You Don't Get to Come Back from It This Time, Russia

People talk about accepting a 'post-Putin Russia' back into the fold. To the Russian people: NUTS!'

From the moment I crossed from Finland into the Soviet Union in June 1990, and didn’t get swept away by a cloud of fanged, communist locusts and carried off to the basements of Leningrad’s infamous KGB building known as “the big house,” unraveling the mystery of Russia has been a lifelong quest for me.

My first night in Leningrad’s Palace of Youth, a fairly new hotel in the city that looked as if it had been there for 50 years before our arrival, introduced me to Leningrad’s White Nights and my first naked breast in Russia — a girl about my age was so impressed by seeing American college students that she joined our co-ed party sitting on a small lighthouse marveling at a sky that never darkened and for some reason removed her top.

I can tell you that the next 32 years of my life would be just as unpredictable, just as marvelous, just as heartbreaking, erotic, sad, frustrating, amazing, and until February 22nd, 2022, I was sure would be unending. Russia was an addiction, a cure, a reprieve, and a country in which I experienced life both from the perspective of the fish inside the aquarium and as someone outside that glass enclosure, methodically helping to build the world inside.

Without going into detail, much of my life, like any ex-pat at the time, consisted of a zillion firsts. Much of what we did professionally and personally was a first. When silly Putinist Russians comment on my articles saying I know nothing about their country, it makes me laugh because, in small ways, as a member of the first generation of ex-pats — not the ones from the multi-nationals but the ones that lived, loved, and fought there — I was part of the small army of toiling ants who introduced so much of what would later become commonplace in their society.

Much of what we did, built the world they are ruining today.

Small firsts

Here is one small first that can now be found everywhere in Russia but didn’t exist before I launched it with our beer brand: the wide-mouthed top on the can.

Each can in Russia was fitted with the standard small, narrow hole from which the fluid slowly gurgled. I am not even sure these old-style types of cans are sold anymore. In the months before we launched our beer, I contacted the can manufacturer, PLM, and asked if we could order our cans with the “wide mouth” top. I called them “bolshoy glotok” in Russian and advertised this on our billboards. We launched the beer in those cans — there was an extreme shortage of bottles at the time — and it was like a revolution in sipping. It helped make our beer brand, Botchkarov, number one just months after its launch.

Sure, what’s so important about a wide-mouth beer can? Nothing. But this is what the first generation of ex-pats and the small army of ready-to-accept-change Russians did in job after job, in relationship after relationship. We made small firsts.

If you only knew how many hours of my life were invested in explaining the “importance” of that wide-mouth can to my Russian colleagues. You would have thought we were deciding whether or not to exit the spacecraft and take a walk-in space. Even after all of the top management was reluctantly convinced, the CEO asked the cleaning lady who popped in for the garbage can her opinion, and she said it was “silly, but what do I know? I am just the cleaning lady,” she admitted.

Her doubt resulted in the decision to halt the big mouth can. I went ahead with it anyway and feigned ignorance later. It worked out to be a smashing success, and while the CEO thanked me, the Head of Sales, my boss, regarded that victory as a threat, and from that day forward, he was determined to end me in the company — he eventually did, and then a year later he was fired for theft.

This is how many ex-pats spent the first 20 years in business in Russia. When the “locals” eventually learned enough to do most of the stuff without us, they also figured out that if you are a “big boss” in a company, the opportunities to steal could be limitless.

Ex-pats from around 2010 or onward were kept out of positions where they had control of budgets, the ex-pats didn’t steal, and all of the money went through the hands of the locals. This guaranteed that a fair portion was always skimmed off the top and into the pockets of the mediocre mid and top-level management.

I share this story about the wide-mouth can because I want you to understand why I am now of the opinion that after what Russia has done in Ukraine, there can be no coming back from this. I am establishing my expertise in the country, demonstrating the commitment and desire I formerly had to see Russia succeed— and no, I don’t consider the big-mouth can a significant development for Russia.

I am also saying that had it not been for the launch of this war of genocide, I had planned to spend a substantial part of the rest of my life in Russia because I was happy and content there. I had no hate or misgivings. St. Petersburg is a fantastic city even though, now having lived over a year outside of it and in Europe, life is much easier in the “modern world” than it ever was in Russia.

For 30 years, these people talked the talk and walked the walk. They became our friends, lovers, wives, drinking mates, enemies, and just the random faces you see over a day, a week, a month, a year, and a decade. The passing of the decades became like a cornucopia of Russians from every walk of life and every nuanced mindset. Many of us believed they had survived the debilitating, “misdevelopmental” excesses of the Soviet period.

It genuinely seemed that they had become, for lack of a better word, normal. Russia had managed to stagger very clumsily through the shock of the 1990s, the euphoria of the 2000s, and even the Putin-generated ugliness of the 2010s to a modern frame of mind.

But alas, we were wrong. They duped us. We can all talk about how the average Russian is helpless to fight back against Putin, and in many ways, this is true. Putin has a “Praetorian guard” of nearly 400,000 protecting him from even the slightest hint of dissatisfaction. This is an army of vile murderers willing to do anything to protect him, not Russia, from Russians.

But that army is only nearly 400,000 strong. There are 140 million Russians. An army of tens of millions of pissed-off and morally offended Russians could rise up and oust Putin and all of his kind if they had the backbone and moral integrity — but they don’t.

Our friends, our former lovers, our ex-wives, our former colleagues, and even our enemies are collectively weak, sad, and helpless. They hide behind “What can I do?” But the real question they should ask is, “How should I do it?” And the question we must ask when they try to return to the world sheepishly is, “What did you do to stop this?” Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority will say: “What could I have done?”

And then, they will play along with us, act like they have changed and seen the light. They will enrich themselves further and lie, steal, and cheat in things that are important to us, like the Olympics. When the next Putin comes along, another one always does, they will once again ask: “What can I do?”

They fooled us once. Shame on them. Shame on us if we let them try to fool us a second time.