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Americans, Russians and Ukrainians — From My Childhood in Rural America to Modern Dubai
A relationship that continues to challenge my understanding of national allegiances and identity
One of my earliest childhood memories is of my father demanding that my brother and I watch the television as a John-Belushi-looking, morbidly obese man in a skimpy, crimson tank top attempted to lift what seemed like an impossible amount of weight over his head. This was the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada, and the giant of a man attempting to clean and jerk over 500 lbs. (which he was the first to do) was the Russian, Vasily Ivanovich Alekseyev, but my father always referred to him reverently as “Alekseyev!”.
I have to admit that, as a five-year-old, I was in no way interested in competitive weight lifting, yet Alekseyev’s performance was an astonishing sight to behold, (even on a 15-inch TV with rabbit-ears). This was the super-heavyweight division, and there was so much weight on the bar that it bent like a banana. The strain on Alekseyev’s face as he lifted made it look like his head was about to explode. My father, who was the same age as the Russian athlete, cheered aloud his contemporary comrade as Alekseyev won gold, and we followed his career as he went on to set 80 world records. It was only years later I learned he received a monetary bonus from the Soviet state for every record, so he had gradually increased his attempts by half a kilo each time to ensure a maximum payout — hardly an ideal way to advance one’s performance trajectory as an athlete, and an economic scheme that today seems quaint, as even collegiate athletes garner millions in endorsement deals.
If you somehow didn’t catch the sensation of Alekseyev’s 500 lb. clean and jerk in the ’76 summer Olympics, there was zero chance you missed the other miracle, 14-year-old gymnast, Nadia Comăneci. The Romanian prodigy performed flawlessly on the uneven bars, leading the judges to award her an unprecedented score of a perfect 10. Over the course of the 1976 Games, Nadia received a total of seven perfect 10s for events en route to winning three gold medals, setting a new standard in gymnastics. While much of the world fell for the loveable gymnast, Romania was a communist-bloc country under influence of the Soviet Union, and despite her later defection to the United States, for many in the West, she may as well have been Russian.
Growing up in the ’80s in America during the Cold War, it was difficult to ignore communism and the Soviet Union’s influence. While Nazis were (and remain) a stalwart Hollywood enemy, the Russians were increasingly substituted as the screenwriters’ go-to villains. The scope of the Soviet Union silver-screen threat varied, but it generally fell into four categories: nuclear annihilation, diabolical espionage, invasion/occupation, and scientifically engineered super-athletes. A short list of this genre would include Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (annihilation), Red Dawn (invasion), Rocky IV (super-athlete), The Day After (annihilation), No Way Out (espionage), and some punky attempts at cross-pollination, both in genre — Chevy Chase and Dan Akyroyd in the comedy Spies Like Us — as well as cross-national partnerships such as the more subtle Gorky Park, in which William Hurt plays a Russian detective navigating corruption to solve a case with an American cop. Despite the last example, the prevailing trope of Russians in American film (and pop culture, inevitably) as “Communists = Bad.”
Despite the reality of watching their Olympians break records and understanding on a basic level that Hollywood is a fabrication, Russians were almost an imaginary people to most Americans of my generation, myself included. We had “ideas” of who and what they were, but no real understanding on a human level.
The mystery of what Russians were really like remained with me until twenty-five years ago in Brooklyn, New York, when I got into my first car accident. I was driving my parents’ maroon, near-vintage Ford wagon, and cruising down Ocean Avenue through Brighton on the way to the beach, when the lights turned and traffic came to a stop. As the green light came again, the silver Lincoln Town Car in front of me, signaling a right turn, lurched to life, and I followed close behind, eager to reach the beach and plant my toes in the sand. Unfortunately, at that same moment, a cyclist along the adjacent sidewalk ignored a stop sign and blew through the intersection, causing the Town Car to lock up its brakes, and failing to stop in time, I bumped it from behind.
Now, when I say “bumped,” I truly mean “bumped.” Had an apple been set between the two cars, the pressure of impact may not have left a bruise. Still, the combination of screeching brakes, followed by my cars’ love tap to the bumper, led the Town Car driver to conclude a legitimate accident had occurred and they pulled over to a stop.
