As someone living in the UK on asylum who can’t visit Russia because of my political views (controversial take: bombing Ukraine is wrong!), I am always curious about what’s happening back home.

So any time my friends (usually, women) come back from Russia, I pull up a chair, place an elbow on the sticky London pub table to hold my double chin, and go, “So, how was it?”

The story I’ve been hearing over the last four years was that nothing had changed. That is, Muscovites still get to enjoy life, go to restaurants, and “the Russian people can adapt to anything”. However, in 2026, all of that changed — Ukrainians started bombing Russian cities thousands of kilometres away from the frontlines, and these days, every story I hear is a negative one.

“There’s no fuel!”

“It’s really depressing.”

“I walk into a bar — and like, where are the guys? And then I realise that all guys are either at war or have fled!”

Most people have their own version of the story of being caught in what’s known in Russia as Plan “Kovyor” — literally, Plan “Carpet” — that is, a state of city-wide emergency when all planes are prohibited from flying out of airports for fear of being hit by a Ukrainian drone. (Though the official line always blames unknown “technical difficulties”.) Every time I hear the phrase, I instantly imagine a carpet that hangs on the wall of my babushka’s dacha and, I suspect, on millions of walls of other people’s dachas.

One of my closest friends on a recent trip to Moscow had to stay for an extra day because she couldn’t fly away — and learned that war gives no flight ticket refunds — and then made an impromptu visit to Baku in Azerbaijan because her flight via Turkey was cancelled.

“In retrospect,” she recalled, “it was kind of cool. I had never been to Baku before! It was more of a holiday. Also, Serge, I met your mother at the airport.”

My mother was one of the last lucky passengers who managed to board the Moscow-Istanbul-London flight before the route got cancelled, and eighteen hours later came out of Gatwick, sweaty and exhausted.

“How’s Moscow?” I asked her, as we boarded the Gatwick Express to the city, me hauling her suitcase with what felt like a month’s worth of possessions, most of which, I knew, were ‘gifts’ from Moscow for me, which is to say, pills of all kinds, enough to cure an army.

“Ah, you know,” she said, swatting the air, and there I was, expecting the usual story of petrol queues and drone strikes and the general aura of a crumbling country, like she had once witnessed in the late 1980s.

Instead, my mother checked her phone furtively, where a work WhatsApp group had sent her a notification, frowned, looked up and said, “A client of mine shits in the shower at the club.”

I started coughing. “Your what?” I said. “Does what? Where?”

She wiped the aeroplane sweat from her forehead and gave me a look like I had just escaped from a mental facility.

“Serezha, what don’t you understand? A client of mine shits in the club shower! It’s a real problem and nobody knows what to do with him.”

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After my parents divorced back in 2014, my mother, whose CV featured just one position — held for 16 years — FULL-TIME MUM, had to reinvent herself and, at the age of 35, start looking for a job.

It was an incredibly stressful time for her, and I recall feeling odd that both me, aged 16, and my mother, despite the 20-year difference, were in roughly the same boat: we were both young, inexperienced, and looking for jobs.

When I later moved to the US to study (ugh) business, my mother tried a number of odd jobs, including being a couples therapist (the irony of it never dawned on her), until she finally landed a job, without any formal sports training, as a children’s coach at a luxury Moscow fitness club, where she has been working for more than ten years now.

Over the years, she rose up the ranks, until the club where she worked — in the basement of Olympiysky Stadium, a giant circular building once home to the 1980 Olympic Games— got demolished by yellow cranes and she got transferred to a super-elite-oligarch-friendly club near Putin’s home, on the outskirts of Moscow, in a place called Rublevka because someone needed to train (read: supervise) the oligarchs’ kids.

It’s easy to imagine the type of clientele this club sees on a daily basis, where the annual membership costs like a brand new Toyota Corolla.

The five-year-olds who attend my mother’s yoga classes (she had taught herself many sports techniques via YouTube) would arrive with suited drivers in black BMWs with tinted windows. They live in houses that have elevators in them. They buy their children planes for birthdays they can’t fly that stand parked in the airport not far away from the club, waiting until it won’t look too suspicious for them to purchase a pilot’s license. They spend around £1,000 a day on a series of classes my mother and her team runs, checking off a box that says - “My child does sports.”

“I work with my body” is what my mother always says on FaceTime with me and my sister. “And let me tell you, it’s not easy!”

Too much money (and too much unearned money) corrupts a person, and the stories my mother would tell me about some of her club clients - the parents, that is - are enough to collect for a whole essay collection.

Every New Year’s, for example, which is a huge deal in Russia — famous for a two-week binge following the 31st of December — invariably someone dies. A year before writing this, a politician of some sort had a heart attack and drowned in a pool at this elite club, his body floating there for several hours before someone figured out what to do with him.

Another time, a middle aged man was spotted masturbating in the jacuzzi, while his ass was blasted by a water massager. It happened on a Wednesday and somehow the fact that it was on a Wednesday makes it funnier.

My mother frequently tells me stories about fighting with clients who demand too much — like, wanting to purchase five classes for their kids on club credit and then never paying it back.

“And it’s not like these people don’t have money,” she explains. “Some people are just assholes.”

I’ve heard stories about fathers who prefer to sit in the room with their arms crossed and stare at my mother’s breasts while she does yoga and pilates with their three-year-olds.

And I always half-disconnect because these stories follow a familiar pattern but also because it’s from this sort of assholic behaviour that I escaped when I left Russia for good six years ago.

Still, the story about a man who shat in the shower sounded too good to pass by.

“I mean, like how did he do it?” I said, as the green plains of the London suburbs glided past the Gatwick Express window.

I got up and squatted on the floor in the middle of the carriage and, in my imagination, resembled a crab. Someone laughed from the seat behind me. “Like this?”

“Serezha, what do I know! All I know is that he shat in the shower. In fact, the entire club knows it. The cleaners came in one day and he was there, squatting in the middle of an empty shower room.”

“But why didn’t he go to the toilet?”

“I don’t know! After some time, someone filed a police report.”

“Wait,” I said, “so this wasn’t a one-off? This guy shat in the shower on a regular basis?”

“I know you’ll write about this so I am not telling you anything. All I can say is that the man is obviously mentally ill.” She looked over her shoulder, despite us speaking Russian on a London train, and lowered her voice. “I mean, who does that?”

“Please tell me more,” I said, leaning over with my elbows perched on my knees. “Please.”

But my mother didn’t say another word. Instead, we spent the remaining part of the train ride to Victoria Station talking about other things. Things like fuel shortages and petrol queues and drone strikes in Moscow and what to do when Plan “Carpet” is announced over the city.

And how, despite everything, she misses the good olds days, before the war, when we all lived together, in one country, in one city, in one apartment, and she did not have to work.

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When I was about six or seven, I woke up one day and just knew: I needed green beans inside of me.

We lived in an apartment my father’s mother had bought us back then, about fifteen kilometres south of Moscow. It was a dodgy place called Podolsk, something Londoners would call up-and-coming, a sort of Russian Deptford or Whitechapel.

During the 1990s, Podolsk was controlled by the mafia, whom some people called the local government. Half of my father’s classmates (at least according to him) went to prison; the other half died of overdoses. By the time I was born, things had mostly quietened down, and the only remaining evidence of what had transpired in the 90s was bald men in leather jackets who drove plum-coloured Lada Sixes, blasting pop songs about a girl turning eighteen who wants to be swept away by a much older man, at 2 AM, by our window.

That became the soundtrack of my toddler years.

The green beans in question sat in a sealed packet on the bottom shelf of the freezer. I knew this because I had witnessed my mother put them there about six months earlier. Since then, she had made several attempts to get me to eat them (”Serezha, eat the goddamn greens!”), to which I always replied, “Ew,” and made a face resembling Mr Bean, one that, to this day, my mother asks me to perform on demand.

But one morning, something changed. Perhaps this is how pregnant women feel in the early stages, craving random food. Not that I can relate, since, through some major fault of my own, I am neither pregnant nor a woman.

“I made kasha,” my mother said as I appeared in the corridor that day. Her tone was the one I imagine guards use for talking to inmates. “Sit and eat.”

“But I’d like some green beans,” I pleaded.

Instead of a response, she looked at me as if I had just insulted her entire family.

And because at six or seven I had no power over any part of my existence, I pinched my nose and sent a spoonful of something called manka, an unexplainable milky white goo, into my mouth.

“But I’ll have green beans for lunch,” I murmured with conviction.

To which my then twenty-seven-year-old mother replied, “Whatever.”

When lunch came, and I was served a bowl of green beans, just like I’d ordered, I was surprised by just how delicious they were. I couldn’t believe that all this time they’d been sitting in the freezer, waiting, while I pulled the Mr Bean face at them.

I told my mother this.

“I guess as you get older, your habits change,” she said, philosophically, wiping a coffee cup with a towel and leaning against the counter. “It’s normal to start liking things you didn’t like before.”

“But why?” I asked.

She shrugged and placed the cup in the cupboard. “I don’t know.”

Then, as if breaking a spell, she added the Russian proverb designed to make children shut up: “But I do know that when I eat, I am deaf and blind.”

Growing up, I watched my father consume litres of black Americano, usually a venti from Starbucks or, during a brief period in California, a large from Peet’s. As a young teenager, I wanted to drink coffee too, but there was one teeny-tiny problem: I hated it. Coffee was bitter, disgusting. And yet, more than I hated coffee, I hated the idea of growing up less cool than my father.

“You shouldn’t be drinking coffee,” my mother told the twelve-year-old me once, at an airport, as I returned with a steaming cup. “You’re too young.”

“No, I’m not,” I said, deeply offended, then pinched my nose and swallowed.

A couple of years later, without me noticing, it became something I did every day. To this day, few things compare to that first sip in the morning.

At thirteen, I went through a fedora phase. I was one of the smaller and chubbier boys in class, and the hats made me look like a mushroom, the kind my grandmother picked in the forest near her dacha. That didn’t stop me from buying twelve of them over several months and keeping them stacked in their own wardrobe.

“Why do you need so many hats?!” my mother said, discovering the collection. “You don’t wear all of them. Maybe we could give some away.”

When, at a certain point, I stopped wearing hats, my mother handed all twelve to the local bomzhi, homeless people. I am sure that if one looked, somewhere on the streets of Moscow, one could find twelve very stylish bomzhi wearing fedoras.

Hobbies came and went in a similar sporadic manner. I’ve been meaning to learn the guitar since I was ten and am probably the only person who, over the years, has become worse at an instrument.

There was a brief passion for Counter-Strike, which ended when I discovered my fingers couldn’t keep pace with my friends’ and I kept shooting my own team in the back. (I was never invited to play again.) There was the summer I collected beer bottles, tied to Euro 2008.

At my babushka’s dacha, I tried woodworking, made tools of unspecified purpose, and stopped when I hit myself on the thumb with a hammer.

Once or twice, I even attempted painting, and I am proud to say that to this day, some of my best work remains a minimalist drawing of male genitalia on my classmate’s chair.

What I’ve started to notice, as I’ve grown older and changed my likes and dislikes, habits, clothes, and food, is a growing gap between who you are now and who you think you are.

The way I imagine it works is a bit like a GPS location that hasn’t quite caught up with you yet. (Which is a real problem in Russia these days, where the signal is jammed as Ukrainians send drones towards Moscow.)

Just because a twenty-year-old you thought saving money was something poor people did doesn’t mean a thirty-year-old you, with more responsibility and brains, should be getting calls from debt collectors.

And just because you once decided you were a dog person, because your parents refused to get you one, and you grew up around your grandmother’s hairless cats that look like a cat turned inside out, doesn’t mean you can’t get two cats as you get older.

My father-in-law, congratulating me on my birthday this year, said, “People change every seven years. It’s important to notice that.” I’d go further: we change all the time, every day, so gradually that we don’t notice, until suddenly we do.

Moving to the UK made me fall in love with beer, specifically IPAs, which a younger version of me would have found baffling. In Russia, there’s a certain stigma around people, especially women, who drink beer in public. In London, it tops water. Though I still can’t bring myself to touch Guinness, which smells like a pub carpet, the IPAs got me.

But then, when I lived in California as a kid, I hated broccoli and today, I hate it just as much. So I suppose with some things, despite everything, you stay the same.

My great-grandfather, in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, suddenly started speaking Polish. None of us had known he spoke it. He seemed to have buried the language so thoroughly that even he had forgotten it was there. With the illness, it came back.

