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You Don’t Get to Come Back from It This Time, Russia
People talk about accepting a ‘post-Putin Russia’ back into the fold. To the Russian people: NUTS!’
From the moment I crossed from Finland into the Soviet Union in June 1990, and didn’t get swept away by a cloud of fanged, communist locusts and carried off to the basements of Leningrad’s infamous KGB building known as “the big house,” unraveling the mystery of Russia has been a lifelong quest for me.
My first night in Leningrad’s Palace of Youth, a fairly new hotel in the city that looked as if it had been there for 50 years before our arrival, introduced me to Leningrad’s White Nights and my first naked breast in Russia — a girl about my age was so impressed by seeing American college students that she joined our co-ed party sitting on a small lighthouse marveling at a sky that never darkened and for some reason removed her top.
I can tell you that the next 32 years of my life would be just as unpredictable, just as marvelous, just as heartbreaking, erotic, sad, frustrating, amazing, and until February 22nd, 2022, I was sure would be unending. Russia was an addiction, a cure, a reprieve, and a country in which I experienced life both from the perspective of the fish inside the aquarium and as someone outside that glass enclosure, methodically helping to build the world inside.
Without going into detail, much of my life, like any ex-pat at the time, consisted of a zillion firsts. Much of what we did professionally and personally was a first. When silly Putinist Russians comment on my articles saying I know nothing about their country, it makes me laugh because, in small ways, as a member of the first generation of ex-pats — not the ones from the multi-nationals but the ones that lived, loved, and fought there — I was part of the small army of toiling ants who introduced so much of what would later become commonplace in their society.
Much of what we did, built the world they are ruining today.
Small firsts
Here is one small first that can now be found everywhere in Russia but didn’t exist before I launched it with our beer brand: the wide-mouthed top on the can.