Resigned to the increasing likelihood of a non-beach day, I gathered my wits and stepped from the car, walking slowly ahead to chat with the other driver. Having been told that 90% of accidents are judged to be the fault of the driver whose car was in the rear, my hope was to come to an understanding that this was neither of our faults, due to the reckless riding of the cyclist. Surely, they would agree that there had been no reasonable amount of time to come to a stop.
Walking alongside the rear passenger doors of the Town Car, I looked in and saw two young children, perhaps twins, no older than ten. They were staring into the front seat with concern, but fidgeting about normally, as kids do. Still, the fact that kids were now involved did little to ease my anxiety, which rose further as the driver opened the door and a lengthy woman in her mid-thirties, covered from head to toe in an enormous fur coat, carrying a designer handbag, and wearing 3-inch heels, emerged.
“Hi, ma’am,” I offered, looking past her to the kids in the back seat. “Are you okay?”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know,” she answered in a thick Eastern European accent, flustered.
“That cyclist was a real jerk. I can’t believe he just blew through that light.”
“Da,” she answered without meeting my eyes and stepped past me to open the back door and check on her kids, who seemed fine.
For the next couple of minutes, I tried my best to convince this person there was no damage to her car and it would be easiest for everyone to just move on with our day. Each time, however, my arguments were met with anxious indecision and a persistent desire to consult her husband. Eventually, I gave up and called my Italian-American uncle, a seasoned, if ethically dubious, New York City lawyer, and asked him what to do. It was the early era of the cell phone, and my clamshell Nokia was notoriously unreliable, so conversations were kept short and to the point.
“What nationality?” my uncle asked.
“Um, I think she’s Russian.”
“Forget it. Give her your insurance info and walk away.”
“Really? Why?”
“Her husband is already filing a false police report. Let the insurance people handle it. That’s what you pay them for.”
“Okay, but it just seems like I could — “
“Douglas,” he cut in. “If you had to wait in line for toilet paper for 20 years, then came to a country where scumbag lawyers could manufacture money, you’d probably do the same thing.”
Well, in time, all of what my uncle spoke of turned out to be true, and this revelation punctured the romantic notion of Russians I had cultivated over the years. I had read Dostoevsky and Turgenev and was a fan of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. It seemed, however, that while delving into Tsarist and communist-era arts, I had casually overlooked the themes of political corruption, social instability, and general suffering (even though the suffering was supposed to lead to enlightenment). Just a quick perusal of Tchaikovsky’s biography would have gone a long way in this regard towards my own enlightenment.
The point is that Russians had had a tough time for a long time, and when they got to America, like many other immigrants over the years — including my own grandparents — they were determined to take advantage of every opportunity. In this light, it’s more difficult to condemn the Town Car driver or her husband (though I never did speak directly with my insurance agent and I’m pretty sure my rates went up.)
Today I live in Dubai, where Russians have been emigrating for decades. I’m a member of a relatively small group of American expats — due in no small part to the long arm of the Internal Revenue Service — but after my years in New York City ended with my berating taxi drivers on Broadway from my bicycle and imploring strangers to pick up their litter, I have found life in the UAE to be an unexpectedly welcome change. Despite what many imagine might be an oppressive monarchic rule, our family has done well here, where it’s modern, safe, clean, the schools are excellent, and people mostly mind their own business. Still, being an expat can be a peculiar, and at times, existential existence. You will never quite fit in as a local (even my children, born here, are not eligible for citizenship), and should we return home, assimilation would be a challenge, having lived under such a different system for years. The decision to leave one’s country for another is not one to be taken lightly, as we and the rest of the 85% expat population of Dubai have learned along the way.
In the early years of Dubai’s expansion, the customs laws were fairly lax, so wealthy foreign nationals flew into town with suitcases full of cash to invest in real estate. After the crash in 2008, investment laws stiffened up and migration slowed, but the UAE has remained hospitable to expats from around the world looking for a relatively low-risk economic safe haven, including British, Indian, Pakistani, and of course, Russians.