“Kurwa,” he’d say, at intervals, to no one in particular, though mostly to his wife. “Kurwa…”

He’d have a look on his face that made me think he didn’t know who he was or where he was. He’d ask me where I lived, who my parents were, and when they’d come to take me home, even though I was his great-grandson. Occasionally, he’d dip into the kitchen cabinet and take out a transparent plastic bag of Soviet candy, batonchiki.

He’d fish one out and hand it to me. “There you go, boy. Have one before you go home,” he’d say.

When I met Masha, she told me that her grandmother had helped design the artwork on the famous candy wrapper. “I remember the Soviet delegation and how we proposed the artwork,” her grandmother had told me over the phone. It was a weird thing, listening to that, where time had looped in on itself.

Still, after all those years, some mornings I wake up, and I just know: I need a batonchik inside of me.

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In March 2017, I sat in a dorm room I shared with two other people: a guy from Hawaii who, for reasons I could never explain, always smiled, and an Indian man who never spoke but had a habit of slapping his naked body with moisturising lotion every morning.

I was sitting at my desk, a white piece of A4 paper in front of me. Using a pencil, I made a T-chart. Left column: Pros. Right column: Cons. The question was whether I should stay at this university, a university where my father was paying $7,000 a month for his son to study business.

At some point, I remember looking up from that piece of paper, staring out the window at a birch tree growing right next to the residence hall, thinking: if I need to make a list of pros and cons, I’ve probably already made my decision.

Two weeks later, I was on a plane back to Moscow.

I hadn’t told my mother I was coming. It was March 8th, International Women’s Day, a big deal in Russia. I arrived at Sheremetyevo, got a yellow Yandex Taxi to Belorusskaya, walked to her apartment, and rang the bell.

“Hello, Mom,” I said.

She opened the door and screamed. In her mind, I was still somewhere across the Atlantic.

“Happy Women’s Day,” I said.

The following week, my father, who had previously emailed me to say that if I dropped out, he would never do anything for me again and I’d be on my own for eternity, took pity on me and gave me a job at his company as a social media manager.

And just like that, my higher education was over.

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Being Russian is enough.

In Russia, we don’t do sauna; we do banya, which is a completely different thing, although you wouldn’t tell. On the surface, they look identical. A person enters a hot, wood-panelled room and sits there for 10 to 15 minutes before going outside and plunging into something cold.

But the difference between sauna and banya is akin to one between German beer and English ale. Both are golden liquids. But attempt to mention they’re the same, and you could start yet another European war.

On an unusually hilly road in Moscow, which, minus the commie facades, would make you think of San Francisco, near Tsvetnoy Boulevard (Flower Boulevard), stands a building that has seen at least two regime changes in the last hundred and fifty years: Sanduny.

Sanduny isn’t just your regular banya; it’s a sanctuary, and serves the same purpose as I imagine gentlemen’s clubs do in England. For a few hours a day, in the company of other men and some vodka, it’s an escape from life, weather, and all of it. The Soviet New Year’s classic, The Irony of Fate, where a man gets drunk in a banya and breaks into someone else’s apartment, captures the ritual quite well.

You can be a corrupt government chinovnik or a chubby nine-year-old boy - it doesn’t matter. At Sanduny, you strip your identity along with your clothes, put on a banya hat, and cover yourself with a white robe like Pontius Pilate. It’s there, where my father and I spent a lot of time when I was a kid, leaving my sister and mother at home.

Sanduny is gender-based (the women have a different, less appealing entrance at the back of the building), and there are multiple levels of service, called razryad, meaning rank, depending on how much you’re willing to pay. The highest rank features leather seats, waiters who materialise at the lift of a finger — “molodoy chelovek, two terry towels here!” — “Certainly!” — and a majestic marble pool with a sculpture of a peeing boy in the middle.

As a kid, I loved to swim, naked of course, towards the part of the pool where I could stand under a stream and pretend the boy was peeing on my face.

The banya itself is a blazing hot wooden room the size of my apartment in London, with the banschiki entering at set times to add steam by pouring ladles of water into the hissing furnace. Every time the cast-iron door creaked open, you knew to close your eyes because you were about to get a first-degree burn.

“More?” the banschik would say as the naked men sat on white towels, their eyes squinting from sweat and heat.

“Davay!“ someone brave - or stupid - would yell. On the banschik went, adding a couple more scoops before the cast-iron door closed again with that same particular squeak.

As the steam went up, the men would sit there, most with bulging stomachs and clean-shaved heads, their red faces dripping with sweat. They’d groan, moan, and emit noises that always frightened me.

“Yeah,” they’d say, in Russian. “This is good. Real good.”

My father would often point to those men and say something like, “You can just tell they’re descendants of the Tatar Mongols…” And it’s true: if a curious anthropologist wants to get a clear picture of why Russia - unlike Ukraine - is an Asian country, Sanduny is the place to go.

In the middle of it all, there would invariably be someone doing the parenie - a torture ritual, as far as nine-year-old me was concerned. It was a process in which a man (usually the fattest one, with a golden cross on his chest and a forest of hair and tattoos featuring Orthodox cathedrals on his back) would lie on his back and have two naked men hit him with birch twigs, while everyone else watched.

“Yeah, hit him hard,” someone in the “audience” would whisper. “Hit him real hard.”

Let me repeat, since this is key. A naked man was lying on a bench… In the middle of a hot, steaming room…While other naked men sat and watched as he was hit with birch twigs…

No, this is not a scene from some R-rated film banned in Russia under the new “LGBT propaganda” law.

This is your average Tuesday at Sanduny.

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As a kid, I’d rarely spend more than five minutes inside the banya room, getting uncomfortably hot. My face would burn, my eyes stinging with sweat, my heart pounding, and I’d feel that if I stayed a second longer, I’d faint.

Still, I’d always try to stay just a little longer than I felt I could. I wanted my father to see I was making an effort, that I wasn’t slacking, that I was a muzhik, before going out and plunging into the marble pool with the sculpture of a pissing boy.

Though, of course, my most cherished memories of Sanduny come not from the banya itself, but from the moments after, when my dad and I would sit on the leather-bound seats and order food.

There was tatar sausage called kazyl, which, I learned when I became a vegetarian, is made from horse. And my absolute favourite: khachapuri in the shape of a boat, the Georgian answer to pizza, where the centre holds an egg yolk, and you dip the bread corners into it, making a giant, delicious mess. (I’ve since lived in Georgia for nine months, and let me tell you: the best khachapuri is still at Sanduny.)

My father would sit with his feet perched up, covered in his white robe, looking for all the world like a Roman senator who’d wandered in off Tsvetnoy Boulevard, a Kindle in his hand, an MBA-approved business book on it with a name like Good To Great.

He’d be a stark contrast from all the other men surrounding us. Younger, more sophisticated.

He’d look up occasionally and ask me, “How’s the food?”

“Good,” I’d say. “Very good.”

And so we sat.

London’s Bath House in Victoria, I was told, is a Sanduny franchise. I’m keen to believe it. You come in, and a grinning Eastern European woman with a nametag reading ALINA greets you in a mix of Russian and English.

“Zdravstvyte. U vas est reservation?“

Downstairs is the main room, where you can eat Russian-Ukrainian food, drink kvas and vodka, and do a cold plunge after the banya. There are Soviet posters on the wall, and most people speak Russian.

Still, despite The Bath House trying hard, it is not Sanduny, and there are subtle signs that give it away.

It could be the absence of the marble pool with the pissing boy. Or the fact that you pay north of £200 a visit. Or, more likely, it’s the strange presence of Brits sitting scrunched at the tables, surveying everything, as if in a zoo, looking very out of place in the otherwise Soviet environment.

“It’s nice, innit?” they say to each other. “My mate showed me this place when…”

There’s something about their fresh fade cuts that just makes you know: despite looking like home, this is not home.

Last year, during my unemployment period — when money had run out completely, and after selling a car, the only thing left to sell was a kidney — I started looking for a way to have a sauna without going broke. And that’s when I discovered Community Saunas.

It’s only a ten-minute walk away from my apartment (unlike The Bath House, which would take me a good hour). There is free water and tea — I know, right??!?! — and nice music in the background. The staff occasionally enter the sauna with essential oils and pours them over the hissing rocks.

For eight pounds a pop (less than a pint costs these days!), a Community Sauna is the Meal Deal equivalent of Sanduny. It’s also a decent metaphor for the newfound humility, the kind that only comes when you spend all your savings and fail to find a job for nine months.

Although being what it is — a community sauna — there are occasional, um, situations.

Like that one time a guy spat in the ladle I used to add steam to the rocks.

Also, because this is a sauna, not a banya, there are no birch twigs and no marble pools. Without a golden cross or an Orthodox cathedral tattoo (yet, at least), I usually just sit there, face dripping with sweat, and groan.

“Yeah,” I murmur to myself, in Russian. “This is good. Really good.”

Sometimes, I’d turn my head and make eye contact with a British nine-year-old boy. Watching his fearful eyes, I’d think about myself at his age, and have a strange sense of time closing in on itself, like a snake biting its own tail.

Despite living some twenty miles from each other, my father and I rarely see each other. We’re both busy with our lives, the way it happens when you’re almost 30, and your parents are barely 50.

But when we do meet, it’s usually at one banya or the other, of which there are a handful in London. We don’t talk much, but rather occasionally steal a glance at each other the way a grown son and a still-not-old father do.

We say things like, “Do you remember Sanduny?”

“Of course I do.”

“And the khachapuri?”

“Yeah, and the horse sausage?”

“Those were the times.”

“Those were the times, indeed.”

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Russia, I’m often told by other Russians, is a European country.

“Europe is everything between Calais and the Ural mountains,” they add, with the kind of confidence that comes when you cite propaganda.

(An American classmate of mine once called them the Oral Mountains and assumed everyone was laughing because they were too far away.)

But the clearest way to see that Russia is an Eastern, and genuinely weird, country is to look at its wedding traditions.

I grew up watching a black VHS cassette labelled MAXIM AND SVETLANA’S WEDDING, shot by my grandfather and edited like an Adam Curtis documentary: no talking heads, no narration, just raw footage stitched together.

Glued to the telly, from the ages of four to ten, I’d watch my nineteen-year-old father climb a concrete staircase, behind him graffiti on the walls, the colour I can only describe as shame, followed by an assortment of family males, as if storming the tower of a Soviet Disney princess.

On every floor up to the sixth, where my mother lived, there was a trivia quiz about the bride.

What’s Svetlana’s shoe size?

The footage shows my father, the age of someone I wouldn’t trust to pick a restaurant today, thinking hard. “Thirty-six?”

Correct!

What’s Svetlana’s favourite dish?

“Buckwheat!”

What colour are her eyes?

A pause, and my father’s face shifts. “Shit,” he says, laughing at himself.

If you fail a question, you pay money. I remember watching my father, this boy wearing a suit two sizes too large, reach into a wallet stuffed with thousand-rouble notes, and think: how do you not know the colour of my mother’s eyes?

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In college, I’d often wake up with a hangover only to realise I had not only missed the first lecture, but my roommates had managed to cram an entire week’s worth of activities into their morning.

As I was trying to make my way to the bathroom at ten, they had already gone to the gym, had breakfast, studied, and perhaps had a baby — all before 6 AM. Their habits seemed to scream that American culture is built on striving for success, and the success culture is built on early mornings.

Back in Russia, everything was different.

One morning in eighth grade, during the first class of the day at a rigorous maths school my father wanted me to attend, the ceiling fluorescent lights were hurting my eyes.

The teacher — a bespectacled woman with curly hair who seemed ancient then and seems just middle-aged now — mentioned something about mornings and asked what time we all went to bed.

“Midnight,” a girl with a moustache sitting by my side said.

“I went to bed at 1 AM,” bragged the boy who otherwise never talked, and when he did, it was mostly to objects.

I remember sitting there, trying to stay alive, thinking that if a dictionary had the definition of hell, this is the image it should have: having to go to another part of the city every morning just to discuss how little sleep you had.

It was torture, really.

“And you, Serezha?”

I looked up.

“What time did you go to bed?”

“I didn’t go to bed at all,” I said. Which was almost true because why waste life on sleep when you can listen to sad rap songs and text girls on VK.

Ice, ice baby. I will love you until I am in the sky.

