Moscow: Before

A travelogue: 2017-2022

I first went to Russia in 2017.  Feels like a totally different time then.  It was the during The Golden Age of travel.  Flights and accommodation were cheap.  Borders were open.  Geopolitics were lukewarm.  And Russia was merely an adversary instead of an outright enemy of the west.  I was there for about five years.  Off and on for three and then living continuously from 2020 until the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

People ask me why I decided to move to Russia.  I didn’t decide to move to Russia.  At least not in the way they’re thinking.  I’ve lived abroad for nearly a decade, planting myself in various spots around Eastern Europe, and I just so happened to wander into Russia after a summer’s travel through Georgia and Armenia.  I started in the south, made my way north, and set up a new home base in Moscow.

Moscow wasn’t such a bad place to live.  It’s a great city in fact.  It has all the conveniences of modern urban life and is not too expensive in comparison.  There are fantastic parks and restaurants, cheap flights to everywhere, and it has perhaps the best public transport in the world.  It’s huge and densely populated, but never feels cramped.  Broad streets and good city planning made it comfortable, but never too comfortable. 

It seems to be the Russian way to never let you forget that life is suffering and that the suffering is all-too-near.  For example, hot water to apartment blocks is heated by a massive communal boiler.  Since the same hot water heats both your tap and your radiator in winter, and since Moscow winters will kill without good heat, the system needs to be cleaned and stress tested during the summers.  The result?  No hot water for 10 days.  One must either take cold showers or get creative.  It’s not so bad.  Every country has its own little corners of savagery to which one must adapt.

The people are a bit cold, but it’s mostly just a public face that westerners aren’t used to.  You see, in America in public, one must pretend that one is nice.  All smiles and fake enthusiasm and small talk that borders on deception.  But you have to do it, and performing the public act well lets everyone know that you are sane.

It’s the total opposite in Russia.  One must be serious and honest and cold and in control, pretending that one is important almost.  Walk around in public in Moscow with a smile, or speak to a cashier with fake enthusiasm, and you will be labeled either stereotypically American or insane.

That isn’t to say that the people are cold through and through, that is hardly the case.  In fact, a Russian friend told me a saying: Russians are like eggs, a hard exterior, but once you crack them, they spill out everywhere.

Life as an expat in Moscow was great.  The English level isn’t so high, but even a tiny fraction of 10 million is a large number.  Very often when a Russian learning English encountered me, a native speaker, I had found a new best friend.  They’d want to practice their English and were eager to show me their country as if I were a guest in their home.  I never encountered hostilities.  Politics was rarely discussed, and more often than not, criticisms were restricted to the cultural.  The West had gone mad on all topics related to sex, gender, courtship, family, and things we call woke, but despite this, many Russians still wanted to visit or to live in The West someday.  Curiosity is what I felt living in Moscow, both in myself and from those whom I knew.

The Moscow I knew was, to my surprise, full of much more than ethnic Russians.  Walk about the streets, take a cab, or order food, and you’re likely to be served by an immigrant from central Asia.  It seems Central Asia is to Russia as South America is to The United States.  I took an early morning cab once to the Airport with an Uzbek driver.  He was talkative, and despite my Russian being horrible and his English nonexistent, he managed to get across that his brother back home had something very important to ask me.  He phoned his family in Tashkent (it had to be about 4am for them) and told his mother to put his brother on.  His English was good and he hoped I could help him get a job in America.

The Moscow I knew was a city of expats, international students, international companies, and Russian bourgeois.  It was a city full young people who spoke English, studied abroad in America or Europe, had foreign friends, and held a moderate patriotism for their country.  If this sounds much like a typical European 20-something, it’s because it is.  That was the culture to which they felt connected and that to which they wanted their culture to become.

But all that changed on February 24^th, 2022.  One man made one decision and 200 million lives were ruined.

Moscow was, and I suppose still is, a city of lunatics, in particular western lunatics who have bought into the idea that Russia is the savior of traditional values.  True, Russia is a deeply conservative society, and it is easy to sympathize when western culture has gone mad.  But it is incredibly naïve and foolish to turn a blind eye and run to tyranny’s embrace.  I can’t help but think that many of those who did will soon find themselves in the same awkward position as communist and fascist sympathizers did by the mid-20^th century.

As Socrates tells us in The Republic, the tyrant is the most fearful and miserable of all men and this fear and misery run top to bottom throughout his state.  What we call paranoia in a tyrant is just another name for fear, and what we call self-censorship in the private citizen be the same.  The latent fear was present before war, political topics were best avoided and attending a protest was never a good idea, but in the days after the invasion, a horrible feeling descended upon Moscow.  It was dread and foreboding.  An anxiety coming from you knew not where.

The anxiety remained but then it was joined by disbelief and then panic.  Sanctions rained down.  The first two days were spent watching the news wondering when Kyiv would fall.  I had friends there.  They were safe.  And to my surprise, they were optimistic and had no plans to leave.  Flights from Russia disappeared and rumors spread that martial law was coming.  And then nine days after the invasion, The Duma passed a law handing out 15-year prison sentences for spreading lies about “The Special Military Operation”.  I’d read enough Russian history to know exactly the kind of storm that was afoot.  It was time to go.  Western foreigners fled and Russians asked me why I wanted to leave.  I didn’t even know how to answer the question.  I tried to buy a flight to Armenia but the payment failed.  The clearing bank had been sanctioned.  But after several days and many tries, I managed book a flight to Yerevan.

I recall my last night in Moscow.  It was snowing and I was having dinner at a Greek restaurant in Kitay Gorod with a young doctor who dreamed of practicing medicine in America one day.  I looked over her shoulder out the window to the street.  A man was being shoved into the backseat of a police car.  “They were stopping and checking people’s cellphones in the metro on the way over” she said.

We looked about the restaurant.  It was full of older people, those who Russians call “Soviet People” – Boomers in our lingo – drinking wine and talking like they had not a care in the world.  “Are we the ones who are crazy or is it them?” the young doctor said.

I knew the answer but she didn’t.  She wasn’t sure.  It was her home, and people just like this were her family and friends.  We say they have been brainwashed by television, but I don’t think that’s entirely what it is.  They are a different kind of people.  They aren’t democratic people.  They feel no responsibility for political outcomes and their social contract is that they can enjoy a bourgeois life by staying out of politics.  They practice a politics of honor, martial almost.  Have loyalty to the state and have trust in The Czar and all will be fine.

I left the next the next day and suppose I will never return.  I’ve watched Russia from the outside and have heard about life there since from those who fled.  The panic was short lived, both after the invasion and after mobilization.  The bourgeois life continues and they still live in fear, but as one of their great novelists once said, “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”

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