In the years since our arrival in Dubai, dozens of Russian connections have been made. Our eldest daughters’ best friends from the neighborhood preschool were the tow-headed Polina and Katerina — daughters of Victorya and Nikolai — a lovely family. We became friends with Irina and Dmitry, who lived in the penthouse across the street with their daughter, Katerina. They were shrewd investors, and we consulted them often about changes in the real estate market.
Our kids eventually enrolled at an American elementary school and made new friends: from third grader Ilyana — a lovely, if fiercely driven aspiring gymnast (a “Russian mother thing,” as her mother, Svetlana, explained over coffee at a playdate pickup) — to Adrianna, a precocious and hilarious pal of my own first-grader, whose Ukrainian and Russian parents met at college in Texas and drive a gull-winged Tesla to the often extravagant (and endless) parade of birthday parties that are a staple of life in Dubai.
Our recent neighbors, Vlad and Diana, with whom we spent many nights sharing dinners and drinks, arrived in Dubai with their daughter about a decade ago, not long after ourselves. Vlad is Russian and Diana is Ukrainian, which folks might consider an unlikely union, but there are thousands of such families across the globe — in Russia, Ukraine, and places like Dubai — raising their families and living their lives.
We became close enough friends with Vlad and Diana, in fact, that late one night I received an anxious call from the Amsterdam airport, wherein Vlad explained they had lost Diana’s passport, and he asked could I please take the spare key, go into their bedroom dresser drawer to photograph and send her identification so they could board a return flight, which I did, gladly. Imagine, the Dubai-expat Russian grandson of a former Politburo senior official, asking the Dubai-expat grandson of Italian and Norwegian emigrants to America for help with Dutch immigration officials navigating a Ukrainian wife’s paperwork. How times have changed.
One of the best things about being an expat in Dubai is the proximity to countries that as an American, one would be far less likely to travel to. Romania, for example, is a place I never thought I’d visit, but found myself accompanying my wife on a work trip, pushing my daughter’s stroller down the sidewalk of Bucharest one spring afternoon. I wondered to myself if Nadia Comăneci had walked these streets to gymnastics practice, or if she even missed Bucharest, which we found to be pleasant, but more than a little run-down. It’s difficult to explain the sense of futility and societal fatigue amongst the population of a post-communist-bloc country, but the following example might assist.
One of our last days in Romania, we decided to rent a car and drive out to Bran Castle in Transylvania, a medieval structure built by Saxons in 1377, but more commonly known as “Dracula’s castle.” After a maddening process of renting a car in Bucharest, the three-hour drive through the countryside was pleasant enough, with picturesque pastures rolling by on both sides of the two-lane state road. We were almost to our destination when I came over a rise and a state policeman walked into the road from the shoulder and pulled us over with a hand gesture.
My license, registration and rental agreement in hand, I opened the window and politely asked the officer why he pulled us over.
“Head lights,” he explained with an unthreatening Romanian accent, that sounded unsettlingly similar to The Count, from Sesame Street.
“But it’s daytime, officer.”
“There is poor visibility in this corridor, even during sunshine.”
“I understand. I’ll turn them on now, officer.”
“Thank you, and have a good day.”
I was about to leave it there and drive off, having dodged a bullet, but my American inner-litigant got the better of me as the policeman was turning away.
“Excuse me, officer?”
“Yes?”
“I’m just wondering; how would I have known about the headlights? I didn’t see any signs on the way in.”
The policeman turned back to me and shrugged with his palms up, smiling as if he were addressing a child.
“Signs?” he chuckled, turning his palms to the sky. “This is Romania!”
As we continued our journey, it dawned on me that the policeman had been trying to explain to the American tourist that in Romania, when something was broken or didn’t make sense, there’s simply nothing to be done about it. It could be a matter of local corruption, or the money just wasn’t there, or perhaps a combination of both. Keep in mind, this was a state policeman, and he was throwing his hands up. In the end, it didn’t matter much, for we got to the castle, had a lovely day, and returned to Bucharest — headlights blazing — without further incident.
Still, it made me wonder what it had been like to grow up in Romania, or even now, if you or your family really did need a service or help with infrastructure. How does one square that circle? Do you just accept it, like the policeman, or try to change things?
