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The place where I met the love of my life — there’s now a shitshow
I’m neither impressionable nor melodramatic. As years and decades go by, it’s inevitable that the places that played a role in your life undergo transformations, often losing the identity you remember.
I’m not nostalgic either. I used to love Moscow, my home city, but after I left in 2013, I never looked back. The events of recent years only increased the perceived distance from my ex-home country. When I write or reminisce about Russia, however, I try not to paint everything in dark colors — like I said, it used to be my home. It would be wrong to disown the role it played in my younger years.
Today, though, something unpleasant caught my attention. Unpleasant? Is it the right word to describe what I felt? It was a mix of disgust and maybe even arrogance.
In connection with the upcoming 9th May celebration (Victory Day which celebrates the victory over Nazi Germany), which always features a pompous parade with military machinery rolling through the city center, there is now a display of Western ‘trophies’ captured in Ukraine. It’s on Poklonnaya Gora, a park by Kutuzovsky Prospect, one of the main avenues radiating away from Moscow’s center.