“Oh God, guys,” the teacher said in a tone that suggested she felt sorry for us when she was, in fact, the cause of our collective lack of sleep. “I, for example, go to bed at 10.”

“Good for you,” I murmured and wished I had toothpicks to stick between my eyelids just to keep my eyes from closing, like Mr Bean.

She turned to me, squinting. “What did you just say?”

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It was a Tuesday, I think, though it might as well have been a Wednesday. One of those buffer days between the weekend you just had and the one that’s about to happen.

I was walking down London Bridge at half past five in the afternoon, joining the great migration of people just released from their glass-and-open-plans prisons, heading home to stare at a different, smaller screen.

Two police officers wearing high-vis jackets stood under the electronic timetable, looking at something.

I followed their gaze.

The man they were watching had his headphones on. He was smiling and bobbing his head to a rhythm only he could hear.

The man walked right towards the two police officers, raised his hand and…

…put a middle finger approximately five inches from the face of one of the police officers.

He held it there for a second, maybe longer, and then smiled at nothing in particular, turned his head away, and kept walking. Same pace, same head-bob, same cheerful energy as before.

I watched the officers’ faces go through several stages of processing. First, there was confusion. Then, it turned into a type of horror at what had just happened to them. Finally, wordlessly, in the silent agreement between two professionals, we are going to have to do something about this, they followed the man up the escalator.

I watched them tap the man on the shoulder, watched him pull out one earbud with the irritation of someone interrupted mid-chorus. And then I watched as the man, apparently realizing he was not, as he had perhaps hoped, already on the train and gone, began pointing somewhere behind him — at the crowd, at the air, at some imaginary person in the direction from which I had come — and it was very clear, even from where I was standing, that whatever explanation he was offering was not going to land.

There’s a saying I heard once: in Russia, if you’re too old or too young, you have no place in society. Which means, as a kid, I spent a lot of energy wishing I were in my thirties or forties, which seemed like the perfect age.

Still, in Russian kindergarten, at school, or from the grandmas sitting on the bench in front of your apartment block — the ones with the same short haircuts, dyed a particular shade of orange-ish burgundy that seemed to be issued along with a state pension — you heard the same thing, said in the same tone:

You must respect your elders.

Which, growing up, never really sat right with me.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not advocating for kicking canes out from under older people. I am all in favour of some basic human decency. But there’s a specific kind of tyranny in the idea that age, on its own, earns you respect. That simply having survived is an achievement worthy of reverence.

Sure, some people get old, and they’re wonderful. But some people get old, and they’re the same dickheads they were at forty.

I went to eight schools in Russia, and across all of them, I met a version of the same person.

The zavhoz.

It comes from zaveduyushchy khozyaystvom — literally, the one in charge of хозяйство. The word can mean household, property, operations, infrastructure, though in practice, the zavhoz title meant the man (or woman) was in charge of everything and nothing at once.

Think about it this way: if the school were a farm and its students were sheep, then the zavhoz was the shepherd with a whip.

At one of the eight schools I studied, Gimnaziya 45 in southwest Moscow, ours was named Pisarev. That was his last name, and his full name was beside the point. In my memory, he was as tall as the ceiling, and wore the same thing every day: a blue shirt and a vest that looked like it itched.

He also had the kind of eyes you expect a serial killer would have, or a psychopath. The closest thing I can think of when I think of Pisarev’s eyes is the blue eyes of white walkers in The Game of Thrones.

Nobody knew what Pisarev actually did, and that was part of the horror. He walked the corridors with great purpose and absolutely no apparent destination.

And if you were running - just running, the way children run - and Pisarev said your name, your blood would turn cold. The feeling started up at your neck and went all the way down, and you had absolute certainty, despite having done nothing particularly wrong, that you were finished.

“Faldin!”

Ew.

Rumours circulated that Pisarev had been an electrician once, before ascending to this strange, untitled power. That his wife had died. That his son was autistic. That something must have happened to him in the long past, long before therapy was invented, around the time dinosaurs roamed the planet, which made him the way he was: a cold, bitter, unsmiling giant, who can snap your twelve-year-old's neck with his two meaty fingers.

Everyone at school, it seemed (teachers included), sought an origin story for him, the way Marvel villains must have an origin story to explain their villainous nature. (Think: Thanos.) When you know the origins of something, it’s less scary.

His last name was dropped into conversations like a grenade with the pin already out. Pisarev will be there. Suddenly, nobody wanted to be there anymore.

I never found out if any of the rumours about Pisarev were true, nor am I sure anyone actually respected him. Feared? Sure. But respect? Doubt it. All I remember is checking the corridor before every lesson, and hating him for making me feel small.

Self-help books insist that everyone needs a mentor. They make it sound easy, as if finding someone you respect is like finding a fossil by turning over a rock in Dorset. The reality is that nobody began a mentorship by saying, “Will you be my mentor?” (I have been on the receiving end of that question twice, and both times it was cringe.) With that said, I am grateful for many mentors in my life.

My first swimming coach, Vasily, looked like the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand (Alex Kapranos), only bigger. He was not a man of advice; he didn’t pull you aside for talks about life. But he taught me to swim, which matters more than it sounds because at five years old, I fell into a lake. I wouldn’t have come back up if it wasn’t for my babushka, who pulled me out with the tip of her cast (she had a broken foot then). To this day, whenever I smell chlorine in a pool, I’m transported back to that fitness club in Otradnoe (X-Fit), the locker room where the boys would compare penises and slap each other’s butts with wet towels.

Nostalgia, I guess, doesn’t always take you where you want to go.

In my teenage years, my boxing coach, Igor — who was technically my father’s coach but who let me come along — was a man who had figured himself out. You could see it in the way he talked about his wife, his kids, how he’d mention God without it sounding like a religious propagandist. He was whole and complete in some way I didn’t have language for at fifteen, but recognised immediately.

I always wanted to be like Igor, and fifteen years later, I’m still working on it.

Of course, for the longest time, my father was my “mentor”. In my late teenage years, I’d borrow his habits, posture, phrases and deliver them as if they were my own. At twenty, I went in the opposite direction and rejected anything the man tried to tell me. These days, I’ve landed somewhere in the middle, which is probably where I’ll stay. It’s the Mark Twain thing, where you spend several years being baffled by how little your father understands, only to look up at thirty and realise he’s gotten considerably smarter.

Though I should mention that the observation I just made is also something my father once told me about his own father, and I just delivered as my own, so I guess old habits die hard.

At nineteen, in the aftermath of my first business idea collapsing, leaving me in huge debt, I decided I was too dumb to do anything, so instead I thought I’d interview smarter people for a YouTube channel. I assembled ten Russian businessmen - not oligarchs, but actual builders, people starting companies without government connections, people who’d worked at the Russian equivalent of Google - and was surprised that what I actually learned had almost nothing to do with business advice.

By writing the emails, presenting myself, being visibly nervous on camera and doing it anyway, I learned that you can talk to anyone, more or less. People would happily share advice and are often waiting to be asked.

Which brings me to the theory, which I’ve formulated long ago: that there’s no such thing as a mentor. Anyone you respect enough to be a mentor can become a mentor. It’s less a question of labelling people and more about seeking those moments of being mentored, which simply means: shutting up and listening once in a while.

(And another thing I am working on to this day.)

Back at London Bridge on that Tuesday or a Wednesday, when I looked up from my shoes, the man was already on the down escalator.

The two police officers had him by the arm, with the firmness that meant the conversation was over. The man wasn’t smiling or bobbing his head anymore. He was saying something, loudly, to whoever was watching — and people were watching, because this was London Bridge at rush hour and we are all, at our core, curious about other people’s disasters. And then he turned the corner and just like that, was gone.

I got on my train.

As the doors closed and the train started moving, I thought about the times I’d gotten in trouble in Russia — a friend who thought it would be funny to throw eggs at police cars; a few times being held after Navalny protests, the particular feeling of being detained in Russia and not quite knowing what comes next.

I thought about authority and the different shapes it takes. The dead-eyed zavhoz in the blue vest. My swimming coach who looked like Alex Kapranos, my boxing coach who loved his wife and children more than anything, and my father, whom I spent years ignoring and longer years quoting without attribution.

And I thought: the thing about respect is that nobody actually chooses it.

You don’t decide to respect someone because they’re older, or because they have a title, or because they’re wearing a uniform. It just happens, or it doesn’t.

The more interesting question is how you behave around people when you don’t respect them.

And sometimes, I guess, at the end of a long day, with just the right song in your headphones, shoving a middle finger in the police officer’s face at London Bridge can feel like the answer.

Though the police, obviously, disagree.

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These days, I wake up at six, two hours before my workday begins, and sit on the balcony in my office clothes, drinking steaming hot coffee from a Japanese mug I found in a charity shop in Notting Hill, and write down thoughts and anxieties into my Moleskine.

Occasionally, I look up at the sky.

London sky, specifically. Those clouds with patches of light breaking through and planes. Always, always planes. The thing about London nobody tells you: any time you look up, at least two or three planes are crossing the sky. Sometimes more. The city is so saturated with international movement that the airspace itself feels crowded, like a waiting room above your head.

Planes.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in one. A year and a half, to be precise.

I used to travel constantly — every month or so. Now I am not going anywhere. Partly because I am broke, but more significantly because I am still waiting for my asylum claim. The Home Office, in its infinite and unhurried wisdom, is sure taking its time.

On one particular morning, I watched a plane cross the skyline.

It looked too big to be up there — the steel scale of it almost unnatural, like something had been miscalculated. And I thought: when I finally do go somewhere, where would I go?

Europe, immediately. Obviously Europe.

I’d wander around old towns, get lost in cities without a plan, sit in coffee shops and fill notebooks. I’d rent a car and drive Germany’s unrestricted autobahns at speeds that would be illegal everywhere else. I’d visit my friends — other Russians stranded across the continent in various states of bureaucratic limbo — in Switzerland, Berlin, and Italy. My sister is in Rotterdam, I could take the Eurostar, and visit her.

I started packing in my head. And the first thing I reached for, obviously, was underwear. Because that’s the first thing anyone puts in a suitcase, it’s the foundation of all travel. You open the bag, you put in underwear, and you build from there.

Simple.

Except: how many?

That’s always the question.

The obvious formula is that the number of days equals the number of underwear. Clean and logical. Except then I thought: but most of mine have holes in them. Masha had been telling me for weeks to throw them all away. Which meant I needed to buy new underwear before I could even begin packing for a trip that hadn’t been booked for a journey I couldn’t yet legally take.

Fine. I’d buy underwear.

And then, as I reached for my Japanese mug of now-lukewarm coffee, a thought entered my head.

It landed noiselessly, like a drop of ink in a glass of water, slowly filling everything.

What if I shit myself?

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The fact that I’m finishing my Master’s in Creative Writing next month is funny for two reasons.

1. My BA was in Business Administration.

2. I never actually finished it.

Taken together, these two facts tend to confuse people.

The first reaction is usually something along the lines of, “Well, that’s quite a jump from business administration to creative writing!” - which requires a long story to explain and involves using the word “dad” quite a lot. (And sometimes the word “footsteps” and then a phrase, “being myself.”)

The second reaction is more practical. People ask how it’s even possible to complete an MA without a BA. Normally, you do a BA, then an MA, and if you’re particularly ambitious or slightly deranged, a PhD. The short answer is: “It happens,” and the longer answer is too boring, so let’s not get into that.

The more interesting bit is that not only am I graduating next month, but I am doing so with distinction.

This sounds impressive, but it also doesn’t really mean anything. In a master’s program, you basically get four outcomes: distinction, merit, pass, or fail. Three of them aren’t really marks but rather polite ways of saying nice one.

Still, when I saw that word - Distinction - on a piece of paper that arrived in the mail, it got me thinking: about marks in general, about the marks I used to get as a kid, about how much they used to matter and then, suddenly, didn’t.

In Russia, we used to follow a four-point grading scale, which is slightly confusing because it starts with 2 and ends with 5.

Occasionally, if the teacher is feeling playful, you might get a 1.

Let’s break them down.

5

If you get a lot of fives, it usually means one of two things.

1. You’re a people pleaser whose parents are extremely strict. You have no life and start doing homework immediately after coming home from school.

2. The teacher is your mom.

Students who got only fives were called otlichniki, from the word otlichno, which means excellent.

You had to be a very specific type of person to get only fives. Otlichniki tended to wear suits to school, while the rest of us wore T-shirts. They could have gel in their hair. Often, they wore glasses and smelled funny. They took everything too seriously and during breaks, stood alone, their backs against the concrete walls, the colour of blood.

