In 1906, a delirious Christian revival roared out of Los Angeles. … The Azusa Street Revival marked the first explosion of the Pentecostal faith. … Among those who embraced it there were numerous Russian immigrant workers. They returned to Russia to preach their new gospel as communist revolutionaries were toppling the czarist government. These Pentecostal pioneers converted thousands in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus.
By the time the Soviet experiment ended, seven hundred thousand people, most of them in the Ukraine and Belarus, were fervent Pentecostals. … Tens of thousands emigrated, settling mostly in Sacramento, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Among them was a young couple, Anatoly and Nina Sinyayev, from the city of Baksan. Anatoly was a welder. Nina’s father was an evangelist, touring Germany and Israel to preach the gospel. When the Soviet walls tumbled, the Sinyayevs took their two toddler daughters and fled to Portland. Nina’s first baby in America was also their first son, Toviy. From then on, she was always pregnant. The couple had ten more children. Anatoly was always working. … They attended a conservative Russian Pentecostal church, and raised their children in their faith.
But their American dreamland contained hazards they hadn’t imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth. Leaders turned to the prohibitions that had sustained the faith during the dark decades back home. Girls couldn’t dye their hair, pierce their ears, or wear makeup. Young men and women could not talk, or date. If a man wanted to marry, he went to his pastor, who asked the young woman if the suitor interested her. Russian Pentecostals didn’t associate much with American society, which they viewed as a threat. … The Sinyayevs’ daughters were not allowed to wear nail polish or mingle with Americans. … The Sinyayevs’ second child, Elina, was their most stubborn. A pretty girl with an aquiline nose, Elina raised her siblings while her mother was pregnant and railed at the church teachings that ruled her home. “All they preached was that women should wear long skirts, head coverings, no makeup,” she said. “They never teach you about love. They didn’t want us to know God forgives.” As they moved into adolescence, the Sinyayevs’ oldest children hid their lives from their parents. Elina applied makeup on the school bus each morning, and exchanged her long skirts for pants.
Mostly, though, opiates consumed young people in Portland who had never used them, virtually all of them white. As a group, it appears none fell to it harder than the children of Russian Pentecostals who came fleeing persecution and found U.S. pop culture a greater challenge than anything a Soviet apparatchik could invent. Among them was Vitaliy Mulyar. Born in the Ukraine, Vitaliy grew up in the cocoon of the Russian Pentecostal church in America—first in Sacramento, then Portland. Like his peers, he spoke fluent Russian, and his English carried the hint of an accent from the country he had left when he was two. He, like his peers, found church desiccated and boring. Vitaliy and his Pentecostal friends grew up in their own world. He found work as a mechanic. Cars became his passion, especially his prized sequoia-green 1999 VW Jetta. Then a friend at work offered him a Vicodin. Doctors prescribed them, so how bad could they be? With that, he found a new passion. Soon he migrated to OxyContin and his habit rose to four Oxys a day.
Elina Sinyayev tried heroin the first time with a friend from work, who told her it would relax her. Her sister started with OxyContin. So did Toviy, her brother. Elina lost her job and, desperate for her dope, began dating a Russian Pentecostal heroin dealer, who also got his tar from the Mexicans delivering it like pizza. Elina believed she was the only one in her family using heroin. But one night at home she looked at her sister and brother and watched them nod off and knew the truth. Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit.
One afternoon in March 2011, Toviy told his mother he had the flu. He went out with Elina and they returned hours later. He seemed different but Nina had too many kids to pay close attention. The next morning, she found her eldest boy in bed, unconscious and gasping for breath. Paramedics couldn’t revive him. He lasted for three days on life support.