For Romania, their emigration rates over recent years provide a pretty clear solution — pack your bags. If you’ve spent any time in the UK, France, or Spain in recent years, chances are your waiter, the person ringing you up at the supermarket, or your grandmother’s caretaker, was a Romanian expat. Though their dictatorship collapsed over three decades ago, communism has cast an exceedingly long shadow, and Romania remains one of the poorest countries in Europe.
Back home in Dubai, things are different. There is plenty of money and I’ve never seen a pothole. Unlike Romania, the highways are lined with streetlights, so even if you failed to use your headlights in the dead of night, your car would be visible on the road. If you did happen to have a question about public works or transportation — despite the fact that the UAE is governed by something betwixt a monarchy and tribal autocracy — there are plenty of numbers to call and agencies to report to, and surprisingly often, they’ll get back to you via text-message or email with a case number for your complaint. They might even call you to discuss the matter and take suggestions. Sure, much of this is lip-service in the interest of public relations for the UAE leadership’s pursuit of recognition as a burgeoning modern state on the world stage, but a good bit of it is genuine, and much appreciated by the population.
My British expat “mates” refer to me as “The American,” partly because there are so few Yanks here in Dubai, but also in no small part because I come from a country that — to the collective nausea-inducing reception of allies and enemies alike — vociferously refers to itself as “the greatest country in the world.” I can report firsthand that even if you’re the most patriotic apple-pie-loving American; if you live abroad long enough, you will be humbled in this regard.
Don’t get me wrong. I love The United States, and have missed it terribly at times (though less so in recent years). That said, having lived for over a decade in a country where I can lose track of my child in a mall and not once worry they’ve been kidnapped, where I can leave my bike unlocked, where no one litters, and where I’ve never even heard of a person being shot by a gun, there’s a fair case to be made for American humility.
My wife’s family hails from Mexico City, but her grandfather, Moses, fled Odesa in the formerly Soviet Ukraine after the Leninist-aligned political theoretician and anti-Stalinist revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, was expelled from The Soviet Union in the 1920s (and later was assassinated by an axe-wielding Stalin agent in 1940 at his home in Mexico City). Great-grandpa Moses traveled to Brazil, made his way up the coast with the intention of immigrating to America, but stopped in Mexico and never left, eventually marrying my great grandmother-in-law and raising a family.
In 2019, my father-in-law, Moses Jr., was celebrating his 75th birthday and wanted to explore his former-Soviet father’s family roots south of Kyiv. Perhaps there were remnants of his heritage — a temple, plaque, gravestone, or even a living relative to bear witness to his ancestors. So, our family gathered from across the globe in Dubai and flew to Ukraine for a two-week visit.
Arriving at the airport in Kyiv, the passport control area was smooth. Once they saw we had small children, they waived us to the front of the line, which we appreciated. Some countries do this. It’s a lovely way to be greeted in a new land and something you never forget, especially if you’ve run the customs gauntlet at Atlanta or JFK.
We collected our luggage and met up with our Airbnb host, Valerio, who had volunteered to drive. We wheeled our bags to the parking garage and piled into his beat-up SUV. Valerio seemed nice enough and spoke English fairly well, which was a pleasant surprise.
What Valerio demonstrated in lingual skill, however, was soon neutralized by his driving style — a slow car in the fast lane, forcing traffic around him, oblivious. I wouldn’t have minded, since I see this often in Dubai, but we had a nauseous child in the back seat. My wife was doing her best, juggling iPads and pointing out the window, but we needed to move faster. Adding to the frustration was Valerio’s exasperating need to deliver a history lesson on the architectural origins of every passing structure.
“This building, here,” he mused in a halting Soviet-esque baritone, “Khrushchev era… and this one coming up on left… much newer… maybe 2010… builders make building but no shops on bottom floor and bad maintenance. Criminals…”
I considered asking Valerio if he was in construction, but resisted. I couldn’t figure out if his ad-hoc historical overview of Soviet-era architecture was a lingering nod to Khrushchev — who had deep roots in Ukrainian society — or a measured introduction to a newer Ukrainian civic pride.
An air of restlessness from the back seat crept over my shoulder.
“How much further?” I asked.