These were never the people I considered my friends.

I once read somewhere that the people who get all fives at school end up working for those who get all threes. I tend to agree with that.

4

Four is quite a comfortable place to live.

In Russia, we called those students horoshisty, from the word horosho, meaning “good.”

Not great.

Just good.

But as a kid, being called a horoshist always gave me the same feeling my mother gave me when she called me stocky around the age of twelve. It was the summer when it seemed like every girl I knew had grown two heads taller than me over the holidays. I started developing serious insecurities about my height, which, in retrospect, was ridiculous.

These days, at 175 centimetres (can’t be bothered to look up what that is in feet and inches), I’m not exactly tall, but I’m also not the kind of man a woman can fold and carry in her purse - what I call a pocket man. (Still, whenever Masha wears heels, I do look like one. We resemble a typical Russian couple from the early 2000s: a stocky man with a trophy wife.)

But back then, being called stocky felt like an insult. And being a horoshist felt similar. It wasn’t bad exactly, but it reminded you of what you were not. A euphemism designed to soften the blow.

That said, I spent most of my childhood being a horoshist. Mostly fours, occasionally a five, sometimes a three. And, I must confess, my mother was right, and I am a little stocky.

Or what Masha likes to call kabanchik - a diminutive version of the Russian word for “boar.”

3

In the eyes of Russian teachers, a three is slightly pathetic, but if you consider what it takes to get one, it might be the highest badge of honour.

It usually means you didn’t care about whatever you were doing, but managed to survive through charisma, personality, luck, anything, really, but definitely not through studying.

Which is why I like that quote about people who get fives working for those who get threes. It reminds me of something John Gardner once said: the world admires talent but pays for character.

Instead of preparing for the upcoming kontrolnaya (exam), you might have played Dota 2. Instead of learning the poems of Pushkin, you decided to climb the rooftops near Arbat Street and smoke your grandfather’s cigarettes. And still, it is marked as a pass. A narrow one, sure - in fact, so narrow that if you tried the same trick again, it would probably bite you in the ass - but a pass nevertheless.

Still, in the eyes of Russian teachers, a three was almost worse than a two. To them, it meant you were somehow cheating the system, and they simply hadn’t caught you yet.

When I was fourteen, my father sent me to a very demanding math school where I managed to develop a lifelong hatred for mathematics.

The best mark I ever received there was a three.

2

A two was thunder.

Fail.

When you got it, it was usually written in enormous red ink. Russian teachers loved their red pens. Sometimes, the number was so large it took up half a page. Occasionally, the entire page, depending on the teacher’s mental stability.

At the start of the lesson, when homework or exams were handed back on torn squares of paper from a thin green tetradka (notebook), anyone who'd received a two would quickly flip the page upside down to hide it.

Students who received many twos were called dvoechniki, coming from the Russian word “dva” (two).

Teachers treated them roughly the same way modern Londoners treat the guys who steal phones on electric bikes. With a mixture of anger, disgust, and a strong belief that something had gone fundamentally wrong in their early childhood.

1

Technically, the Russian grading system goes from two to five.

But there was also a special mark.

It was called a kol.

Literally meaning a stake, the kind you hammer into the ground, it wasn’t so much a mark as it was a personal insult.

If you received a kol, it meant that not only had you not tried, but that your essay about what Pushkin meant in his poetry had personally offended the teacher.

And not just the teacher, but, as teachers liked to point out dramatically, by getting a kol, you had offended yourself.

“I don’t even want to look at you,” they could say, throwing your thin slip of paper on the floor. On it, a massive red 1. “Get out of my sight.”

A kol is a teacher’s equivalent of saying you are a piece of shit.

When I was in ninth grade, around fifteen, my physics teacher used to drag boys who got a kol out of their seats by their ears. She would literally grab your ear and haul you across the room to the nearest corner.

“Stand there. And don’t turn around. If you face the class again, you’ll get another kol.”

(This, by the way, was at that demanding math school I mentioned earlier. The teacher’s name was Marina Germanova. If you’re reading this, Marina Germanova, fuck you.)

A kol was serious enough to send you to the principal’s office - or worse, have the teacher call your parents.

These days, I imagine a student writing an essay about Russia’s “special military operation” might easily earn a kol for saying something outrageous - and true - like: there are no Nazis in Ukraine, or that Russia is deliberately killing civilians.

Though today, something like that would probably get you into far more trouble than being dragged by your ear across a classroom.

By the time I reached high school, though, I stopped caring about marks altogether, mostly because I stopped studying, and instead spent most of my time working for my dad.

Then I somehow ended up in an IB program where the highest mark was seven, and I mostly received sixes and sevens. (Because, despite not studying very much, I am actually quite smart. And humble.)

Now I’m almost thirty, and marks mean absolutely nothing to me.

And yet, I still can’t wait to hold my Master’s diploma and see the word Distinction printed on there, next to my name.

I want to take a photo of it and send it to my father, that man who has spent his career collecting diplomas from the best universities: first Moscow State, then Stanford. A man who has then spent a considerable amount of effort (and money) trying to get his son into the best schools and universities, to make sure he didn’t just smoke his grandfather’s cigarettes on the rooftops of Arbat but actually, you know, made something of himself. A man who was very disappointed when his son dropped out of a business university in the US and came back to Moscow.

I want to send him the picture of my diploma with the word Distinction on it and say,

“See? It might not mean anything to me. But I know it means a great deal to you.”

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We had four televisions in my grandmother’s apartment.

Not accumulated over the years, as televisions are supposed to be, over the course of a life, like wrinkles or debt — but rather, all at once, simultaneously, as if my grandmother were running a pub.

The newest one stood in the living room, while the oldest hummed in the kitchen, balancing on top of the fridge like a kind of god overseeing our family. The two middle-aged models occupied both bedrooms — thick-backed, sullen, like overweight government officials in the State Duma.

Most days, all four were on, and walking down the corridor in my babushka’s apartment felt like changing countries.

Each doorway led into a separate ideological kingdom, each stranger than the last.

You could turn left and find my grandfather sprawled across the bed, watching Zadornov make jokes about America.

Americans were stupid. Americans were naive. Americans were, occasionally, the subject of bathroom humour — and those were his absolute favourites.

Every time the word shit — govno — came on, my grandfather would laugh suddenly and violently, his enormous stomach rising and falling like a buoy in rough water. There were, apparently, infinite variations on this theme, and he intended to appreciate every single one.

Turn right, and you entered my uncle’s room, who must have been just over twenty. Back then, the room was still his, before it became storage, then a children’s room, then an office, then a gym, then back to storage again once he moved, completing a full cycle. A small television with a protruding back sat beside a bulky computer. My uncle rarely watched TV but he played a lot of computer games: Mafia, The Sims, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., with nine-year-old me sitting by his side for hours, just watching, which was better than playing by yourself, and explains the popularity of Twitch streaming.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. — a popular Ukrainian game, which I mention because history now renders this detail poignant — he’d navigate radioactive landscapes, fighting off zombies called bloodsuckers. In The Sims, things were less violent, and I’d watch him recreate his friends, many of whom I knew personally because they visited our apartment, with an attention to detail I found impressive and, now that I’m older, slightly worrying.

He would send them to the pool.

Remove the ladder.

And then watch them swim around in circles until they drowned.

At the centre of the corridor, behind two wooden doors with frosted glass, stood the living room. The newest television lived here, the creme-de-la-creme, complete with a karaoke system that no one touched except for nine-year-old me, who performed what I can only assume were devastating renditions of Russian pop ballads for an audience of my grandmother’s hairless cats.

That newer TV model offered more channels. American films, dubbed by Russian voice actors on STS - the only watchable channel - many of whom later became famous in their own right and created the strange situation where you’d watch Leonardo DiCaprio’s face while hearing Sergei Burunov’s voice.

Sometimes, when the living room sat empty, the television stayed on anyway, filling the space with sound and light, the way people leave lamps on when they go on holiday.

But if my grandmother’s mother, my great-grandmother, claimed the couch, the channels would be different. No STS, no American films and instead, an endless serial drama with a cliffhanger every three minutes.

“I’m blind!” someone would cry as I’d enter the room, and the intro would end and say in some ridiculous font, EPISODE 834.

Cut to pounding on a door.

Cut to a forbidden pregnancy.

My great-grandmother would lie there squinting, barely able to walk, even though she couldn’t have been much older than sixty when I first remember her.

“Babushka, where is my—”

“Shh,” she’d hiss, swatting the air. “I’m watching.”

Further down the corridor, you passed the glowing fish tank with its obese goldfish and the magnetised photos of my grandmother’s sphinx cats. In fact, I noticed, over the years, a pattern: the older my grandmother grew, the less hair her cats seemed to possess. There are photos of the five-year-old me pulling on the tail of a gorgeous snow-white Turkish Angora called Bilka. But somewhere in my teenage years, she got herself a sphynx, Musya, then Musya had a kitten called Cleopatra (Klepa), and it all went downhill (or, should I say, downhair) from there, until all of my babushka’s cats started to look like they were turned inside out.

A few years before I am writing this, she acquired a hairless dog. My father once promised to buy her a hairless goat. He did not follow through. But I must confess, I do think about that hypothetical goat sometimes.

Anyway.

The kitchen opened onto a narrow balcony stacked with jars — pickles, tomatoes, cucumbers, sauerkraut, jam — everything preserved by her own hands, as if my grandmother were preparing for a future in which vegetables might disappear. (With every passing year, I am starting to think whether she knew something about the world in advance.)

And there, in the corner, up on the fridge, was the kitchen television, blasting Channel One. The never-changing Ekaterina Andreeva appeared nightly, the same face, the same hair, the same measured authority — announcing that President Putin had visited Skolkovo, Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley, which meant traffic would freeze and no one would arrive anywhere on schedule.

Most of the time, my grandmother wouldn’t watch as much as listen to the TV, like a podcast. Othertimes, she would sit down, her apron still on, neck craned toward the screen.

In moments like these, you could follow her gaze and see that instead of Ekaterina Andreeva, there’d be a suspenseful soundtrack and a row of ants marching in formation.

The camera would slowly zoom out, my grandmother would beam with joy, and you would gasp at what appeared next on screen.

The ants, it turns out, were carrying a severed human finger.

Comedy about America, drowning Sims, serial melodrama with its impossible cliffhangers, state propaganda, ants with a human finger…. all of this existed at once, in one apartment.

Until, of course, it didn’t.

When we eventually moved out of my mother’s family apartment and rented our own place in central Moscow, we had no television.

Then, when we eventually got one, it was used for DVDs only - never official channels. My parents made this choice quietly, without announcing it.

At school, my classmates would ask, “Did you watch that program last night?”

But I never had.

Especially after two years in California and returning to Moscow with an accent and absolutely no cultural references, I was permanently and irrevocably behind on mainstream culture. In many ways, I still am.

In the late 2000s in California, I grew up watching SpongeBob SquarePants, which now feels like a fever dream. There was iCarly, which in hindsight was essentially pre-YouTube performance art. When my father was home, he watched AMC, which had a new show on: Breaking Bad. I remember finding it boring and slightly frightening at the time. The chemistry teacher could not cook meth fast enough for my twelve-year-old attention span. Little did I know that I’d consider the show one of the finest things ever made for TV and Vince Gilligan, at least in my personal cosmology, something close to a saint.

There was also Mad Men, which mostly featured men in suits drinking whiskey and smoking in small rooms where women weren’t allowed. (I rewatched it recently and was happy to note that my childhood analysis was entirely accurate. The show is absolutely unwatchable.)

There was Larry King (God bless him) on CNN, interviewing people whose names meant nothing to me. Obama debating Hillary Clinton. Hot Wheels commercials. The Nerf gun commercials. That peculiar arrogance of American advertising in general, its confidence that you would like the thing, that you would buy the thing, that everything was going to be fine.

But my most nostalgic American television memory has nothing to do with cable.

It was early Netflix, before streaming.

Back then, you ordered DVDs online. A red envelope arrived in the mailbox. You watched the movie — in my case, it was exclusively Schwarzenegger films, Bruce Willis films, films where men solved problems by moving very quickly and not asking too many questions. Afterwards, you walked back to the post box, dropped the envelope in, chose the next one online, and waited. I loved the waiting.

