The sky is clear and cold as midnight approaches in the rolling farmland northeast of Freeport. It’s a Saturday night in mid-April, and as windows go dark in the farmhouses people are just beginning to gather at Saint Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church.
At midnight the priest emerges through the altar doors, dressed now in white to symbolize the risen Christ. As the bells peal in the darkness, he leads the congregation out the church’s door clutching a ring of candles and lilies and singing “Christ is risen” in Slavonic. The choir answers him. Ordinarily the faithful would walk around the church three times–signifying the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost–but the grass has been freshly planted and no one wants to trample it. Sykaluk distributes more incense, and finally leads the worshipers back inside the church, where altar boys have replaced the black cloth that had draped every surface with white.
Most of the parish’s 33 families make their homes away from Lost Lake, in Freeport, Rockford, or Wisconsin. The residents of the subdivision are mostly old-timers, immigrant Russians in retirement. Nikolai Gladkin is typical. He grew up in a village near Kursk, the son of a farmer hostile to the communist government; in 1937 his father was arrested, and the family never saw him again. In 1943, as the Russian army was about to retake Kursk from the Germans, Gladkin traveled west with the vanquished forces. “My family stayed, but I went,” he says. He served the German army until the war ended and afterward had no interest in returning to his homeland. “The Soviets would say I was an animal anyway.” In 1950, fresh from a displaced persons camp, he emigrated to work in the citrus farms of California.
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When Seraphim established Lost Lake in the early 1960s, the Gladkins bought a lot there and built a garage that they used as a summer getaway. In 1968, as the last whites fled Lawndale after the riots attending the death of Martin Luther King, the Gladkins took up permanent residence at Vladimirovo, enlarging their summer place by combining it with a mobile home. Both adults, like so many who moved to Lost Lake at the time, found work at Micro Switch, a manufacturer of switches and sensors located in Freeport.
The old-timers talk with one another in Russian, and when the conversation turns to politics there’s always a stiff strain of anticommunism and a reverence for America. “Communism means dictatorship, and I don’t like that,” says Garmasch. “The communists in Russia don’t treat people like they should,” says Lucy Zavolokoff, originally from Kiev, who met her husband, Peter, in a displaced persons camp in Germany. “You can’t speak to anybody there, or you couldn’t until a bit ago. But it’s heaven in the United States. Anyone can make something of himself. You don’t need a high education. You don’t have to wait for the government to give you anything.”
Training young people in the faith and culture of their ancestors is the purpose of Lost Lake’s summer camp, which is conducted for four weeks every year on the property that adjoins the church. The campers, aged 7 to 16, come for what their parents hope will be a stiff immersion in old Russian life. They sleep in open-air cottages. Each morning they don uniforms–khaki shirts and blue pants or skirts–and march military-style to breakfast. The morning is taken up with classes on the Russian Orthodox religion and Russian history and language. Everything is conducted in Russian, “or at least we try to,” says George Ignatiev, a mechanical engineer from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who is the camp chairman. “For those kids who don’t understand there are interpreters.”
In 1944, when communist troops moved into Czechoslovakia, Seraphim and 14 monks fled to what they felt would be safety in Berlin. But soon the Soviet army was closing in. Seraphim led his party across the Swiss border and, after a sojourn in Geneva, on to the U.S. in late 1946.
