To Russia With Love

ALMOST EXACTLY FOUR YEARS AGO I WAS SITTING IN A TINY kitchen in Kyiv with two guys named Sasha, drinking beer and taking bong hits of some very weak Ukrainian pot. The tiny kitchen was attached to a tiny apartment that the Sashas shared with yet another guy, Sergei; all of them had jobs, in IT or media, but the jobs didn’t pay very well, and because the city was the center of government and media and finance in Ukraine (such as these were), prices even in the outer bedroom communities were high. Still, the Sashas were having a good time; they spent hours on their bulky laptops, surfing the internet, and recently, led by Sergei, they’d been making funny sketch comedy videos and posting them on YouTube.

It was three in the morning and we were discussing the fragile state of Ukraine. From afar, it always seemed like Ukraine was in danger of falling apart; western Ukraine looked to Poland, and beyond Poland Europe, while eastern Ukraine looked to Russia. In Lviv, in western Ukraine, everyone spoke Ukrainian; in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, everyone spoke Russian. The languages were close together, yet separate. And the Russian-speaking residents of the Crimea, a beautiful resort area that had once been the summer destination of the Tsars, were always making noises about seceding.

But the Sashas weren’t worried. Ukraine, as a country, had lasted almost twenty years. Gradually it was beginning to find a modus vivendi, a way to live. On television, for example, it was perfectly normal for someone to ask a question in Ukrainian and receive an answer in Russian. It was understood that everyone understood. And even Crimea, the Sashas said, smiling, would eventually come around. They were not willing to give up Crimea. “There are nice beaches there,” they said.

In retrospect it seems to me that we were all being a little lehkomyslennye, as the Russians sayâ€"“light-thoughted,” or thoughtlessâ€"about Crimea. But who could blame us? I had arrived in Kyiv by train from Moscow. I can’t remember if there was a border post between Russia and Ukraine, because it didn’t concern me; as an American citizen, I didn’t need a visa to visit Ukraine (and neither did Russians). I did need a visa to visit Russia, but the visa was easy to get. And once in Russia I could travel around and pretty much do whatever I wantedâ€"like for example get on a train and go to Ukraine.

It hadn’t always been like this. In 1981, when my family left the USSR, all our friends and relatives came to the airport, at six in the morning, to see us off, a crowd of thirty people, it must have been, because they thought they’d never see us again. There was no going to America for decent people in the USSR (as opposed to Party functionaries), and there was no going back to the USSR once you’d left. They came to say goodbye and then we left and it was over. We arrived in Boston. A couple of years later, a Korean Air flight was shot down after accidentally wandering into Soviet airspace. Ronald Reagan declared the country we’d just escaped from the “evil empire.” My parents were thrilled; they were vindicated. My father, a computer programmer, quickly got a job, and we settled down, to live in America.

And then, just like that, Gorbachev proclaimed his perestroikaâ€"rebuilding. He hoped to rejuvenate the Soviet Union, bring it back to its revolutionary roots. This was impossible, as it turned out, the tree had rotted, but he didn’t know that, and gradually the country opened up. In 1988, our family made a visit to Moscow, of the sort that just a few years earlier we thought would be impossible. At the time my parents were convinced that our weeks in Moscow were stolen timeâ€"that, like Khrushchev’s brief “thaw,” the Gorbachev era wouldn’t last. They were right about it not lasting, but what came after it was even greater freedom.

The USSR collapsed, literally ceased to exist; factories closed; people’s savings disappeared overnight. But for us emigres it was a bonanza. We returned to Russia en masseâ€"as journalists, historians, economists, investment bankers, heroes. The great bearded Solzhenitsyn came back and for all his troubles was handed a television show, during which for a year he harangued his audience (what did the producers think was going to happen? Solzhenitsyn was going to invite celebrity guests?) about how to fix Russia, until finally, mercifully, the show was canceled and Solzhenitsyn went back to his little house on the outskirts of Moscow to write. The scandalous emigre poet Eduard Limonov came back and started a political party. My father reconnected with a few of his old computer programmer friends still in Russia and started a business; for their office they rented an old mansion near Belarussky Vokzal. My sister, a young editor at the Los Angeles gay magazine The Advocate, quit her job and went to work as a journalist in Moscow (she was hailed, in a relatively friendly way, in the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets as “American lesbian Masha Gessen”).

And not just recent emigres like usâ€"even the grandchildren of White emigres came back. Paul Klebnikov, a strikingly handsome journalist for Forbes whose grandparents had come to the US after the Bolshevik Revolution, came to Moscow; so did Boris Jordan, a young investment banker, also from the White emigration, who would go on to found Renaissance Capital, one of the first investment funds specializing in Russia. And then there was William Browder, grandson of the former longtime head of the American Communist Party, back when it was a real force: he also returned, for Salomon Brothers, and eventually founded Hermitage, another big Russia-dedicated fund.

And it wasn’t just emigres. Lots of Americans and Brits and Germans and others came over to visit Russia and see what it was like. Just a few years before you had to be some kind of eminence, or have paid thousands of dollars for a special Intourist-approved visit, to see all this; now you could walk over to the Kremlin, look in on frozen Lenin, get drunk at the Hungry Duck, and take a Russian girl home for $50. There were so many expats in Moscow in the mid-’90s that there were not one but two English-language dailies, the Moscow Times and the Moscow Tribune, and even an alternative paper (it was the ’90s, after all) dedicated to making fun of the establishment papers. In fact there were so many expats that at one point the alternative paper, called Living Here, experienced a schism, and yet another alternative paper, The eXile, was launchedâ€"that’s how many expats there were in Moscow.