No hope for the US- Russia relations

I don’t know how cold the Cold war was. I do remember the waning years of the Soviet Union but was too young to understand the nuances of the propaganda. In any case, no one traveled outside of the country, so there were no issues on that front — there couldn’t be. But it seems that the frosty US-Russia relations are now at their frostiest ever. Fucking freezing. If Snow White exits, she’s laughing maniacally, observing this undying winter.

Not one but multiple generations were able to experience the “West” first-hand after the Soviet Union collapsed and the country opened up in the early 1990s. In 1994, at the age of 14, I left Moscow to spend a year in Oklahoma. I later did my MBA in the US and have now been here in America for almost a decade.

Our parents, especially my mom and my wife’s mom, have visited us from Russia many times. We, the grown-ups, are a little selfish in enjoying these visits — it’s a mini-vacation for us when the house is clean, the kids are fed with delicious food and we have more flexibility in our daily errands. But there is also joy and love, of the purest kind. I know it when I’m at the airport to pick up my mom or mom-in-law after their long flight from Moscow; when I observe my kids study the crowd exiting the arrivals gate and smiling in joy when they finally see their grandmother. The movie Love Actually gets it right. The arrivals wing of airports captures so much real-life love.

Well, no longer. A year ago my mother-in-law’s visa was not renewed for some reason…