But back in Russia, cable was propaganda, so I - and all of my friends - made do by pirating “foreign” shows on VK. Misfits. Suits. Supernatural. It was streaming before streaming existed and felt, at the time, like we were getting away with something. (Which, technically, we were.)

My family only got real television again in the early 2010s, around the time of the Bolotnaya protests. A new channel had appeared: TV Rain. My father mentioned it casually — there was a young guy with interesting ideas, he said, so he and some other businessmen met with him and donated money to him, they appeared on a segment of this new channel with a name that made me think it only broadcasts weather.

“What’s his name?” I asked. “This guy.”

“Alexei Navalny,” my father said.

For most of my upbringing, I believed that not having a television had made me and my family special. Immune. Inoculated. Safe. You couldn’t catch something you’d never been exposed to. (Then COVID came along and reminded us all that isolation is not quite the protection we think it is. Just kidding.)

Still, living in the UK and the US later, I revised my theory — not because it was wrong, exactly, but because it was incomplete. Russians distrust television instinctively, in a way that has been earned over generations. Saying I saw it on TV in Russia is not a badge of credibility. It’s practically an admission of gullibility. My grandmother watched four screens simultaneously and trusted approximately all of them, which is a kind of superpower if you think about it.

Americans, on the other hand, at least before a certain point in recent history, didn’t carry that suspicion. Television for them was just another medium — newspapers with pictures, basically. You could go on it and say things, and people would believe you, more or less, because why wouldn’t they? The idea that the medium itself might be adversarial simply hadn’t occurred to enough people yet.

But to me, TV always felt like heroin. Not that I know what heroin feels like. It just felt like it. Something you try once, and suddenly you need to build a whole lifestyle around not trying again.

So I made a rule: I would only watch television in hotels or at my grandmother’s apartment.

Contained environments. Supervised consumption.

And I have followed through, too: none of the flats I’ve rented since have had a television — not in Georgia, not in Russia, and not in the UK.

When in 2021, I left Russia for good, I remember the physical sensation of relief as my passport was stamped at Sheremetyevo. It felt like stepping outside a signal range. There was Western life ahead, no more pirated VK, propaganda, or shit jokes.

And then, four years ago, in a hotel room in Dubai, I woke before dawn. It was February.

I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the television with the sound muted, the way you do when you want the presence of another world without having to be present in it yourself.

I felt safe. Outside Russia. Outside its reach, so I scrolled lazily through the channels, while my then-wife was asleep.

And, to my surprise, every single one showed the same face. A very familiar face.

On CNN, BBC, ABC, and all other three-letter acronyms, leaning back in his chair, speaking with the controlled calm of someone who has spent his entire life trusting every muscle in his body, Putin was giving his bizarre reasons on why Russia was invading Ukraine.

I stared at the screen, and it was then that I understood what my grandmother’s apartment had been teaching me all along.

It doesn't matter how many televisions you have.

What matters is whether any of them will show you anything different.

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If in the UK there’s one sacred pancake day, Shrove Tuesday, followed by the quiet self-imprisonment of Lent, then in Russia, we do not do moderation.

We do Maslenitsa.

Maslenitsa, or pancake week, is older than church calendars (nor is it religious - its roots are pagan and agricultural). In the late days of winter, when the skin is so dry you can rub paint off the wall with it and there’s that depressive feeling that spring will never come, Maslenitsa is a breathing room, an excuse to burn a straw woman - sorry feminists, but it’s always a woman - in a field and eat a lot of what the French call crêpes, which I insist on pronouncing as “creeps,” as if Radiohead wrote a song about pancakes, and what Russians call blini.

Blini are not your thick, fluffy Anglo-American discs from IHOP drowning in maple syrup. No. They are thin as paper, elastic, slightly golden at the edges. You eat them with salmon, cottage cheese, ham, mushrooms. But ideally, with caviar.

My babushka Tanya made them perfectly, which is a sentence any Russian can pronounce, and they’ll be right. There are only three ingredients to making blini: milk, eggs, and flour. That’s it. Mix, pour, swirl, flip. And yet most people ruin them. They end up too thick. Too rubbery. Too pale. You need the right pan, the right heat, the right wrist - babushka’s wrist. After a lifetime of doing it, her hands didn’t think. They just know.

I am convinced that wherever in the Universe babushkas are created, there is a compulsory crash course in making blini. A grey, fluorescent-lit classroom somewhere beyond the clouds, with plastic chairs bolted to the floor and a portrait of an unspecified Slavic saint hanging slightly crooked next to a motivational poster that reads: Never share secrets with the enemy. Though who the enemy is is never specified. (Americans and IHOP, probably.)

An instructor in a floral apron paces at the front with a ladle like a military baton.

“Comrades,” she says. “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives.”

There are no measuring cups - only instinct. If you dare to ask what temperature to set the stove at, you are dismissed for Western tendencies and pronounced a “foreign agent” or “enemy of the state”, as is the custom in modern-day Russia, and had been during Stalin’s era. Module Two: Wrist Rotation and Emotional Authority. The flip must be clean. The face must remain neutral. At the end, there is an exam. One pan. No recipe. No mercy. If the blin tears, you are beaten up with birch sticks and sent back for ideological re-education. If it lands perfectly thin and golden, you are issued one floral headscarf, one wet towel for disciplinary purposes, and lifelong permission to sigh at your descendants.

For example, in my childhood, if anyone dared approach the stove to “help,” my babushka would snap that wet towel in their direction and hissed, “Get away from here! We both know your hands grow out of your ass.”

Wherever my babushka studied to make blini, I am convinced she passed with distinction.

Maslenitsa lasts seven days, each with its own rules. Friday is mother-in-law day. (Yes, mothers-in-law have their own calendar slot. Thank God it’s just once a year, right?) Sunday is Forgiveness Sunday, when you walk up to people and say, “Forgive me,” even if you have no idea what you’re apologising for.

My grandfather Vasilich had one reply. I would shuffle over and mumble, “Grandpa, forgive me.”

He’d nod and say, “God will forgive. And I will too.” As if he were personally subcontracted by the bearded man upstairs.

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When the last school bell would ring, freeing us from our temporary prisons until seven the next morning, the 12-year-old boys would scatter like cockroaches when you flick on the light - rushing downstairs to change.

“Seryi,” they’d say, changing into their smenka - the spare shoes we were forced to bring. It was my eternal nickname, the one every Sergey gets. Seryi. Grey.

The school staff would stand watching us like guards.

“You coming or what?”

“Uh,” I’d say. “Where?”

“A bunch of us are doing a Dota speedrun.”

“You can take Pudge tonight,” someone else would say, slamming their sweaty hand on my back.

I’d come up with some excuse, saying I needed to take my cat out for a walk.

But when the next day, my classmates would trade war stories about how they’d all met online on Skype and “destroyed” the other team, I’d listen and feel sharply jealous.

I may not have been a gamer, but I wanted to be part of The Boys.

On the weekends, even when the weather was good, The Boys would assemble in a dusty room on the second floor of a shopping strip mall near Akademicheskaya train station. The room smelled of sweat and was called somewhat non-ambiguously, Computer Club. This was a type of an Internet Cafe, where instead of the meditative sound of emails being typed and online research being conducted, you’d hear computerised stabbing, groans, see pixelated blood filling the screens, and lots and lots of BLYAT SUKA!! EBAAAAT! coming out of twelve-year-old mouths.

Succumbing to peer pressure, the twelve-year-old me would pay 50 roubles (roughly $1) an hour to play Counter Strike “po setke” — literally, on the network.

I’d take my seat next to a greasy-haired perpetual virgin, with a weird mole on his face, wearing a black T-shirt that looked like it had been washed last decade, a half-eaten Chicken McNuggets covering a T key on the keyboard, and start playing.

Very quickly, though, cries would come, “Grey, what the fuck are you doing?!”

As I’d find myself in the far corner of the game map, where, instead of fighting dragons and killing the opposing team with spears and flying fireballs, I’d find a pixel forest with a meadow and wander around, collecting flowers.

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The moment Dry January is over, it’s quickly replaced by Wet February, with people making up for lost time. London pubs are once again loud and sticky, people clutching their Guinness as if it’s Universal Credit. Bottomless brunches are back in fashion, and a bottle of wine after work is, once again, self-care. With all of this, the New Year’s resolutions people made - those gym memberships, deleted Instagram accounts, written promises to become a better person, whatever that means - dissolve like a cube of ice in rum-and-Coke.

The funny thing about Dry January, a cultural phenomenon that began accidentally when one British woman decided to train for a marathon and was later strangled by brand partnerships, is that if you do it properly, February feels strange.

By the time it arrives, you’re surprised you ever drank at all.

You look at people ordering pints, swaying from side to side, and think, with genuine curiosity: why would anyone do this to themselves? Not only do you reek of booze, but you also behave like a complete imbecile.

(Isn’t it much better to behave like a complete imbecile while sober?!)

When I think about my own relationship with alcohol, I remember that it began early. In the early 2010s, teenage Serge had local homeless men on payroll to buy us alcohol near our school in southern Moscow. There was a bottle called Grape Day for less than a pound a litre, a pre-mixed drink called Shake (the name probably came from the effect you were supposed to experience), and of course, Jaguar - a cardiac experiment of an alcoholic energy drink, that was later banned because someone died.

At fifteen, getting drunk behind the school wall and jumping half-naked into the snow felt new, rebellious, adult, which is why we did it.

But once the novelty wore off, drinking turned into something else - a coping mechanism of sorts. It was a way to survive first jobs, COVID, early relationships, and growing up. I drank too much in my early twenties, often alone, hunched over a glass, feeling very serious about my sadness, like a proper Russian.

Then there was a time when alcohol and I fell out. Much to my first wife’s pleasure, I had two years of complete abstinence, because the antidepressants I took at the time made drinking impossible. I substituted drinking with endurance running and got into the best physical shape of my life. But something felt off. I missed out on too much. Not the drinking itself, but the relationships that form when you use a pint as a social lubricant.

Every time I stopped drinking, people would tell me, “You’re different.”

By which they meant boring.

“No,” they’d reply when I told them that. “Not boring. Just different.”

And of course, they’d be lying.

If I didn’t drink at all, I’d probably have just one friend.

My sister.

These days, I’m no longer lost, though I do still get sad, which I’ve accepted as part of my personality. Beneath the easygoing exterior I perform for people, I am, fundamentally, a melancholic, nostalgic, and soft man.

The antidepressants I take now allow me to drink, and I enjoy going out with Masha’s friends and belting karaoke songs in ZIMA, laughing too loudly, waving at friends from across the room, and not being the boring one at a party.

Being in your twenties in London means going out, and going out means drinking. If Russians are stereotyped as sad drinkers, the British are disciplined social ones. It’s simply how the culture works.

Still, having not drunk for 38 days - according to my I Am Sober app - I can’t say my health has improved dramatically. But I did notice that suddenly I’m interested in everything again. I listen to podcasts. I read more. I walk without knowing where I’m going. I wander because I have time, and sometimes I don’t even know what to do with it. I feel like a kid again, just staring at the wall, following cracks with my eyes, tracing patterns.

Sometimes I catch myself studying my reflection in the mirror like I’m seeing a stranger and thinking, “Huh. So that’s you.”

My mind feels bigger, quieter, less crowded. And, of course, I always get the last laugh in the morning when my friends can’t lift their heads off the pillow, and I’ve been up since six, already ten kilometres into a run.

(See? I am better.)

In this sense, balance, I think, requires occasional extremes. The older I get, the more I realise there are other things I care about more. Writing early in the morning. Training for races. Sleeping well. Feeling clear.

All of which don’t love alcohol the way alcohol - falsely - promises to love them back.

Now, as I approach the end of my twenties, alcohol and I are like ex-lovers who have done too much damage to pretend everything’s fine, but still bump into each other occasionally at parties. We’re polite when we meet, but we both know it’s healthier not to see each other too often.

It might be that by my thirties - two years from now - I’ll realise drinking was an infatuation of my roaring twenties, something that no longer fits. Not just because life will be fuller with work, projects, maybe kids - but because the cost will simply be too high. The hangovers get worse every year. The price of a big night out keeps rising: low energy, bad runs, foggy concentration, anxiety. Which is why some people say drinking is a pleasure for the young.

But ultimately, it’s not about drinking or not drinking. Alcohol is a tool. The question is how you use it, and whether it’s serving the life you want to live.