“Not far,” he answered, returning to the architectural tour. “This one up here… also Khrushchev-era… and next door… German… See brickwork? German design.”
I settled in for the remainder of the ride, listening to Valerio’s lecture on infrastructure, and we mercifully arrived at the apartment about an hour later.
Dragging our bags to the graffiti-covered building’s entrance, another common feature of Ukraine’s general framework presented itself — the entryways, stairways, walls, light fixtures, roofs — were falling apart. Most buildings looked like a set from Saving Private Ryan.
We lumbered through the entryway and around a corner to face what had to be one of the oldest two-person elevators on Earth. Valerio explained we had to “jump in quick” because the doors were “fast,” and made a clamping gesture with his arms. You had about three seconds to get yourself and your bag into the cage before the doors slammed and the carriage lurched upwards. We did just that, one after another, hurling bags and leaping in, two at a time, as the doors crashed and we rose to the fourth floor.
Once out of the post-apocalyptic hallway, the actual apartment wasn’t bad. It had four big bedrooms in a railroad layout, with two bathrooms (that somehow shared a single door) and a living room. The kitchen was small and amazingly, had no sink, but we later found it tucked away behind a closet door in the living room next to a laundry machine. We got the Wi-Fi codes and directions to the supermarket from Valerio and ushered him out.
In Kyiv, there are few crosswalks, and large untenable medians bisect the avenues. Pedestrians travel under the streets in a series of maze-like tunnels and mini-malls that permeate the underbelly of the city. We were there in summer, so this seemed silly at first, but when I later considered how unbelievably cold it gets in winter, it made perfect sense.
I meandered through the underground, passing shops selling brightly colored socks, embroidered Soviet-era traditional dresses, electronics, vape-kiosks (everyone vapes) and weird food stands that peddled what looked like donuts stuffed with hotdogs (which everyone ate, all hours of the day). Many items, along with much of the infrastructure, including the playground equipment in the parks and the kiosks and buses, bore the iconic blue and gold colors of the Ukrainian flag.
We braved the hills and walked to museums and cathedrals. There are lots of cathedrals in Ukraine. One of the first we visited, St. Sophia’s, is perhaps the most famous — an Orthodox cathedral, founded in 1037 during the reign of Vladimir the Great, with a towering gilded cupola, museum and necropolis. There were thousands of people in the streets that day, and we learned it was in celebration of the one-thousand-year anniversary of Christianity’s arrival to Kyiv.
On the fifth day we woke up early and packed our things for the long train ride to Lviv, an eastern European-style city near the western border with Poland. We called Ubers to take us to the train station and as the cars were arriving, my brother-in-law wheeled my youngest daughter into the antique elevator and the doors rumbled shut. The lift lurched downward and abruptly ground to a halt between floors.
Little provokes greater panic than being stuck in an elevator. Worse, the elevator was sixty years old and my toddler was trapped. Her uncle was with her and she had the stroller, so at least she wasn’t uncomfortable, but her grandmother was downright terrified. They were stuck exactly halfway between the floors, inside a meshed cage, but we could at least communicate through the metal framing. Frantic, we directed my brother-in-law to the push buttons, which of course, he was already doing.
I ran downstairs to the ground floor, and using my newly downloaded Google Translate, pointed the camera at a Cyrillic sign that might have been the elevator company. I say, “might have,” because the Google Translate app was hit or miss. The day before, I had tried it on a bag of salad and got “Fucking Bad” as a main ingredient.
As I was struggling with the app, a tenant came around the corner and explained the sign was indeed for the maintenance company, but no one ever answered. I ran back upstairs and found my wife on the phone with Valerio, who said someone would come but they might take a couple hours to arrive.
Images flashed of my daughter stuck overnight, desperate for food and a clean nappy. I tried in vain to pry the doors apart with my hands, while my wife examined the elevator mechanics through the metal cage. She eventually discovered what looked like two lock-and-release rollers on top of the doors. I ran upstairs to the apartment and came back with a broom handle, which I was able to thread through the cage and pop the locks, one at a time. We pried open the doors and held them apart.
