The hamburgers were nearly cooked when the phone rang. June Quigley, professor of English as a Second Language at the University of Delaware was on the line. She was in great distress and could hardly speak. She said, “My mother just died. I’m in Kentucky for her funeral… and Elmira (Pron. Elmeera) is in jail in Washington.” Without hesitation I told June not to worry … I would take care of the matter. Little did I dream what new lessons about life under Communism lay ahead..
“Elmira” was Elmira Umarova, a Muslim student in my class at the newly-minted western-style graduate business school in Ukraine where I was teaching full time for the two-semester year, the requirement for an MBA. Elmira had a PhD in sociology from her home town of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and was one of fifteen students from the school who had been assigned to the University of Delaware and June Quigley’s care for the summer of 1990, between terms (the other half of the class was at York University in Toronto for the summer).
She had fallen in with a married American man who put her up in a hotel in Washington for the weekend. She went shopping at Woodward & Lothrop and when she emerged, alarm bells went off. The store’s security guards found she had stuffed $800 of clothes and other items inside her own clothes; of course, Elmira had never seen such security systems in Tashkent, but that’s no excuse (coming from a country where her own salary, even with a PhD, was probably less than $1,000 a year, the vast array of wonderful things not even available in Uzbekistan doubtless took a toll on her integrity). The store security guards turned Elmira over to the Washington police who put her in jail that warm Saturday evening.
I conveyed responsibility for the hamburgers to another family member and called the store. I explained to the manager that I realized what the young lady had done was wrong, but she was from a foreign country and was one of my students, in fact, and if the store would drop the charges, I would personally arrange to have her leave the United States. The manager agreed to drop the charges, but said that procedurally, I would have to go through the security office of W & L’s parent, Strawbridge and Clothier, in Philadelphia. I called Philadelphia. They had received word that charges would be dropped, but there was nothing they could do until Monday, when they would drop the charges before a judge. Elmira was going to spend at least two nights in jail.
I called the Washington jail (a former colleague, Jeb Magruder, had previously described the inside of a Washington jail to me … "very bright lights" … "not pleasant") and asked the desk sergeant if I could speak with Ms. Umarova. He said, “No, she already made her one call”. “Can you tell me who she called”, I asked. “The Soviet Embassy”.
Had I been Elmira in that situation, that would have been precisely my last choice of places to call as this would guarantee that the school in Ukraine would be informed immediately; I had hoped to get Elmira back into the Soviet Union without anyone else learning about her misconduct. After all, the charges against her were being dropped which meant that, technically, she had not committed a crime and had no criminal record in the US.
Monday morning, Elmira was released. We had a friend meet her at the jail and escort her to the Eastern Airlines Shuttle to LaGuardia Airport. My wife, Barb, met her there and drove her to JFK airport and handed her a ticket for the next Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
When Barb and I returned to Kiev in late August to finish out the final term, the first thing that caught our attention was that our room at the Communist Party’s "Hotel October" was not available, and our belongings, left there for the summer, were now heaped on the floor in front of us. The hotel administration, prompted by someone else, of course, clearly wanted us out, or at least to make us very uncomfortable.
I asked to see the manager with whom I had previously established a cordial relationship. This relationship was no more. Nyet…Nyet...and more Nyet. We were tired from the trip … It was late. … Hotel rooms in Kiev were impossible for a foreigner to obtain on short notice. One wondered if hotel managers in those times were selling hotel rooms or selling rudeness. We staged a sit-down strike in the center of the lobby. Soon the manager came by again. I told him we were not leaving without a room. He stuttered and stammered but eventually relented and gave us a tiny room, a kind of penal broom closet.
The next day at the school, I was invited to discuss Elmira with the chairman and founder of the school, a Ukrainian-Canadian academician, Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, and the school’s rector, Oleg Bilorus (later to be named Ukraine’s Ambassador to the US). It took some time, but eventually I realized that it was not Elmira with whom they were angry; they were furious with me.
I explained the technicality that meant Elmira was officially innocent, that under US law, she had committed no crime and there was no record of the incident. “That’s the problem”, they hooted. “You should have let her rot in jail”. Hawrylyshyn was the more politic of the two, but it was clear that I was now persona non grata. They both said Elmira should be expelled. Since I was a volunteer without portfolio, they had no obligation to even listen to my opinion and could have just done what they wanted to do. If they had had a replacement handy and the necessary funds to hire such a replacement, however, I would surely have been fired, as well.