A recent New Yorker article about Dry January quoted someone saying, “If you need a Dry January, you probably have a problem.”

Which sounds right… And also not.

People stop drinking for all sorts of reasons. Some do it for health. Some to prove to themselves they’re not alcoholics. Others simply because it’s something you do. In London, you drink from Thursday to Saturday, every week, with a pause in January. It’s part of the culture, like tap water, Sunday roast, “Mind the gap”, and those awful lit-up carriages blasting pop music with a poor immigrant cycling up front.

Sure, Dry January comes with its own kind of virtue signalling. “I am better than you” is the unofficial slogan of most Dry January posts, whether we admit it or not. You drink, therefore you suck. I don’t, therefore I am interesting.

But when I think about why I do it, I realise Dry January is a convenient shield. A way to stop drinking without answering the eternal “why?” - the same question I get when people find out I’m a vegetarian - followed by a hurried “I’m not judging anyone,” because everyone feels attacked.

One month a year, I can just shrug and say, “Yeah, I’m doing Dry Jan.”

And people - those people I thought were my friends and would be by my side, rain or shine - nod politely and say, “Oh, cool. No worries, mate. See you in Feb then.”

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It’s me. The egg man.

You have to understand, it had been a long day.

I woke up at 6 a.m. to work on my novel - a document that increasingly resembles a cry for help - then took the Windrush Line to the office, where I spent nine hours writing articles for a large multinational financial company. I had one free coffee from Caffè Nero, courtesy of my insurance program, and one free banana from the office box lovingly labelled FRUITFUL OFFICE.

It was one of those days where you jump from call to call on Teams without moving your body, only your soul, which, at a certain point, begins to slowly exit through your ears. At some point, you look at the clock and realise the day is gone, your back hurts, and you haven’t eaten.

This is how I ended up in Little Waitrose buying a Meal Deal after work.

If you’ve read me before, which I doubt you did, you know I love a Meal Deal. It’s cheap, filling, and if assembled correctly, even nutritionally legitimate. I’m also training for a marathon, which means I’ve become one of those people who says things like “protein intake” with a straight face. At the Little Waitrose snack fridge, I faced a choice: carrots with hummus or two eggs in a pot with a decorative leaf of spinach.

I made - what I now see - the wrong choice.

Now listen. Like everyone else, I hate people who eat on public transport. I hate the sound. I hate the smells. I hate watching someone dismantle a Big Mac at eye level while ketchup performs parkour down their shirt. But that evening, I was starving. So somewhere between Holborn and Cannon Street, I ate my mozzarella-and-tomato wrap standing in the corner of the carriage like a guilty rat dressed business casual.

The egg pot, however, I saved for later.

At Cannon Street, with four minutes to spare, I ran for the train, pleased with myself for squeezing in some accidental cardio. (Did I mention I am training for a marathon?)

I boarded the 19:04 Slade Green train, which you did as well, sat in the first carriage, and collapsed into the only free seat.

The egg pot stuck out of my coat pocket like a poorly concealed weapon.

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The first time it happened, I was drunk and stupid. I was crawling to a bus stop in Central London after I had just puked on the pavement, a stolen glass decanter from ZIMA in my hand. As I was walking through a dimly lit street, music blasting in my AirPods, a skinny man in a dirty tracksuit approached me and said, “Hey brother, where are you from?”

In the state I was in, everyone was my friend. Even a skinny man in a dirty tracksuit in a dimly lit street. “Russia,” I said.

“Oh man,” he said and shook his head. “That must be tough.” And it is. But the words landed differently that night, not only because I was drunk but also because that very day, I had applied for asylum in the UK and had spent two hours at the Home Office building in East Croydon, explaining what would happen to someone like me if I were to return to Russia.

He spread his hands out in an embrace, and so did I. He patted me on the back and let go. He smelled funny, but I remember thinking: what a lyrical way to end the night. As he walked away, I wanted to change the song in my headphones, so I put my right hand into my jeans pocket only to find it empty. My drunk brain took too long to realise what had happened. A song was still playing in my AirPods, but the phone wasn’t there. I had just been embraced by a skinny man in a dirty tracksuit in a dimly lit street. The dots connected.

“Hey!” I yelled. He turned around, his eyebrows raised. “Where’s my phone?”

“I’ve got no phone, man! What you saying?”

“I’m saying I had my phone but it’s not there anymore. Where is my phone?”

“I’ve got no phone, man!”

This went on for some time. A few passersby walked past and looked at us without much interest. It was 2 AM on a Saturday and this was Central London. Anything goes.

The skinny man walked up to me and said, “Hey, you know what, search me!” He took everything out of his pockets: some change, what looked like bubble gum, an old Nokia phone I hadn’t seen since my early teenage days. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, he took off his pants, revealing his small, hairy genitals.

“Man, what the fuck?” I said. “Put on your pants. Just give me my phone back and I’ll be on my way.”

It started to dawn on me that I might not be getting my phone back, but I felt like a sucker. This was the most clichéd robbery. Something resembling my mother’s voice came into my head: “Never embrace skinny men in dirty tracksuits at 2 AM in Soho. Even if they relate to how hard it is to be Russian.”

“Give me my phone back!” I yelled again.

“I’ve got no phone, man!”

We were slowly starting to sound like a street performance.

Out of options, I moved the glass decanter I’d stolen into my other hand and grabbed the man’s elbow. “You’re coming with me,” I said. “To the police. Let them figure it out.”

“Alright man, let’s go!” he said confidently, and off we walked, hand in hand, like a couple on a leisurely stroll. We walked ten metres or so, I don’t know what that is in feet, when he let go of my hand, turned abruptly, and ran away, in my drunk head, faster than Usain Bolt.

I watched his back as he ran away and wondered whether I should follow him. I imagined him turning a corner and other skinny men in dirty tracksuits standing there, with knives, or worse. Not worth it, I decided. My mother’s voice came again: “Serezha, if you’re drunk and in Central Soho at 2 AM and your phone got stolen and the robber ran away, don’t chase him! There might be people with knives around the corner…”

I looked down at my stolen glass decanter, looked up at the figure growing smaller in the distance, and yelled the first thing that came to mind, which was something along the lines of, “Hey, fuck you, brother!”

Then I sent the decanter flying forward, aiming at his back. I missed, of course, and the glass shattered across the pavement into a million little pieces.

The second time it happened, I was sober as British tap water, coming back home from a walk in Greenwich Park, talking to my mother on the phone.

She was telling me about seeing Ukrainian drones lying on the ground on her way to work.

“It’s scary,” she said. “It looked like—”

But I never learned what it looked like, because her sentence was cut off the moment my phone was snatched from my hands. I stared ahead as the man dressed in black rode away on his electric bicycle, faster than any neighbouring car, my heart racing.

I was shocked, sure, but somehow almost expected it. As the black figure swerved left and right, avoiding traffic, and grew smaller by the millisecond, I inhaled deeply and yelled what had already become my war cry in these situations.

“Hey, man, fuck you!”

Aside from the fact that Serge is a slow learner, the curious thing about both times my phone was stolen was that a) they happened within one month in the summer of 2025; and b) both times it was the same phone.

While I consider myself an expert at this point in what to do when your phone gets snatched, I appreciate the luck involved. After that first time, when I miraculously made my way home after the skinny man in a dirty tracksuit left me phoneless, I made a point of blocking my device and was surprised to learn you can leave a message. That is, in case someone finds it.

I had no hope of anyone finding my phone, so I put down a message that read something along the lines of:

I WILL PAY PEOPLE TO BREAK YOUR LEGS. YOU PIECE OF FILTH.
p.s. if you find this phone, it was stolen. here’s my number…

And the next day, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as Mohammad.

“I found your phone,” he said.

“Where?” I said.

“In a field in Hackney. It displayed a message with some bad words written…”

“Can you give it back?” I said.

“Meet me,” he said.

“No thanks,” I said. The image of the man taking off his pants and then running away was still too fresh. “Leave it at the nearest police station.”

“Okay,” he said.

And what do you know: a few days later, my phone was miraculously returned to me from a police station in a remote place called Barking. It took me two hours to get there. The officer opened a safe and handed it to me, intact.

“Sorry,” the police officer said, handing me the phone, which smelled suspiciously like wet autumn leaves. “We keep it with all the other drugs.”

That’s exactly the phrase she used: “all the other drugs,” which I don’t know about you, but I found quite profound.

While the whole thing is surprising for many people—

My friend who wanted to come visit me recently texted me, “Is it true that they steal your phones on the streets of London?”

I said, “Yes.”

And he cancelled his tickets.

—for us Londoners, this is hardly news. A recent stat mentions something like 70,000 phones stolen each year in London alone.

For a certain assholic cohort of people, it is a business of sorts. Nobody cares about your bank details or private data. They snatch the device, ship it to Shenzhen, and make an easy £300–500 a pop.

But it’s not just London.

Every country, it seems, has a problem of its own.

In Russia, say the wrong thing, and they beat you up, no questions asked.

In the Netherlands, if my sister is to be trusted, it’s the bikes. People have two, just in case.

In the US, they just shoot you in the face.

To me, this reflects a metaphor for the universal truth of life: nowhere is perfect, and everything comes at a price. The question is, what price are you willing to pay?

So when, as an asylum seeker in the UK for my anti-Putin public views, I am confronted with a choice—go to prison or be sent to war for my beliefs back home, or have my phone snatched occasionally here in the UK—it’s a no-brainer.

Unlike dying in Ukraine, which I can do only once, there’s an unlimited number of times I can inhale and yell, “Fuck you!” to the figure in the distance with my phone, growing smaller by the second.

I am also proud to say that I bought myself some phone insurance.

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The year my mother’s mother, Tanya, turned fifty, my father bought her a home karaoke machine.

It was a grey box roughly the size of a DVD player, with two large holes where the microphones went.

While karaoke is originally a Japanese invention - the word itself comes from “kara” (empty) and “oke” (orchestra), literally, empty orchestra, Russians take it to a whole other level.

Any party, drinks, or bar crawl inevitably ends up in a dimly lit basement, belting out cheesy Russian pop songs from the 2010s until three in the morning. Much like Londoners always, somehow, insist on “Wonderwall”, Russians have their own karaoke canon - songs so mandatory that without them, the night doesn’t count.

You’ve obviously got the eternal “Only Shot of Vodka on the Table” by Leps, the Georgian-Russian singer. Then you’ve got Verka Serduchka, the Ukrainian man-turned-woman-on-stage miracle, yelling that “everything will be alright,” with the small lyrical caveat that this only applies once you’re sufficiently drunk. And then, of course, the undisputed king of Russian karaoke: Valery Meladze, also Georgian-Russian and related to one of Russia’s most famous composers, because of course he is.

Meladze sings in a kind of emotional bleating that feels halfway between a love confession and a mild cry for help. His catalogue includes “Inostranetz” (Foreign Man, possibly Russia’s unofficial answer to “Englishman in New York”), plus sacred karaoke texts like “Salut, Vera!” and “Nebesa” (Heaven). Behind the lyrics, the music videos play on loop: Meladze ringed by a dozen young, beautiful women, shirt aggressively unbuttoned, hair artfully dishevelled, eyes locked into the camera lens like he’s trying to seduce, consume, and spiritually dominate you - all at once.

In short, karaoke might be Japanese in origin, but it’s a Russian national pastime.

“Oh Maxim!” my babushka exclaimed as she took the unwrapped box in her hands. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

My father reclined in his seat behind a table so packed with bottles and dishes you could feed a small army. He smiled weakly, with the confidence of a music producer on the verge of discovering a national pop star.

“Sing, of course,” he said.

The twenty-odd people crammed around the small kitchen table, neighbours, friends, distant cousins, a weird uncle I had never met, raised their glasses of Russian Champagne (that’s the name of the brand) and cheered.

After the celebratory dinner, the machine was placed under one of the four TVs in our apartment.

It was plugged in, tested, and then never touched again.

That is, by the adults.

At the time, we were living with my mother’s parents in a hell in hell called Otradnoe.

Every morning, as the adults disappeared to attend to Adult Business, I locked myself in my grandmother’s living room, turned on the TV, slid in the DVD labelled GOLDEN KARAOKE HITS 2005, and pressed play.

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My cousin Yaroslav came to visit recently from Moscow and what surprised me most is that he’s sixteen. Not in that cliché “how quickly kids grow!!” sense, although that too: every time I see him he’s another head taller than me, but in the sense that at sixteen he flew all the way from war-ridden Moscow to another country, alone.

