Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Still, I had no idea how to talk to these women, and they didn’t seem interested in helping me figure it out. Embedded in the university for most of my life, I didn’t know how to strike out on my own, with no context, no institution through which to meet other people. I tried, a few times, to start conversations in line at the Coffee Grind, to no avail.

It was while feeling these feelings at the Grind one day that a thought occurred to me: Russian online dating. I entered the words into Google, and after some missteps I found myself on a Russian dating site. It was filled with beautiful girls. Or at least photos of them. Huh. I dug up an old photo of myself from my computer, slapped together a profile, and wrote some notes to girls who seemed like they were educated. Before the week was out I had a date with a cute blond twenty-five-year-old named Sonya. “I’m going to be in your neighborhood tomorrow night,” she wrote me. “Let’s meet up.”

Wow, I thought. The modern world! And I continued thinking it as I met Sonya at an incredibly expensive bar called Sad (pronounced Saad) around the corner from the Tsvetnoi Boulevard metro station. Sonya was pretty, just about exactly as she had appeared in her profile photo, and smart. She was studying fashion at Moscow State and wanted to become a hat designer. She had come to Moscow from the southern city of Rostov, which was totally crime-ridden and dangerous, she said. Her best friend from high school had been raped and killed a week after their graduation. Moscow was no picnic either—she had to scrimp and save each month to make the rent—but compared to Rostov she found it a great relief. For my part I told her a few select things about my life in New York and how I’d come to Moscow to take care of my grandmother and find an interesting topic for my next academic article. She seemed sort of impressed, or at least not entirely bored.

We had two drinks each, for a ruinous total of fifty dollars, but it didn’t matter, because Sonya seemed to like me. To my great relief she did not order food, and after about an hour, she asked if I wanted to go. I wasn’t quite sure what this meant but I said yes. We walked out into a beautiful night and toward the subway, me wondering once again whether I should make some kind of move. But before I could think about it too much, just as we rounded the corner onto the boulevard, she curled into my arms and kissed me.

I was made a little dizzy by it. My first Russian kiss! It was like an American kiss but better, more intense, and it was in Russia. It turned out that all I had to do was go online and fill out a form.

Then Sonya broke off our kiss and put her hand on my chest. “Andrei,” she said, “listen, I’d love to take you home with me. But there’s a cleaning fee.”

“A cleaning fee?”

“Well, yes, if we go to my place we’ll definitely make a mess.” She sort of cuddled into my arms again.

It finally dawned on me what this was. At some level I didn’t care. I said, “How much?”

“Three thousand,” she said.

“Dollars?”

“No, of course not,” she laughed. “We’re in Russia, after all. Rubles.”

A little over a hundred dollars. I had brought exactly that amount with me, as a kind of upper limit on the night’s spending, and had already spent half of it on drinks.

“Can we make it fifteen hundred?”

“Sorry,” she said, “those are the rules. Maybe we can go to a cash machine?”

I was horny, but this was too much. I shook my head no.

“All right,” she said sweetly and stepped away from me. “Call me if you change your mind.” Then she turned around and walked into the subway.

I walked home to my grandmother’s out fifty dollars. The construction sites all around me, as well as the buildings that had already gone up, had never seemed so ugly. Noisy teenagers were drinking beer and yelling on the pedestrian strip along the boulevard. As I turned onto Pechatnikov and started walking up, I passed another fancy restaurant. Wealthy men and their pretty young—I now assumed—escorts sat inside having dinner. This place sucked. And it sucked in a completely different way from the one I’d been led to expect. What happened to the scary dictatorship? What happened to the bloodthirsty regime? I had thought I was going to be arrested, but no one was going to arrest me. No one gave a shit about me. I was too poor for that. I was now getting $493.53 direct-deposited into my account by the university every two weeks for my PMOOC classes, a not totally risible salary by Russian standards, but I still had exactly as much in the bank as when I arrived—a little under a thousand dollars. And my paycheck was going to become more like $375 every two weeks come January. Anything besides rent and food and a daily cappuccino at the Coffee Grind would remain beyond my reach. This wasn’t like getting taken to the Lubyanka in the middle of the night, but as a form of social control, money worked. If people couldn’t afford to do anything but barely survive, they probably wouldn’t form a political organization and seize power. You didn’t actually need to pack them off to the Gulag. What a fucking scam. The world, I mean. The world was a fucking scam.

SO THIS WAS my life—a series of errands for Dima punctuated by a series of rejections by Russians and a slate of activities with a roommate—my grandmother—who only remembered the ones she didn’t like. My trip to Russia was not going as planned. On top of everything else I had had this notion that coming here would raise my stock back home. I wasn’t just some bookworm who sat in New York and contemplated Russia; I was in Russia itself! But that didn’t seem to have been the effect; in fact an opposite effect could be observed. One day while sitting in the Grind and considering my situation I received an email. “Dear Andrew Kaplan,” it began:

My name is Richard Sutherland. As you probably know I teach cultural studies at Princeton. I’m coming to Moscow soon to talk with some culture-makers about their concepts of “modernity.” Our mutual friend Sasha Fishman said you’re there now and would be willing to help. I don’t of course speak any Russian but I’ve got some research funds for the trip (Princeton is really being quite good about it) and can pay you for your time—how does $8/hour sound? I arrive October 3 on the Delta flight from New York; if you’re able to pick me up some seltzer water, I am always very thirsty after a long flight!

I stared at this email amid the bustle of the Coffee Grind, across the way from the KGB. My first impulse was to delete it, but then I chickened out and undeleted it. I was flabbergasted—I should not have been, but I was. Would someone write to anyone they had the slightest shred of respect for and suggest they pick them up at the airport with some seltzer water? I didn’t know. But I suspected not. Worse still, this person had funding from Princeton to research a topic that was basically my topic, even though he did not know the first thing about it .

But if this was an insult—and it was—the insult really emanated from Fishman. Sasha fucking Fishman! I was so mad that without thinking too long about it, I pressed “forward” on the undeleted email and put in his address.

Dear Sasha,

I realize I’m not a great academic star like you, but this is a bit much. Next time you know someone who needs a servant in Moscow, please do it yourself.

I sent it off immediately and immediately regretted it. Not because I was wrong but because it would allow Fishman to say something condescending. I had to wait a day for it, but sure enough it came. He wrote using my American name: