Survival, skydiving, and second chances
Vladimir does not bury the lede: He tells you right away that he is about to impress you. Then, he tells you he went skydiving for his 90th birthday.
This news is a little less surprising when he talks about being a pilot. Born in the Soviet Union and turning 18 around the time of the Great Patriotic War — known outside of Russia as World War II — meant that Vladimir was going to be in the military. But when he arrived at aviation school, he quickly realized flying was his calling.
Vladimir remembers when he was dedicated to the Soviet Union and a member of the Communist Party. He was even a leader of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, at his school. But after the war, he started to notice that the propaganda he had been fed, all those promises and slogans, did not match up with the reality of his life. He lost both his brothers in the war: one to hunger, and one whose last letter home was from the front lines around the time of his 18th birthday. Vladimir remembers fainting from hunger on the streets of Saratov. Disillusioned, he started seeing things differently. He stopped trusting the Soviet power.
In the 1980s, his family first began to consider coming to the United States. Leave the Soviet Union was not so easy in those days. There was a term for people who were denied permission to leave the country: Refuseniks. Vladimir’s daughter and her family were Refuseniks for many years and finally allowed to leave for America in 1987. He remembers his daughter, who had begged him to join her in the U.S., asking him why he was looking at her so tragically as they said goodbye. He asked her to please understand that he was looking at her for the last time.
Over time, Vladimir began to understand what his daughter had been trying to tell him: There was no life for a free person in the Soviet Union. He resisted it, not wanting to leave and not wanting to go to the capitalist U.S. But it was a difficult life, especially if you were Jewish. After the war, Vladimir became a commercial pilot, but he was delayed rank and denied promotions. Jewish pilots were barred from flying internationally. Antisemitism spread unchecked.
Eventually, international programs began to help Russian Jews leave the Soviet Union, and Vladimir and his wife came to the U.S. as refugees in 1989. They reunited with their daughter and her family in Boston. Years later, when a friend told him there was no better place to live, he landed in his apartment at 2Life’s Brighton Campus.
If he could live his life all over again, Vladimir says he would want it to be the same. And if he gets to see his 100th birthday, he will celebrate by skydiving.
