12 years since leaving Russia

Around this time every year, Facebook shows me this memory. A couple of weeks before leaving for the US, we traveled to Seliger — a lake a few hundred kilometers from Moscow, en route to Saint Petersburg. My in-laws had a village house there, and every now and then, we’d go for a summer retreat. Seliger has a monastery, and the picture below was taken atop it. My wife wears a platok (headscarf), as women are supposed to cover their heads when visiting a church. That monastery visit aside, the trips to Seliger, including that last one, weren’t very spiritual. In fact, they were the opposite: indulging in food and drinking. Good memories.

At the time of that trip, we were already very close to leaving. Several months earlier, I had received a job offer from a company in the Bay Area and got my H1B visa.

Did I know I was leaving for good? Yes, the departure loomed large. We were resetting our lives and leaving our home for good. But no one could have predicted that the farewell would turn out to be so monumental. Less than a year later, Russia annexed Crimea, beginning its historic path of isolation. That path, of course, escalated to even more unimaginable heights with the war in Ukraine in 2022.

My in-laws left Russia in 2015 and never went back either. They, too, rebuilt their lives in the U.S., in many ways from scratch. My mom left Russia…