It’s important to understand here that this wasn’t a school trip or a carefully scheduled family vacation, no: this was him traveling eighteen hours from Moscow to London for a solo holiday he paid for himself, after working all summer as a delivery boy.

Respect, sure.

But also: what the fuck?!

My first trip anywhere on my own was when I turned eighteen. My then-best friend Zhenya and I decided to celebrate becoming men, or so we told ourselves, by going to the place one should never go to in early spring (or any more than once in a lifetime): Saint Petersburg.

We spent the entire weekend drunk in our dodgy hotel room across from a local strip club, looking for trouble.

I’ll skip the shameful details, but looking back, it’s honestly impressive we weren’t beaten up or, at the very least, mugged. Young, reckless, figuratively and literally drunk on our parents’ money, we were perfect candidates for a give-me-your-phone-or-I’ll-stab-you-punk situation.

Which, growing up in Russia, I already had some experience with by the time I was twelve.

The first quote-unquote real solo trip was later that same year, in 2016, when I flew to Boston to attend college.

Because Moscow is located in the ass crack of the world, my 16-hour flight went through a place I’d then never been to before: London. Somewhere over France, as the captain announced a thirty-minute preparation for landing, a beautiful Russian flight attendant approached me. The eighteen-year-old me watched longingly as she kneeled in front of my seat and touched a flock of her straight blonde hair.

“I’m sorry,” she said, using the tone adults reserve for telling children their previously unknown great-uncle had died. “But it seems you won’t be able to make your connecting flight.”

She then escorted me and another man into the business class section, where the apology extended to a service of champagne and small sandwiches.

Gulping glass after glass of free sparkling alcohol, the eighteen-year-old me half-listened to an elaborate explanation that because the plane had been delayed and there were no other flights to Boston that night, we’d have no choice but to stay in London overnight.

“The only question is,” the flight attendant I had managed to form a crush on in the previous ten minutes said, “do you both have a British visa?”

My partner in crime, a forty-something doctor with a family in Boston who flew weekly between Russia and the US, probably to visit his secret family, did.

I didn’t.

“Oh,” she said when I told her. “I’ll have to check with my colleagues on the ground what to do in that situation.”

Then she left and at this point, it seems, the service had ended, because she never came back, breaking my young, fragile heart into a million pieces.

After landing, the champagne and any feelings I had for the flight attendant had worn off, and the eighteen-year-old me exited the plane in full-blown panic. This was my first solo trip abroad, I kept thinking. I was supposed to arrive in Boston that night, a city I’d never been to, where a pre-booked transfer would be waiting at Logan Airport to take me to the college campus. Instead, I was in London, without a visa.

I was convinced I’d be stuck in Heathrow forever like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

In my head, a red stamp slammed my passport while Stanley Tucci yelled “Unacceptable!” on a loop, in my face.

At border control, I was told to wait, as typically people who arrive at their desks have visas and I was obviously making things difficult for everybody. For twenty-odd minutes, I entertained myself studying the laces on my shoes, but when I looked up, my passport had a little piece of paper called a 24-hour Emergency Visa.

“Welcome to the UK,” the officer then said before doing something I’ve never seen people in uniform do before: smile.

Looking back now, I am fascinated by this turn of events. Most Russians today worry about getting a UK visa, pay extraordinary sums to lawyers, agencies, meticulously collect documents, just to see the country of lords and ladies. Many end up not getting a visa.

Turns out, none of that matters. All you need to do is be late for your connecting flight.

“Thank you,” I said, grabbed my passport, and rushed to baggage claim to find my new friend.

Outside, a transfer was waiting to take us to a free Hilton hotel.

As the two of us walked through the airport’s revolving doors, I spotted a sign: More London this way, next to the Heathrow Express logo.

From a distance, it looked uncannily like the Mercedes-Benz star my father once boasted he’d bent while driving 200 km/h in his twenties…

In the transfer bus, I pressed my face to the cold window as the darkness and fields rushed by. I couldn’t help but feel like I had somehow landed in a bonus side quest.

That morning, I woke up certain I’d be on my way to the US, to follow my father’s footsteps and study business. And here I was, eighteen, in the UK. In my head, I replayed everything I’d absorbed about this country growing up in Russia: tea at four, black cabs roaming the CAPITAL OF GREAT BRITAIN…

But Serge plans, God laughs. And every now and then, it seems, He gives you a small detour to remember why you wanted to leave in the first place.

“Have you ever seen Big Ben?” I asked my fellow stranded passenger.

The forty-something doctor I sat next to on the plane looked at me like I’d offered him my sweaty hands to sniff.

“Yeah. What about it?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, smiling like a junkie who, after weeks of sobriety, managed to score. “Nothing…”

After dropping my bag at the hotel, my new friend approached me and asked if I wanted to have dinner. For unclear reasons, he thought it worthwhile to inform me he wouldn’t be taking a shower. “I’ll go straight to dinner!” he said, seemingly unable to control his excitement about the prospect of a prepackaged grilled cheese sandwich provided by Aeroflot.

I studied the dark circles under his armpits. I had an important choice to make. Airport hotel dinner with a smelly forty-something dude or adventure.

I could go back to the airport, I schemed, take the Heathrow Express, and, if the adverts were to be believed, be in Central London in under twenty-five minutes. I could - gasp! - see Big Ben with my own eyes.

When I told my new acquaintance about my plan, he looked at me like I was an escaped exhibit.

“So you’re saying you’re not having dinner with me?” he asked, wounded.

I hesitated. After years of fighting for my father’s attention, saying no to middle-aged men wasn’t my strongest skill. (Still isn’t.) I knew I was about to make an unnecessary, possibly stupid decision.

It was also irresistible. For the plot, if nothing else.

“Exactly,” I said. “I’m going to see Big Ben!”

Then I, for some reason, stomped my foot.

He shook his head like a disappointed teacher, then walked away toward the tiny hotel cafeteria, on a side quest of his own.

Back at the airport, I stood on the platform staring at the outdated grey ticket machine which, today, as a proper Londoner, I’d never touch. The machine demanded money: £25 I didn’t have. At eighteen, I was pretending to be a man but had flown across the world empty-handed.

“Serezha,” my mother answered on the hundredth ring, “do you know what time it is? And why are you calling? Shouldn’t you be in the air, flying to the US?”

I explained. She called me crazy, in English, for some reason, perhaps because her son was in London. Then she sent me 10,000 roubles, enough for the train, back, and a celebratory pizza.

“I’ll send you a photo with Big Ben,” I promised.

But she had already hung up.

On the Heathrow Express train, the eighteen-year-old me felt drunk on possibility. For as long as I could remember, especially after living in the US as a kid, I wanted to leave Russia and be in the Big World. And here it was. In the English adverts, in the faces of other passengers, in the way everything smelled slightly different, that oily, dusty, slightly rotten smell of potential.

When I somehow navigated the maze that is the Tube and emerged at Westminster, I couldn’t see it at first. My phone said it was right across the road, but there was nothing. Then a double-decker bus moved, the crowd of tourists shifted, a cyclist glided past, and there it was.

Almost toy-like.

Lit up.

Not-so-big.

But nevertheless, Big Ben.

I thought about my middle-aged friend back at the airport hotel. I imagined him stuffing his face with a packet of crisps and watching hotel TV. What a loser, I thought.

Then I took a selfie with Big Ben and sent it to the family group chat.

My father replied instantly.

“Did you get on the wrong plane or something?”

I didn’t answer.

This was my moment, and, like always, he was ruining it.

When I look at my cousin traveling to London for the first time on his own, I can’t help but think about myself at that age.

I recall how the morning after my spontaneous London trip, flying to Boston in economy, not business as I’d hoped (it’s easy to get used to good things), my mind was elsewhere. How I thought about the Big World ahead of me, the four years of studying entrepreneurship. The life I had imagined for myself that seemed certain then, inevitable, predefined.

Seven months later, I’d fly home and start working, never finishing my BA degree. The following year, I’d meet a girl at Starbucks who would become my girlfriend and, years later, the reason I’d move to London and make it my home. I’d discover writing, political journalism, working for startups. I’d get an MA. I’d build things, get into debt, break up, start over. There would be jobs, habits, good ones and bad ones. There would be friends, stories, mistakes.

I knew none of this then.

But between that boy staring at Big Ben with a sense of light disappointment and me now, ten years later, writing this essay, lies something important, something that my sixteen-year-old cousin would still have to live through.

Something I’ll always call my “twenties.”

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Olivier is the weirdest salad on the planet.

Entirely inedible for anyone not born in Eastern Europe, yet deeply loved by anyone who was.

It’s a mixture of whatever non-perishable things you have in the fridge, drowned in mayo.

It’s a Soviet salad, which is to say, it’s a poverty salad.

In some parts of the world, it’s called simply a “Russian salad”. In Poland, it’s called vegetable salad, renamed as part of a broader emotional and political detox from decades of Soviet authoritarianism.

But in Russia, we call it Olivier, after a French chef who ran one of the most glamorous restaurants in 19th-century Moscow and came up with a special egg-based sauce nobody had ever tried before.

Mayo.

After 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power and killed or exiled anyone who had at least a hint of a brain, the Soviet people tried to recreate this glamorous dish at home, to taste a life they had destroyed.

When it came to the Olivier, luxury was replaced by ingenuity. For example, chicken breast was replaced by what’s commonly known as “doctor’s sausage”. Despite the suggestive name, it has nothing to do with your GP’s genitals, and is simply the cheapest sausage in the grocery store.

And somehow, it still worked.

Better, even.

More than a century later, people in my part of the world make so much Olivier during New Year’s that they keep eating it for days afterwards: cold, straight from the tub it was made in, at 3 a.m. — like some hungry, luxury-loving Soviet rats…

When I think about all the things that shaped me as a man, I feel like an Olivier salad.

I’m not British. Not American. Not entirely Russian either. Born on the cusp of a century, during one of the most turbulent moments in my country’s history, I now live in the UK, my fourth country. (Which makes me wonder whether this is, in fact, not the end of my journey around the planet.) It’s only natural that the desire to understand who I am, or where I belong, has followed me my whole life.

Perhaps this is why the time between Christmas and New Year’s, that awkward non-word twixmas, is my favourite time of the year. It’s the only time when I get to reconnect with the two sides of me that somehow make one person.

While most Russians wait until the 7th of January, my English-British-American side celebrates Catholic Christmas because I grew up on movies like Love Actually and its less appreciated cousin featuring Nick Cage, The Family Man. And then, once Christmas is over, the other, Russian, side kicks in. The one that listens to sad-but-good songs about love and hope. Melancholic songs that, unlike Russia itself, end kindly. I watch the Soviet movies I grew up on. And of course, I make the food, starting with the main event — the Olivier.

The year's end is often a time for reinvention, for self-renewal. But the older I get, the more I see that change isn’t about becoming someone new. After all, you’re not an iPhone that needs to be upgraded every year. Instead, it’s about coming back to yourself and slowly becoming who you always were, but forgot. Self-renewal is less about innovation and more about a homecoming, regardless of whether that makes sense to anyone on the outside.

The Olivier Salad is a combination of ingredients that absolutely should not be together. You’ve got potatoes. Canned peas. Pickles. Eggs. Mayo… “Doctor’s sausage.”

On paper, it’s nutritionally questionable. Probably shortening your life. More of a crime than a salad, really. And yet, the Olivier is more than just a traditional Russian New Year’s Eve dish.

Survived through the most ridiculous experiment in human history and being born from having nothing and wanting everything, it’s nothing less than hope.

In a bowl.

The Olivier Salad: Serge’s Way

Beware: the last time I served Olivier to someone from what we Russians call “the Western world,” they threw up in my sink. But if you insist, here’s the no-BS, Western-proof way to do it.

Proportions

My grandmother would tell you that Olivier is all about how you dice the ingredients. She would hit me with a wet towel if I cut them too large and accuse me of making “pig’s pieces.” Flinching ever so slightly, I’d go further and say that Olivier is about proportions. Too much of anything and it’s over. Done. Finita. Pizdets.

If your Olivier isn’t what you hoped it would be, the proportions are off.

Ingredients & Proportions

Pick your baseline - say, using your regular drinking glass.

Then measure the following:

• Potatoes: 1.5x (the foundation)

• Pickles: 1x

• Protein: turkey or chicken breast, or a vegetarian alternative: 1x.

