas Lasdon, executive director of the nonprofit Urban Justice Center, who met Mr. Tolstich at the soup kitchen's legal clinic, said that during the month Mr. Tolstich prepared his affidavit, he was sober and reliable, keeping three appointments. The former dissident, who studied in Leningrad at the prestigious Academy of Arts and at the Medical Institute before being sent to hard labor in prison camps, was in a workfare job at the time, records show, cleaning doors on Wall Street in exchange for weekly relief of $11.25 and $32 in food stamps.
Mr. Lasdon said that he was thrilled to have a man with such a history join the lawsuit. He told Mr. Tolstich the park bench violation was likely to be dismissed, but warned that a failure to appear in court would generate an arrest warrant. He noted that the police had been raiding shelters to round up homeless people with outstanding warrants. For now, no warrant has been issued for Mr. Tolstich, because the clinic's lawyers have won three adjournments on his behalf.
To the fraying circle of " said Edward Kline, the president of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. "They haven't found a place for themselves in the West and they can't really go back -- they're unwanted in both places."
Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a former dissident leader, said that young Russians in both countries shook their heads at political activism and asked, " 'Why would anybody do that instead of making money?' Nobody in that generation remembers that there was even a cold war or Soviet Union."
Is it likely, as Mr. Tolstich's Jan. 10 court date drew near, that memories of being locked up overwhelmed him? "Of course, yes, absolutely," said Yuri Fedorov, a veteran of Soviet political imprisonment and president of the Gratitude Fund, which helps Soviet dissidents. "He's not a very strong man," Mr. Fedorov added. "He used to be a very good man."
In 1986, Soviet exiles placed Mr. Tolstich's name on a list of political prisoners, with only the barest facts of his case. Veterans of those days read volumes between the lines of his entry: 1980-83, imprisoned under fabricated criminal charge. Arrested spring 1985, Article 70. Publication of his works abroad. Tried December 1985-January 1986. Political camp.
Mr. Yarim-Agaev said that fabricated criminal charges were especially commonplace in 1980, during a three-year campaign by the K.G.B. to eliminate dissent. After rounding up all the visible activists, he said, the secret police arrested little-known dissenters and put them with criminals. "That is part of the tragedy of Nikolai," he added.
The works that got Mr. Tolstich in trouble are long forgotten -- probably articles in the Russian-language press of Europe, experts say. But they were enough for charges under Article 70, which outlawed "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Pretrial detention was harsh in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), whether in a K.G.B. prison known as "the gray house," or in Kresty, the infamous czarist-era fortress with punishment booths that only had room for a man to stand.
His conviction under Article 70 meant punishment in a political labor camp, with even more severe physical conditions and limited interaction with the outside world than in the criminal camp, said Mr. Yarim-Agaev, who called it "the second circle of hell."
Mr. Tolstich was one of 200 political prisoners released by decree of Mr. Gorbachev in late 1987, and among those expelled from the country, his affidavit said. Within days of arriving in New York, he came to the Center for Democracy in the U.S.S.R. in Manhattan, which Mr. Yarim-Agaev had founded in 1985. Later, Mr. Tolstich contributed articles to various publications including Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the major Russian language newspaper in New York, others said.
"He wrote a lot," Mr. Yarim-Agaev recalled. "He was -- he is a very cultivated and educated person, a person with humanitarian inclinations." But adjustment to a foreign country was difficult after years in a prison camp, he added. "A person after that hardly feels full of energy for new labors and new beginnings."
Many dissidents had imagined that coming to America would feel like coming home. Instead, they found what Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the International League for Human Rights, calls "a constant disconnect" between their ideals and reality. And when the Soviet Union collapsed into economic chaos, gangsters and old K.G.B. hands seemed to get rich and powerful on United States aid, the former dissidents said, while their kind slid into impoverished irrelevance.
The Center for Democracy was disbanded in 1991. For a few years, Mr. Tolstich's acquaintances saw him at birthdays and funerals in the old circle, but eventually lost track of him. By the mid-1990's, the downward slope of his life steepened into a succession of unstable living arrangements and short-lived jobs he listed for his lawyer: mechanic's assistant, clerk, security guard.
At one point, acquaintances said, Mr. Tolstich roomed in a squalid ground floor apartment in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn with Boris Khurgin, a newspaperman described by former colleagues as a brilliant poet who drank himself to death at 48.
On a hot summer night a week after Mr. Khurgin's death in 1995, a colleague was sent to their apartment to look for poems to save. What he found was a wake without end in two tiny, barely furnished rooms where several men sat half-naked, sweating and drinking vodka with "terrible, bluish faces." One was Mr. Tolstich.
At the end of 1997, Mr. Tolstich entered the city's shelter system for the first time, returning in late 1998, Department of Homeless Shelter records show. But last year, when Mr. Fedorov encountered him again, he was pulling his life together. He said he had been living for months at the 30th Street shelter and attending an alcohol treatment and counseling program for Russian immigrants run by the Educational Alliance.
"He said he quit the drinking and tried to find a job," Mr. Fedorov said. "It was true. I asked him, 'Why didn't you call me when you had a problem with this?' But he said, 'I was ashamed.' "
Mr. Fedorov last saw him on Dec. 28, at a nursing home where they visited another former political prisoner, who was dying of cancer at 58. Friends say that they believe that Mr. Tolstich was shaken by that man's death a few days later, and that it might have contributed to his disappearance.
On a recent afternoon, a few worn-looking men rested in the part of Chelsea Park where the police had stopped Mr. Tolstich. There is a small patch of asphalt surrounding a World War I memorial to "the soldiers and sailors of Chelsea." The site of the former dissident's humiliation resonated with some.
"Dissidents are like soldiers," Mr. Yarim-Agaev said. "They're veterans of the war for human rights. Even Nikolai, I would not consider a failure -- he has already won his struggle. He deserved to live decently the rest of his life for what he already accomplished."
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Carl
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