While it's one more year until John J. Appelbaum '97 becomes a United States citizen, he's been a patriot since his first days on American soil.

And he was a conservative before it was cool.

The Kirkland House senior and his mother, Valeria Sinyavaskaya, emigrated to Jacksonville, Fla., from the former Soviet Union in 1991, seeking refuge from the communist nation whose government "told you what to think, what to wear, where to work and how to live each moment of your life," Appelbaum says.

"I saw it all up close--what happens when a government gets too much power," Appelbaum says as he closes a menu at the Grafton Street Pub and orders the traditional American brunch of eggs, bacon and hash browns. "It can't solve everything, and it only makes most things worse."

An auxiliary staffer of Peninsula, a conservative campus magazine, and two-term treasurer of the Undergraduate Council who twice sought the council's presidency, Appelbaum has made his mark at Harvard jousting with campus liberals.

"Basically I'm unhappy with the way the liberal establishment is running the government. Liberty means the freedom to do whatever you choose. We're losing all those freedoms," Appelbaum says during a Sunday afternoon interview. "I believe in the Constitution--what's really there. If James Madison knew what the Constitution was being used for, he'd roll in his grave."

He's made his share of enemies. Council President Lamelle D. Rawlins '99, whose activist agenda Appelbaum regularly opposed, calls him "a foul ball," and Crimson editorial chair Joshua A. Kaufman '98 once described him as "a stupid man" with "no ideas."

Appelbaum retorts that most campus liberals "have no idea what lifes like in the real world. They're just trotting out stuff they're hearing from Harvard professors."

Yes, Appelbaum is socially and fiscally conservative. No, he doesn't apologize for it.

"Kaufman slamming me was the culmination of my four years," he says. "He compared the Peninsula staff to Nazis and fascists. That's a damn lie; I'm Jewish myself. That kind of criticism just means I'm making sense. I'm sticking up for what middle America believes."

Appelbaum's conservative roots stretch back to Novosibirsk, Siberia, where he spent his first 16 years of life. It is a city of about one million, sustained by a manufacturing base that relies on government defense contracts. The chilly arctic air that keeps temperatures below freezing eight months of the year accompanied ominous political winds swirling about the Appelbaum family.

"I saw the lies, the deceit, the corruption. Everything was rationed, first meat and butter but then more things," Appelbaum says.

"There was a saying," he says. "Are you using soap to wash your hands? Then you're not getting sugar with your tea."

"The bureaucrats lived and ate better than everyone else. We had to swear loyalty oaths to the state, call Lenin 'Grandpa Lenin,'" he says. "One year all the history exams were canceled because Gorbachev had just come to power and nobody knew what the official version was anymore."

John's father, Jacob Appelbaum, was a physicist in a government laboratory, and his mother toured the nation as a professional ballerina.