Once my parents and sister were approved to immigrate, the communist bureaucracy still wasn’t finished playing its games.
A week before my family's scheduled departure, my grandparents heard a knock at the door. “Hello, Mrs. Lokshin. Is Anatole here? We’ve come to take him to Base so-and-so to award him his promotion to First Lieutenant.” My grandparents said they didn’t know where their son was and hadn’t spoken to him in some time, which was an obvious lie.
The KGB knew intimate details about my father—every one of his bosses, his close friends, and more—so how could their file still show an old address? Or was the whole thing simply another little performance, staged to irritate and intimidate?