What I Did in Moscow…

Russia had always loomed large in my imagination: opulent tsars and funny-looking architecture, giant bears and snowy Siberian tundra’s, Communist cosmonauts and head-scarf wearing babushkas. But all of these stereotypes told me little about the real question I wanted to know: what would it be like, in 2008, living in a city of 12 million, trotting past old communist flats and ducking into the metro outside the Kremlin on a day-to-day basis?

The classes I took made my experience much richer by providing background on the political and social developments I saw happening all around me. It definitely helped that my political science professor was probably the best-known commentator on current Russian politics and my economics professor was the current economic advisor to the Kremlin! These courses explored the historical and ideological factors, which underlie Russia’s unique experience in global politics. I learned to observe a lot of history through a very different lens, which I don’t think I could have done from a classroom in California.

Sometimes I still smell Russia when I wake up. It’s the parquet floors ubiquitous in old apartments, the wooden boards with interlocking tongue and groove creating repeating V-shapes lining narrow hallways; it’s the perpetually boiling teakettle waiting in the miniature kitchen; it’s the smoke hanging in the cold air. As I wake up I imagine myself in the apartment of my Moscow host mother, lying in my little bed while snow falls past the window, accumulating on the sill, then blanketing the still-quiet and dark street below, covering the leaves of the trees that line the park across the street from our seventh-story apartment, and silently accumulating on the black woolen shoulders of the overcoat worn by the lone early-morning walker in the park.