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I’m realizing I will never be back in Russia.

Alexei Sorokin
5 min readMay 22, 2022

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I dream of Moscow almost every night. In my dreams, it’s always the summer and I’m somewhere in central Moscow, sometimes on my own, sometimes with my wife. In every dream, there is at some point a wave of subconscious anxiety related to our traveling back to America. Do we have our green cards? Do we have our visas? Why did we risk leaving America and entering Russia? How will we go back?

Our immigration journey in America was long and painful, so I guess the anxiety in my dreams is explainable. Then there are more recent obvious events.

The dreams are not because I miss Moscow. Absolutely not. I used to love my home city but since we left Russia nine years ago, we’ve not looked back. It’s like someone switched the lights off. Initially, there were no emotions at all — we were never homesick, never sentimental. Then, over the years, as we watched Putin’s regime unravel, we became aware of how fortunate we were to have left Russia. The idea of finding ourselves back in the country started to feel unimaginable; there was then fear, considering we had four kids, whose childhood, year after year, had been shaped by growing up in America, notwithstanding the Russian language we speak in the family and some cultural elements that we retain as an immigrant family.

So the dreams are not because I miss Moscow. I guess it’s a combination of memories and emotions, some distant, some related to more recent events, that keeps Moscow so imprinted in my subconsciousness. It’s part of my identity…

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Alexei Sorokin
Alexei Sorokin

Written by Alexei Sorokin

A Russian immigrant in America, father of 4, Cambridge and Harvard Business School alum. I run and write every day. https://runningwritingliving.substack.com/

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