I could see my daughter and her uncle’s heads, but if Hollywood was any guide, hauling people out of an elevator stuck between floors usually ended badly. I took a moment and decided this wasn’t a horror movie and ordered my brother-in-law to fling the three-year-old to safety, tossing her up and out of the elevator into my arms. Her uncle then climbed out awkwardly, scraping his legs badly in the process, but thankfully no one was halved.
As we moved on towards the train station, I was grateful that my family members were intact, but furious that this could have happened in the first place. The idea that we had to consider our child in an overnight elevator scenario had been exasperating, to say the least. Where to direct that fury, however, proved elusive. Valerio and our neighbors in the building had been far less concerned, not because it wasn’t their child trapped in the elevator, but likely more because they were simply used to this kind of thing. If the policeman from Romania had been on site, he might well have looked the situation over, thrown his hands up and said, “This is Ukraine!”
The general dysfunction in Kyiv, like Romania, stemmed from a faltered societal transition from a pseudo-communist state where one’s station in life, and community advancement in general — while supposedly merit-based and collective, respectively — more often came down to who your uncle was in the government, and whether or not they would benefit financially from any such “progress.” Thankfully, we never got to the point of offering cash to the elevator repair person, but my sense was that had the elevator doors remained stuck, greasing a palm was likely to have been our next best option.
As we left the elevator behind and took to the stairs, I had to remind myself that Ukraine was not the UAE, of course, where, despite its headaches and antiquated bureaucratic style, the infrastructure is practically brand new. Kyiv is over a thousand years old, but its communist-turned-fledgling-democratically-elected government was struggling to make some of the simplest things run smoothly. A funny (or not so funny) thing about communism is that while the idea had been that people were supposed to work together to make things work better, the resulting legacy has been a slew of failed states where nothing actually works very well at all.
Still, as we walked the streets, I passed pedestrians toting briefcases and humming along at a purposeful gait on their way to work. We shopped for groceries and ate lunch beside folks from all ages and walks of life, happily planning their days. Kyiv had a bustling and upbeat vibe, from the playgrounds and parks to the downtown streets and shopping malls.
Lviv, despite its own share of travel-conundrums, was a lovely city — with an impressive music and art community, nestled amongst the centuries-old streets, churches, and buildings. We returned to Kyiv a week later and drove down to Odesa (where Trotsky grew up) but never found any sign of my grandfather-in-law’s relatives, or even a gravestone, for that matter. It soon became clear that most who had not escaped before World War II had been murdered by German Nazis and their Axis allies, the Romanian authorities. Despite this grim realization, our extended family returned home to the UAE and Mexico, pleasantly surprised and buoyed with contentment about most things Ukraine (antique elevators excepted).
Back home in Dubai, both our Russian and Ukrainian friends were keen to hear of our visit to their part of the world, and our Thanksgiving dinner with Vlad and Diana was enhanced by a new frame of reference and range of topics — which we enthusiastically discussed at length. Life went on, and while our unlikely trip to Ukraine had been lovely, recollection faded in the mind’s eye, reawakened by the occasional reminiscence over the underground passages in Kyiv that would be a gift in the Dubai heat, or the fresh produce on the streets of Lviv — an impossibility in the Arabian climate.
Our kids began a new school year, Vlad took a new job managing a hotel, and Diana started a yoga clinic. My kids’ Russian friends returned to gymnastics classes and piano lessons, and the steady cycle of playdates and birthday parties resumed. A few of our expat friends returned to Russia and Ukraine, either having finished their work in Dubai, or simply responding to a longing to return home, for as many of us love living here in the UAE, there is no opportunity for permanent residence or citizenship, and we are all just passing through.
In February of 2022, Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine. I say “Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” because the man is a textbook psychopath, and the decision to attack a peaceful neighboring country was entirely his. This was the consensus of literally every Russian and Ukrainian person I know, and much of the rest of the world, too. I remember the shock and fear I felt for the many people we had met in Kyiv during our visit, and a profound anxiety and sadness for our expat friends from both countries, several of whom had relocated back to Russia and Ukraine recently, and we worried about their safety. The underground passageways in Kyiv were now bomb shelters, as Putin rained artillery and missiles on shopkeepers selling clothing and shoes in the same styles his own people wore as children. Where was Valerio? Was he fighting alongside his newly-armed countrymen, or had he fled Kyiv?