One difficulty for the two school leaders was that I was the only teacher working full time on the substance of the entire MBA program to make this first year of the school’s existence a success. Along with several volunteer guest lecturers coming to Kiev at my behest, we were covering free-market economics, international marketing, international trade and finance, international banking, merchandising, and even laws of business.
A possibly larger barrier to my ouster may, in fact, have been money; given that I was a volunteer, any replacement might have cost serious money, and therefore present the two leaders with a typical dilemma in Communist societies: better quality of education versus a bigger share of the pie.
Elmira was not attending class while she awaited her fate. She had pleaded with Bilorus to exert any punishment he wished, but to let her complete the semester; if she went home in disgrace, she would surely lose her job and her husband might lose his job, as well. She seemed to have feared much worse in her traditionally restrictive Muslim society.
At Elmira’s request, I arranged for her to address her fellow students. Elmira stood before the class, and bravely apologized sincerely, thoroughly, and completely, and asked for mercy to let her finish the term and get her degree. Remember: she committed no crime, not even a misdemeanor.
She then left the room while the students debated the matter. I half expected a consensus that she should stay, albeit with some penalty. I could not have been more wrong. The five other females in the class of 31 spoke first. “She should be expelled”. “She always has her hand in my purse.” “She’s a Tatar (a discriminatory slur referring to Muslim Turkic tribes descended, possibly in her case, from the Mongolian invaders). Some of the male students chimed in and also argued for her ouster with obvious, often viciously discriminatory comments, no doubt because she was Muslim…. That is, until one of the older students (44 .. all of the students were members of the Communist Party and ranged in age from 21 to 49), a Christian, chided the largely atheist group, “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone”.
I met once more with Bilorus and Hawrylyshyn on the Elmira matter. The three of us finally agreed that Elmira should be given the right to withdraw from the school for medical reasons … a conclusion that was supported by the fact that she had lost considerable weight as a result of this ordeal (She must have weighed less than 90 pounds). This resolution of the case meant she would be spared the fate of a disgraced Muslim woman in a backward society known for its oppressive treatment of women.
The following weekend, one of my guest speakers and long-time friend, Jim Schoff, and his wife, Joanna, arrived in Kiev where Jim was to lead three days of seminars on merchandising. Jim was not new to the merchandising game having been, some years earlier, president of Bloomingdale’s Department Store. Of course “the school” (Hawrylyshyn and Bilorus) had “forgotten” to arrange a hotel room for our friends, an embarrassment that was never rectified; the Schoffs wound up in a second-rate hotel teeming with prostitutes, lots of noise, and ultra-thin walls.
The next morning, I accompanied Jim to the school in northern Kiev. As we entered the vestibule of the school, we saw a woman being carried out of Bilorus’ office through the obligatory double leather-covered doors, a typical sound barrier for Communist big-wigs. Contrary to the decision to discharge Elmira for reasons of health, as we had agreed, Bilorus had expelled her, after which she fainted. I knew exactly what had happened, and told Jim I would have to explain later.
Elmira visited us in our apartment shortly thereafter, looking frightened and even thinner if that was possible, as she prepared to return to Uzbekistan. She thanked us for trying to be helpful, and disappeared into a Soviet miasma that has been equated with “Dante’s inferno”[i] .
The Russian journalist, Andrei Loshko, recently shed some light on what had happened to Elmira (and me) way back in 1990: “Lawyers say that to be arrested in Russia means more or less the same thing as being convicted. Here’s how it works. The courts accept about ninety percent of applications for confinement under arrest, meaning that a rejection is considered a serious incident, resulting in professional competence checks and reprimands. A verdict of “not guilty” after an arrest is an incident yet more serious, as it indicates that a court made a mistake and improperly deprived the accused of his freedom. And that’s a scandal. The accused will demand compensation, and who needs that?”
In Elmira’s case, everyone already knew that she had committed no crime … Instead, therefore, I had become the criminal.
Today, 20 years later, I go to my mailbox each day to see if my “thank you” note from Bilorus and Hawrylyshyn has arrived (for donating to the school a full school year of my time). The Ukrainian postal service is notorious for slow delivery.
[i] Open Democracy, “Corruption, complicity, careerism: the hydra of Russian justice” , Andrei Loshak, 18th March 2011
