Look at this poignant message from my Russian friend

I have four very close Russian friends. We’ve been friends for over two decades. Ironically, we are connected by something not very Russian — we were all educated in the West, specifically at Cambridge. Our paths to Cambridge were different. Two of us, myself included, come from privileged families — privileged by the standards of the 1990s when Russia was going through a lot of turmoil. We are from Moscow. We went to boarding schools in England in the 1990s and made it to Cambridge. My other friend is from Astrakhan, a city in the south of Russia, on the river Volga; he had come from a family far less privileged than mine and had not only managed to find his way to England through an exchange program but had earned scholarships at both his school and at Trinity, probably the most famous college at Cambridge. My third friend is from the city of Samara, also on the Volga river. My fourth friend is from Moscow like myself; unlike the rest of us, he didn’t go to school in England, and at Cambridge, he was in the master's program, not the undergraduate one.

We are really close. At Cambridge, we ran together, watched movies, and, of course, got drunk every now and then — who doesn’t in college? We had heated debates about Russia and our roles in the future of the country. Out of all of us, I was especially patriotic. I really wanted to be back in Russia. For one thing, I had a girlfriend in Moscow (now my dear wife!). I loved Moscow, my home city. I wanted to help Russia become a prosperous country. My friends challenged my ambitions. You didn’t need a fancy degree from Cambridge to succeed in Russia’s rough business environment. If anything, it’d be a barrier.

With the exception of one of us, we then started our careers in London in investment banking. We had to work a lot but found time to socialize. Look at us — young, silly, probably a little drunk in every picture: