RUSSIA HOUSE, TRADING IN ITS NAME

By Sarah Booth Conroy October 27, 1991

The mayor of Moscow and dissidents from the old Soviet system last week raised the flag of the Russian Republic on a beaux-arts house at 1800 Connecticut Ave. And everyone cheered.

The ceremony marked the establishment of Russia House, a for-profit corporation for cooperation. The go-between for Russian and U.S. businesses is said to be the first of its kind, although others from Eastern Europe may follow to learn and earn with U.S. entrepreneurs. Moscow's nonprofit International University will also have its headquarters in the grand old building.

This Russia House has nothing to do with the Sean Connery movie or the John le Carre book.

It actually is the sequel to one of Washington's most romantic stories.

The stars are Russia House President Edward Lozansky, a onetime math teacher and physicist, and Tatiana Yershov Lozansky, a chemist and daughter of a Soviet general. The lovers braved her family and the Soviet system to marry in 1970. Lozansky immigrated to the United States in 1976.

But it took another six years, an amazing campaign by Lozansky, the Sakharov International Committee, 13 Nobel laureates and a hunger strike by Tatiana Lozansky before Lozansky, his wife and their daughter, Tania,

were reunited in Washington.

Lozansky has told the story in a book, "For Love of Tatiana."

"We have sold an option on my book for a full-feature movie," said Lozansky. Royalties from the book, the documentary and the movie paid a part of the $700,000 purchase price for Russia House, he said.

The corporation is also privately funded. Officers of its board are Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov; Paul Craig Roberts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former treasury assistant secretary; and Dean Booth, an Atlanta lawyer. Businessman Robert Krieble, who donated fax machines, computers and copiers to dissidents in the Soviet Union when "they were illegal," Lozansky said, is one of the financial supporters.

At the inauguration of Russia House, furnished only with a lectern and radio and television microphones for the ceremony, Paul Weyrich, head of a group called Free Congress, said, "When we first went to the Soviet Union we were considered foolish. But democracy is real. The change is real."

"Russia House is not financed by governments but by private people," Mayor Popov said. "Aid in the form of commercial goods and food should not be the main effort. Aid would be over soon, and all would be as before. We need a free-market economy -- but we don't have people who can run a free market," he said, speaking through a translator. "I told {Treasury} Secretary {Nicholas} Brady that many Americans will sign treaties with ministers -- who then will disappear. Trade should be with private individuals and businesses."

Popov, a witty man, even in translation, said that Moscow's crime level is lower than most capitals', though "it is now a crime to buy goods and sell them for profit. When that law is changed, there will be new crimes. We will then have rich people, and some will want to try to share their wealth."

That night in the gold-and-white pilastered reception room of the Soviet Embassy, Ambassador Viktor Komplektov entertained a remarkably diverse group: American businessmen hoping to prospect for gold in Russia; Sens. Claiborne Pell and Richard Lugar; a few ambassadors from neighboring countries, including Norway's Kjeld Vibe; Allen Weinstein, president of the Center for Democracy; and of course Popov and the Lozanskys.

Much talk was about the International University, an outgrowth of the Moscow American University, which Lozansky and his supporters established last year with the help of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. "We had 60 students last year and added another 60 this year, even though the entrance examinations are very hard," said Lozansky, who is the university's vice president.

Popov is its president. "It is good to bring the faculty to the students," Popov said, "because too many students who come to the U.S. to go to school do not come back." His own son is studying business administration at Shenandoah College in Winchester, Va. Lugar pledged Indiana teachers to the project.

Meanwhile, Weinstein said the American Club of Moscow -- a cultural and information center -- has been opened by the Center for Democracy in the Prospect Mira house, formerly the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters.

As for the Lozanskys' other story, are they living happily ever after? "We mostly live on the airplane between Moscow and Washington," Tatiana Lozansky said, her face lighted by the glittering chandeliers of the Soviet Embassy, a legacy of the czarist years.

The Washington Post