• Carrots: 0.5x

• Garden peas. Unsalted, in water. Ideally, from an Eastern European shop or wherever you can find Bonduelle.

• Eggs: 0.5x. (Don’t overthink it.)

• Mayo: to taste. Preferably Russian, Provansal. Err on the side of incaution.

Recipe

Everything should be diced into cubes of roughly the same size.

1. Peel and dice the potatoes and carrots into small cubes. Most people boil first and cut later, but that’s how you end up with mash.

2. Boil the diced potatoes (1.5x cups) and carrots (0.5x cups) in the same water for about 20 minutes. Add a tablespoon of salt and two tablespoons of sugar. Yes, sugar. Trust me.

3. Dice the pickles (1x cups) into similar-sized cubes and set aside.

4. Boil the eggs (0.5x) for about 8-10 minutes. Hard-boiled, but not so hard you could kill someone with them.

5. Cool everything down. Mix potatoes, carrots, pickles, peas, and eggs. No mayo yet.

6. Add your protein. These non-meat-eating days, I use a ready-made vegan option. Some people use doctor’s sausage to reconnect with childhood trauma. I respect that. Just make sure everything is diced into perfectly similar cubes.

7. Finally, add mayo. Mix. Taste. Add more mayo. Always add more mayo.

8. That’s it. Serve as is.

9. Or with chopped spring onions.

10. Or, if you want to pretend you’re Olivier himself or one of those people whom the Bolsheviks killed or exiled, add a spoon or two of caviar. You know, just for the plot.

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Happy New Year, my dear readers.

S Novym Godom.

The year was 2024, and we were in Ölüdeniz, Turkey, celebrating my twenty-sixth birthday.

I have a tradition where every April, I drag my family together from different corners of the world and rent a large house so we can all hang out. It’s the only way we can still be together now. Scattered Russians during Putin’s stupid war.

That birthday felt especially unreal because my grandmother, my seventy-year-old babushka, somehow made it all the way from Moscow. She didn’t bring a gift, so when she asked what I wanted, I told her I didn’t need anything.

Unless, of course, she wanted to hike up the mountain in Ölüdeniz, where the paragliders gather, strap herself to a complete stranger, and jump off a cliff.

And she said, “Okay.”

The next day, a private Turkish driver took us up the mountain where the paragliders launch. My babushka’s instructor, a muscular guy in his mid-thirties with curly black hair and a permanent five o’clock shadow, sat beside her in the backseat of a black jeep.

He didn’t speak Russian. Or so we thought.

As we drove up the mountain, the driver making unnecessary sharp turns on a narrow serpentine, me cursing under my breath, my babushka pointed at the instructor and said, “Do you think he is married? What a handsome young man.”

Without missing a beat, the instructor turned to her, blinked, smiled, and said, “Mama mia.”

My babushka nearly collapsed from joy.

I rolled my eyes and went back to cursing the driver, clutching the seat handle.

Though at this point, I figured that if our car went flying off the serpentine, at least I wouldn’t have to watch my grandmother hit on a man who could easily be her grandson.

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At the top, it was cold and windy. Paragliders strapped themselves in, put on helmets, and glided away. Our instructor walked up to my seventy-year-old babushka, plopped a helmet onto her head, took her by the waist, strapped his very fit body to hers, and with the confidence of a man who had done this a million times, ran off a cliff.

With our jaws on the ground, my sister Kate and I watched as the mother of our mother lifted into the sky like some Soviet-engineered eagle.

The instructor started doing little left-right swoops so we could film her, flying right over our heads.

“Babushka, are you all right?” I yelled, smiling, just to check.

They flew past. No response.

“Babushka! Are you all right?” I yelled again.

Nothing.

I looked at my sister. This time, concerned.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s probably not all right.”

My phone rang. The WhatsApp profile photo was the instructor’s sweaty forehead, mid-flight. I answered and he yelled over the wind, “Your grandmother wants to say something, but I don’t understand!!”

“Pass her the phone,” I said.

The phone changed hands mid-air and my grandmother screamed that she wanted to go down. Immediately.

I said I understood and passed the message back.

“We are not an airplane,” the instructor said, meaning that paragliders don’t go up and down on a whim of the rider. “But okay. We try.” Then he hung up.

My sister and I sprinted back to the car. The driver took us down the mountain, once again making unnecessary sharp turns on the narrow serpentine. This time I cursed under my breath at myself. What kind of grandson, I thought, sends his seventy-year-old grandmother off a cliff with a man who says “mama mia” and means it?

The paragliding community in Ölüdeniz is a tight bunch and information travels fast. By the time Kate and I reached the bottom, still alive despite our driver’s efforts, eleven muscular paraglider guys were standing in formation, apparently waiting to catch my babushka.

I looked up and a moment later there she was, descending like a Boeing 737 making an emergency landing.

When she hit the ground, they barely held her. Once the instructor unstrapped himself, they gently lowered her flat, like a wounded soldier.

I ran over, gasping.

“Babushka, are you okay?”

“No,” she said calmly, wincing. “I am not okay. I need to go home. Now.”

I called my mother and stepfather, who took her back to our cottage in Fethiye.

On the way, she became violently sick in the car. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say the vehicle required spiritual cleansing afterwards by my stepfather.

This is a good moment to zoom out and tell you about my babushka.

Her name is Tanya. She grew up in the Soviet Union as the daughter of a pilot and a woman who didn’t have a birth certificate. She spent most of her life at home, cooking, cleaning, and tending to my grandfather’s desires. To an outsider, her life resembled that of a house cat.

She met my grandfather, Vasilich, at Moscow State University. She was cleaning the toilets. He was guarding machinery. Later he went to work for a place you’ve heard of, the one people whispered about in the Soviet Union.

While he was a good grandfather to me, he was a terrible husband to her. Physically and psychologically abusive. Affairs, plural. Two she knew about. God knows how many she didn’t.

When he died a few years ago, something in her snapped open.

It was like she stepped out of a cage she hadn’t realized she was living in.

Suddenly there was space. Oxygen. Possibility. And she ran into it like someone afraid the door might slam shut again.

Within a year she had a boyfriend twenty years younger, a lily tattoo across her back, three credit cards, a car on finance, and a month-long holiday in Morocco.

It was as if she were trying to compress all the life she had missed, all the joy and rebellion and chaos, into the two or three decades she had left.

After the flight, she slept for a day and a half. During those hours, I tortured myself. I paced the house feeling like an idiot. An asshole. A negligent descendant. This was my fault. No wonder I don’t have friends.

Then, sometime in the afternoon, I heard laughter from her room.

I knocked gently, ready to apologize for the rest of my life.

She was lying in bed, holding her brand-new iPhone, watching the video I’d filmed of her flying. I could hear my own voice yelling, “Babushka, are you all right?”

She looked up at me and said,

“Next time, can you make sure I do it without the instructor? He’s ruining my video.”

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Earlier in 2025, still unemployed, when all the money I had meticulously saved vanished without a trace, slipping out like a proper Irish Goodbye (which, in Russia, we confusingly call an English goodbye), Masha, who had been covering most of the bills, started giving me a look.

The kind of look that says, “This is not what I signed up for.”

When we met, I often took her to parties and restaurants, driving around London in a car. But now, a year and several tens of thousands of pounds later, she found herself dating someone with no visa, no money, and no job prospects except an occasional funny essay online.

“I don’t care what you do,” she kept telling me. “Just pay the rent.”

So I started looking for options.

Job search in London is famously confidence-killing. You begin with high hopes about yourself. I sure did, assuming that after all my years of working for my dad and freelancing for his oligarch friends, I had a real career trajectory.

You apply for jobs and demand a salary higher than your previous one, telling yourself and the dozen interviewers a story they want to hear. But with every rejection, or worse, silence, a part of you dies. Like a character resurrected by blood magic in Game of Thrones, you come back to life after each failed application a little less yourself.

In February, a sign went up near our apartment, underneath a railway bridge. Two words: BRIDGE BAKERY. The area where we live is famous for lacking decent dining establishments. In the cut-your-wrists gloom of February in London, it felt like the promise of something light and warm and possibly sweet and buttery. A life where yours truly could pay full rent, keep his car, and not rely on credit cards to ride the bus.

As a college dropout and someone who never succeeded following the Traditional Path, I learned to be resourceful. And I instinctively felt that this arch bakery arrival wasn’t for nothing. It was a sign.

Maybe, I kept thinking, it’s part of a larger organisation. I’ve long wondered if I could create content for a non-financial company. Perhaps if I got their attention, I could pitch myself to their upper management. A chain of bakeries could be a start. Before you know it, I thought, I’d be managing dozens of accounts for top London restaurants. Who knows, maybe I could start an agency focused on food. Maybe after all these years, that was my real calling. The dots would finally connect, just like Steve Jobs promised in his Stanford commencement speech in 2005…

…I’d call the agency something sharp and funky. It would be a ONE WORD agency. Maybe that’s the name. One Word LLC. I could hire my ex-colleagues, get testimonials from ex-bosses, and make an ad.

A memorable, scroll-stopping ad. A funny ad.

What’s funny? Rabbits? Ryan Reynolds? I’ll ask ChatGPT.

ALRIGHT WAIT.

First things first, I told myself, stopping before I fell into another mental rabbit hole. (Actually, Rabbit Hole would be a good name for a content agency. Please stop it.)

The question is, I asked myself, swerving in my chair while Masha took a work call in the living room:

How can I get the attention of this soon-to-open bakery under a bridge?

Masha’s voice drifted from behind closed doors. “Can someone please make me a presenter?” Followed by a female British voice that should have belonged to a radio host but somehow ended up in a Teams meeting of a multinational consulting company.

A lightbulb went off in my mind. Presenter. I should present the soon-to-open bakery with a vision for its content. I would show them the Serge Magic.

I rubbed my hands together in that comically evil way movie villains do and swirled in my chair again.

Outside, it began to rain.

I got to work.

Two weeks later, Masha and I were in Southampton for our anniversary. Using some of the last money I had, I booked us an expensive hotel on the docks with a view of the yachts. We went on a private Titanic tour and explored the city’s pubs. We had oysters for dinner and a bottle of champagne delivered to the room. I bought a Polaroid camera for the occasion and asked Masha to take a photo of me stuffing myself with marine goo.

“To victory,” I said, raising my glass.

“What victory?”

“I finally have a plan for my job search,” I explained. “And if everything goes according to plan…”

Just then, my phone rang.

I wiped my hands of the marine goo and raised my index finger to Masha.

One second, darling.

“Yes?”

Some shuffling, and a child was screaming in the background.

Then an accent: “Hello? Is this Serge?”

“Yes.”

“Give. Google. Back.”

“Sorry?”

“I said, give our Google account back.”

“Who are you?”

“I am the one you stole our Google account from by creating a pin on the map where the bakery is supposed to be. You responded to comments on our behalf. This is theft.”

I went silent for a few seconds. “Well, you see, I’m a content creator and writer. I can—”

“I don’t care. Give. Google. Back. And Instagram. And LinkedIn. And…”

She spent some time listing the social media accounts I had created for the bakery under the bridge.

“Can I just say one thing?” I asked, panicking.

“No.”

Then she hung up.

I could almost hear the world’s smallest violin playing in the distance.

Across the table, Masha stared at me with a look that said, Well, what was that about?

I told her the whole story. My reasoning. How I had spent the past week responding to comments on the bakery’s Google Maps profile, creating a website, a logo, and a dozen other things with the intention of getting hired. I told her about the agency idea.

She listened quietly, smiling now and then, laughing, eating. When I finished, she put her fork down, washed the food with a sip of champagne, and said, “Why don’t you just make a resume and apply for jobs? You know, like a normal person?”

I looked at her, then out the window at the yachts. “That’s an interesting strategy.”

She nodded.

“That’s interesting,” I said again. “I don’t think I’ve ever really considered it.”

I raised my glass again. “To normal,” I said.

Masha clinked her glass to mine.

“To finally paying rent,” she said.

A few days later, I visited the bakery under the bridge. It turned out they served delicious bread, and since it was so close to our apartment, it felt like a tiny gift in the February gloom. As I stood in the queue, I felt a strong urge to ask the cashier for something free — you know, for setting up all their social media accounts and spending several days untangling the permissions. But as I watched the man roll up his sleeves and slice the olive sourdough, I decided against it. Not because I had changed. But because I didn’t need free bread.

What I needed was a job.

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