The Ukrainians were fighting to protect their families and homeland, but many of the Russians were also fighting for their lives, desperate to avoid the front lines in an immoral and unlawful war, especially as the conflict dragged on and conscription ensued on both sides.
“Where was Polina’s father?” I wondered about my daughter’s classmate. “Had he been pulled into the Russian army?” It was difficult to find answers, as their phones were monitored by the state and many had quickly fled to other countries after the fighting began.
Vlad and Diana, having recently relocated, were able to help her extended family escape Kyiv to Switzerland, where they all shared a small apartment — impossibly cramped, but safe from Russian missiles. We kept in touch as the fury towards Putin grew by the day. Diana, an exceedingly kind, meditative, and measured person, by all accounts, once described the Russian leader over WhatsApp as “a soulless mother-fucker who will burn in hell.”
In the weeks and months following Putin’s invasion, a mass exodus of Russians arrived in the UAE, which, in keeping with a long tradition, was one of the only countries willing to grant visas. This was good for the Russians, but their presence soon grated on many of the expats in Dubai. Real estate prices skyrocketed, as the demand for housing increased exponentially. Job markets were similarly flooded with a new workforce that was grateful to be out of Russia and willing to work for lower salaries. Restaurants sprang up serving Muscovite fare from Cyrillic menus. My car-salesman friend went from two or three Russian customers a month to six or seven per week. Even my long-time and beloved dental hygienist, Daphne — an American from Philadelphia — was replaced by a Russian-babushka-mouth-technician. She spoke very little English and after two tries, gave up trying to pronounce my name. No more gentle cleanings for me, this hygienist always had her belly pressed into my temple as I lay back in the chair, terrified under the light.
Throughout this period, there was palpable tension on the ground in Dubai between Ukrainian and Russian expats, for obvious reasons. Public protest is illegal in the UAE, however, so these arguments were rare to witness and often tamped down by the surrounding public.
“Hey, you can’t yell like that at people here in Dubai!” I heard more than once, as fellow expats attempted to quell an outburst.
Despite being decidedly pro-Ukraine (and making a legitimate effort to do more than change my social media colors to yellow and blue), I generally stayed out of it. This was in no small part because I could not tell the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages — and often the bilingual opposing parties were arguing in one or the other. Many Ukrainians returned to their country to fight (and die), but most of the Russians stayed, with more arriving every day. Life was simply much better in the UAE, as Putin’s economy strained and the threat of conscription loomed large.
Indeed, our elevators, shops, and parks felt like they had been invaded by Russia’s fleeing masses but then again, who could blame them? How were they any different from those who fled Stalin in Trotsky’s era? Sure, many of those who made it to Dubai had more money and resources than the thousands who could only escape to Kazakhstan, but did they deserve to die in a corrupt dictator’s psychotic war fantasy? The answer is “no,” of course. No one deserves to die in war, especially a war as unjust at this one. It should also be emphasized that of the over 1 million Russians that have left their country since the war began, many of them have done so not only for personal safety and economic security, but for moral reasons. They did not believe in the war and were willing to upend their lives completely, leaving behind better paying jobs, cultural and familial networks, and in many cases, far more personal freedom. These are different times, of course, and expat life has become more manageable, but comparatively, roughly 100,000 Americans left the United States in protest of the Vietnam War.
It’s been nearly five decades since Alekseyev won gold in the Montreal Olympics, and last year the games were held in another French-speaking city, Paris — a grand success, by all accounts. My family visited Paris just before the opening ceremonies and the excitement throughout the city was palpable.
For the Russians, however, the excitement was muted, as their athletes were forbidden to compete under the Russian flag — a consequence imposed by the International Olympic Commission, for their invasion and ongoing war in Ukraine — a seemingly small and misdirected penance, but something, nonetheless.
The Ukrainians, by comparison, were darlings of the games, competing fiercely in their yellow and blue — often to the cheers of a global audience, and earning twelve medals in all, including gold in high jump, fencing, and boxing — a fitting and symbolic reflection of their collective will to rise up and fight.
