The House on 61st Street

In a third-floor room at the Russian consulate, Oksana Stepanovna Kosenkina nervously snapped off the mid-afternoon news broadcast. She walked to one of the windows overlooking the courtyard below, and wrenched it open. She stood there a moment--a plump, distraught, middle-aged woman in a ruffled blue dress.

Then she jumped.

Her body hit a skein of telephone wires, caught for a second and plunged on, ripping the wires loose from the walls. She landed, groaning, on the cement courtyard, the wire still wrapped in a tangle around her legs. There was an instant of silence. Then the whole neighborhood was in an uproar.

Kidnap or Rescue? The Russian consulate is a five-story stone Manhattan town house (leased from the niece of the late John D. Rockefeller) on fashionable East 61st Street, across from the Hotel Pierre. Newsmen had been posted outside its grillwork door for five days--ever since Oksana Kosenkina had been brought there from an anti-Soviet refugee camp in New York by Consul General Jacob Lomakin (TIME, Aug. 16). Had she been kidnaped by the Reds? Or had she been rescued, as they insisted, from "White Russian bandits"?

By her leap to freedom, Oksana Kosenkina, a schoolteacher scheduled to be returned to Russia, gave her answer.

"Leave Me Alone." From the exclusive 28 Club next door to the consulate, a tan-uniformed employee rushed into the street, shouting: "There's a woman lying in the courtyard back there." Excited knots of spectators appeared out of nowhere. Newsmen and photographers pelted into the club building. Police guards on duty outside the consulate raced after them.

They reached an areaway, separated from the consulate by an iron fence, just as three Russians burst out of the consulate's back door. As police scrambled over the fence, they could hear the injured woman moaning in Russian: "Leave me alone, leave me alone." Despite her pleas, and the shouted orders of the cops, the Russians picked her up, lugged her back into the consulate, with the police right behind them.

Angrily, the Russians protested that their own doctor would take care of the woman, that they needed no outside help. Police summoned an ambulance anyway. There was another brief scuffle, when police seized a letter written by Mrs. Kosenkina to a friend in Moscow. (The letter was returned to consular officials.)

But a half hour later Mrs. Kosenkina was under police guard at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hospital. She had a broken leg and kneecap and internal injuries. She would be hospitalized for at least three months.

"Bird in a Cage." As soon as she was able to talk, Oksana Kosenkina knocked all the Soviet protests into a cocked hat.

She told police that she had been thinking of suicide ever since she had allowed the Russians to bring her back from her New York hideaway. That afternoon was the first chance she had found. Said she :"I was like a bird in a cage. I had to get out--I was struggling to get out."

Meanwhile, the Russians were struggling just as hard to get her back. Consul General Lomakin had scarcely been heard from since his press conference at which he bared the Russian side of the Kosenkina story. But no one expected that he had given up. (When he was stationed in San Francisco, he had helped to shanghai an escaped Russian seaman who had dodged his ex-countrymen for a year.) Now he ordered his assistant to get Mrs. Kosenkina back.

Vice Consul Zot Chepurnykh rushed to the hospital with pretty, blonde Secretary Zina Ivanora and angrily demanded the right to see Mrs. Kosenkina. "She is a Soviet citizen," he rasped. "We want to take care of her and we are responsible for her." Hospital officials politely refused.

"Dear Oksana . . ." Twice more that evening Vice Consul Chepurnykh returned. The first time he claimed that he had permission from the police to see the patient. He demanded that Secretary Zina be allowed to keep Mrs. Kosenkina company during the night. A hospital doctor brushed him off quickly: "This is a hospital, not a hotel."

Just before the second visit Mrs. Kosenkina made it clear that she was not willing to meet her compatriots under any circumstances. "I do not want to see anyone from the Russian consulate. I'm afraid to see them. I fear them and will not see them." Still muttering, Chepurnykh departed.

But this time he left an ominous little note. "Dear Oksana: I would like to know how you feel. Do you need anything? We hope you are all right. We took all the necessary steps to have you cured. We wish to see you--Zina and Zot."

Enter the Ambassador. Next day the Russians got at least part of their wish.

With a Russian-speaking police detective standing by, Vice Consul Chepurnykh managed a brief interview.

"Would you like to go to another hospital?" he asked.

"No."

"How do you feel?"

"All right. I don't want to talk to you."

"Did you make a statement that you didn't want to see anyone from the Russian consulate?"

"I don't want to see anyone. You kept me a prisoner. You would not let me go."

There was one more bombshell. The day Oksana Kosenkina had been captured, Russian Ambassador Alexander Panyushkin himself had slipped up to New York to see her. The story leaked out that he had vainly ordered her to sign an affidavit swearing that she was not a prisoner in the consulate. If she did, "everything would be forgotten"; her attempt to get out of returning to Russia would be forgiven.

Legal Asylum. By this time Ambassador Panyushkin was not the only Russian diplomat whose ears were burning. The day before Mrs. Kosenkina's plunge, Foreign Minister Molotov had summoned U.S. Ambassador Bedell Smith. In a formal note of protest he accused the U.S. Government of "connivance" with "a White Guard gangster organization" which had tried to kidnap her in the first place. But now the whole Russian propaganda machine was reduced to complaining about "the scandalous behavior of American Intelligence agents" disguised as police, who were putting words into Oksana Kosenkina's mouth. There was no concealing their unhappy confusion.

Besides Oksana Kosenkina, another teacher, Mikhail Samarin, had run out on his employers and refused to return to Russia. He had already told both the FBI and the press that he wanted to renounce his Soviet citizenship, that he wanted to tell the full story of "the totalitarian technique and practices of the Soviet dictatorship." After an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee last week, he repeated to reporters in an interview that he hoped to stay in the U.S. with his wife and three children.

"So Much Trouble." But Oksana Kosenkina had made it even plainer than Samarin that nothing seemed worse to her than a return to Russia. Not only did that give the U.S. a chance to extend to her the same right of asylum; it also publicly branded the Russians' whole story as a brazen falsehood.

No one doubted that the Russians had their own ways of making someone pay for such embarrassment. When the House Un-American Activities Committee put Oksana Kosenkina under the protection of a congressional subpoena at week's end, most newsmen speculated, with a certain grim humor, that blundering Consul Lomakin would be the next to need sanctuary somewhere. Vice Consul Chepurnykh, who was due for recall to Russia himself, had already let it be known that he had no desire to be the goat.

"It's Lomakin's business now," he said. "The situation is quite clear to me. Nothing can be done without the high bosses." Later he added reflectively: "There has been so much trouble. Things have not gone well. Possibly we have made some mistakes."

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