A black-and-white photograph from August 1980 shows 12-year-old Walter Polovchak, small and skinny with hair falling onto his forehead, flanked by adults as he walked into a courthouse for a custody hearing.
He wore a button-down shirt tucked into slacks and a serious expression. By all accounts, Walter was a normal kid attending a court hearing that was far from an ordinary family dispute.
Born in Ukraine but taken to Chicago by his parents in 1980, Walter was mired in a geopolitical firestorm between two empires during the Cold War. His parents had decided to go back to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, but Walter and his older sister, Nataly, refused.
He was dubbed the “the littlest defector” by the media during a yearslong court battle between his parents and the U.S. government that raised complex questions about personal freedoms, parental rights and government overreach. His parents eventually returned to their home country without their two oldest children.
Decades later, Walter, now 54, lives in Des Plaines, Illinois, with his wife. He has two children and says he lives the life he fought for all those years ago.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, he began reliving his own early history, his childhood in the Soviet Union and his adolescence embroiled in a fight to stay in the U.S. He condemns the invasion of his home country, which has been independent for about 30 years.
“I’m shocked, heartbroken,” Walter told the Tribune.
He is a proud Ukrainian American, a hard-won identity intertwined with some of the most significant events in recent world history.
In the years since the long court battle, the Soviet Union fell and Ukraine became an independent, democratic country. Walter traveled back and forth and reconciled with his parents, who are now deceased. He met a younger sister who was born after his parents returned to Ukraine.
Now, he and his older sister are aghast to watch what is happening in their former home. They’ve sent money and frequently check on relatives who live there.
“Until the 23rd of February, I could not in my heart believe Russia would do that. … We are brothers and sisters. We are intermixed. We are intermarried,” said Nataly Hunt, 59, Walter’s older sister, adding that she doesn’t believe the Russian people support the government’s actions. “It’s evil beyond evil.”
‘I fell in love with this country’
Michael and Anna Polovchak came to the U.S. in January 1980 with their three children: Nataly, Walter and a younger son, Michael. They settled in the Belmont Cragin area of Chicago.
Walter says he and his sister liked it in the United States. He recalls his surprise going to a grocery store and seeing aisles and aisles of food out in the open, rather than behind a counter.
“Dogs and cats have their own aisles for food,” he said with a chuckle.
But about six months after emigrating, his father wanted to return to Ukraine. In his 40s, he had trouble adjusting to a new country, his children said. Walter and Nataly wanted to stay. The standoff — which set off a nearly six-year legal battle that cleaved the family in two — began on a sunny July day.
In a memoir, “Freedom’s Child,” published in 1988, Walter recalls adjusting the chain on his bike in his cousin’s yard when he was picked up by police and taken to a police station. Walter and Nataly, then 17, had run away from home to avoid having to return to the Soviet Union. They had been staying with the cousin.
At the station, Walter told officers he did not want to return. So instead of taking the boy home, the officers started custody proceedings in Cook County, upon the advice of the State Department, according to legal filings. That day, without his parents, Walter filed an asylum claim, which was later granted. He was also eventually temporarily placed in the state’s custody.
That set off two court battles: one in family state court and one in federal court.
Walter remembers the difficulty of those years — intense media attention, fears that the KGB might be able to reach him in America, and occasionally being picked on in school.
But the two eldest Polovchak children have remained steadfast in their decision, grateful for the lives they built in the United States. Life in the U.S. at the beginning was difficult at times, Walter said, as he had to learn the language and acclimate to a new culture. But he said he enjoyed freedoms here not available in the Soviet Union.
“I was adjusting to life here, learning language, exploring, seeing freedom of religion, movement, speech and press,” Walter told the Tribune. “I fell in love with this country.”
Michael and Anna Polovchak eventually returned to Ukraine with their youngest son. They continued fighting to bring their son home, and by the accounts of their lawyers, were devastated.
A 1980 Tribune photograph shows Walter’s father, Michael, after a court hearing. He is slightly hunched over with a hand over his face.
An ‘unusual and sensitive’ case
Around 1984, Harvey Grossman, then a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, traveled to the Soviet Union to visit Anna and Michael Polovchak to meet with them about the case. Grossman, on behalf of the ACLU, was representing the parents, arguing that their rights had been violated.
“The whole thing was very upsetting,” Grossman recalled to the Tribune. “They were all distraught.”
The parents were fighting for Walter on two fronts. In state court, their lawyers argued that Walter was improperly removed from his parents’ custody. The Illinois Appellate Court, and later, state Supreme Court, agreed, reversing a lower court’s ruling that made Walter a ward of the state.
By that time, though, the Polovchaks had already returned to the Soviet Union, and they could not send for Walter because the U.S. Department of Justice issued an order that said Walter could not be removed from the country.
The Polovchaks had additionally filed a claim in federal court that said their rights were violated when a court granted Walter asylum without notifying or hearing from the parents. They argued they were deprived of their right to raise their son.
A 1985 opinion from a U.S. appeals court mostly sided with Walter’s parents and the lower court that had ruled in their favor, though it acknowledged Walter, at 17, has rights that “grow more compelling with age.” The opinion ruled that the parents’ rights were violated, but remanded the case back to a lower court to “fashion a remedy that takes into account Walter’s interests as well as those of his parents.”
But the issue was moot. Walter turned 18 a month after the decision.
In the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, the judges wrote that the Polovchak case raises “unusual and sensitive” issues in the area of federal immigration law.
“When a minor seeks political asylum over the objections of his family, his interest in choosing his own residence for political purposes is pitted against the right of parents to raise their child in the environment they deem proper,” according to the opinion.
Though effectively not applicable to Walter, the ruling was precedent-setting, and was cited more than a decade later in the case of Elián González, the 5-year-old boy who was rescued at sea after his mother drowned trying to flee Cuba for Miami. The boy’s relatives in Miami fought to keep him in the U.S., while his father sought to have him returned to Cuba. The case ignited similar controversies, and the boy was eventually returned to his father.
From a legal standpoint, Grossman, the ACLU lawyer, said the Polovchak case was fairly straightforward.
“It was really the political brouhaha around the case that was complicated and noisy,” he said.
Grossman believes that if the government — which he said had an interest in Walter that was about Cold War politics rather than the child’s well-being — had stayed out of it, the family would have been able to work through their issues.
“He was a pawn in a political game that was created primarily by the Reagan administration,” Grossman said.
Praying for Ukraine
Today, Walter and Nataly live pleasant lives with their families, far from the dramatic events of their childhood.
Russia’s invasion of their home country, though, gives rise to an eerie feeling of history repeating itself.
Nataly recently attended a church service with a multicultural group of friends, including people from Russia and Belarus. The group gathered to pray for peace, and for the people in Ukraine.
“I feel guilty, looking at myself here everyday, thinking I have health, I have a job, wonderful grandkids,” she said, “and there are people in my country running for their life.”
Nataly, Walter and their younger brother, who eventually came to the U.S., have been sending money to their family members abroad. They heard from their younger sister that she is safe.
“My cousin sends us messages,” Nataly said, adding that he is not far from Kharkiv. “It’s all constant shelling, constant shooting.”
Nataly, who now lives in Champaign, spends a lot of time with her church community in prayer. Her Russian friends have been supportive, she said.
Looking back, Nataly knows she and Walter had to grow up fast. But both feel grateful they were able to make the choice for themselves to stay in the U.S.
“I’d rather have nothing and be free in mind,” Nataly said.
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