Honestly, we’re doing just fine.

Russia

Russian expats have no clue what modern Russia is like, said Galina Sapozhnikova in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Thousands of Russians left home in the 1990s and settled in New York. Since then, their only exposure to Russia has been the hysterical analyses they read in the U.S. press and the drivel they watch on the tabloidesque Russian TV shows they get on cable. When I come to visit my old friends in New York and I tell them about life in Moscow, they don’t believe me. “Everything is fine,” I say. “Food and clothes pile up. People are taking out loans, buying cars, going on vacations.” The expats just narrow their eyes, assuming I’ve become “a professional propagandist and agitator.” You can’t really blame them. If all I had read were that New Yorker article accusing President Vladimir Putin of personally ordering the murders of practically everyone who died in Russia in the last few years, I’d be suspicious, too. On the ground, though, the reality is more prosaic. Russian democracy is far from perfect, it’s true, but most of us are living a hundred times better now than during the Yeltsin era. My old friends and I end up fighting, and we have to drop the subject. “Which of us is the zombie? Is it us, intoxicated by stability for the first time in the last two decades? Or is it them, finding it painful to admit they made the wrong choice?”

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