Here we are going back to my column published in August, mentioning Vladimir Putin’s presidential Order #702. The order says that foreigners from the West who share traditional Russian values may move to Russia without too much paperwork. That column of mine also says that an estimate of those willing to do it may be as high as 3 million people – but that’s only an estimate. What’s more surprising, a great lot of people have already moved in.
So, here we are, in a prestigious and exclusive Moscow club, listening to one such lady called Liana (not her real name, since the club does not allow direct quoting of guest’s speeches). She is beautiful, she is an artist painting intricate mandalas to hang on a wall – or, at least, that’s what she calls these multi-colored disks with all kind of patterns on them. She is also doing yoga, and, back there in the US, was respectfully called a witch, since she had a herb garden in her plot of land in the state of New York, and owned a local store with an esoteric tint. In fact, she was doing quite well in the US, being also married to a prospering senior bank clerk from Chase Manhattan.
What went wrong and pushed her into going back to Russia? Her husband made the final decision, she says. Being in finance, he distinctly dislikes the prospects of the American banking system.
Now we are in for a couple of surprises. Liana’s husband is a Pole, and Poles are supposed to hate Russians historically, aren’t they? But apparently not all do. At least, the husband says that the US is in for a disaster, fighting Russia in Ukraine.
More, Liana herself is, technically, Ukrainian. Now, that’s as complicated as is the idea of Ukrainian identity. Liana reminded us that people in Ukraine’s East and South mostly call themselves Ukrainian Russians or simply Russians, which explains a lot about the current events down there. She moved from Ukraine to Russia in the early 1990-s, then went to America to make a fortune as an artist. Many did the same at the time.
Anyway, here this couple is, thanks to the Order #702, with children and mandalas, looking for a country house close enough to Moscow. And here they are, trying to explain to us, locals, in which way we are better than the Americans, and what is the basic difference between living in the West and in Russia. In one and simple world, Liana tells us, Russia is normal.
Now, there are many ways to explain normalcy or lack of such. We, the locals, certainly do not see it, unless we try to make a comparison. But there is an academic way of doing that. So, a first philosophical forum called Comprehending Russia has opened in Moscow this week, gathering local and foreign thinkers and writers.
No Indian speakers are on the list, only some Indian faces in the audience. Foreign speakers are all Western or ideologically similar, namely from the US, Austria, France and Japan. Which is small surprise, since the basic idea of the discussion is about a difference between Russian and Western civilizations. I’d love to see a similar event, explaining why Russia is not China (or India), but that may come next, one day.
Not everyone can bear the strain of pure ideas, juggled at such gathering. Discussion about values tend to be too much like mathematical formulas. We may hear that basic Russian values are about putting spiritual over material, and all such. But, let’s be frank, Liana the formerly American witch puts it down much better.
Living in America is getting scary, she says, since there is that constant pressure on virtually everyone to change their lifestyles and basic habits for some undoubtedly noble reasons. More and more obligatory changes are coming in. You cannot say or write these or those things, not to mention doing them. Same happens in Europe. The scariest thing she ever encountered, Liana says, was the medical terror of 2020-2022, which was about meddling with your body, not only with your brains. While Russian society proved to be almost totally immune from that horror.
The West is completing destruction of democracy, says one of my favorite writers, Igor Maltsev, living mostly in Germany. Individual freedoms are gone, and it all started in September 2001, when the New York Twin Towers went down. You cannot even keep the count of small, mundane things banned in the West and still being accepted as normal in Russia.
We, here in Russia, may not see it, but foreigners do. All right, Liana is Russian (though her husband is a Pole). But how about a lady called Karin Kneissl, Foreign Minister of Austria in 2017-2019? She lives in Russia now, and there are dozens of media features about her and her family buying themselves a house near Ryazan, not far from Moscow, just what Liana wants to do.
Human thinking is a curious thing. One case is nothing, that Austrian lady who danced with Vladimir Putin at her wedding is a peculiarity. Two cases are a coincidence. But if there are many such cases, it’s already statistics, and statistics is all-powerful and convincing.
The thing is, Ms. Kneissl is not the only foreigner in that Petrushovo village near Ryazan. The reports are listing about two dozen such seekers of normalcy there from all over the West, who mix with locals without any culture shocks. The village itself was losing local population, first, in a yet another wave of industrialization of the 1970-s, and then in the turbulent 1990-s. People went to big cities, while the land plots and the houses were been neglected.
And now Europeans and Americans are coming in. Their life stories are different. Some are descendants of the Russian imperial aristocracy, not speaking any Russian, others are families with children under threat of sex change, with no parental consent being needed. One such family has built a veritable estate with a farm out there, in Petrushovo, others participated in financing a paved road to the village. And, again, the locals act like good neighbors and friends to all the newcomers.
That village is not the only such case, there are other such European or American settlements near Moscow, St. Petersburg or in Crimea. But what’s so special about it, you may ask. How many thousands of foreigners, Russians included, come to India and stay there indefinitely? How about these Mumbai or Goa foreign communities? Huge migrations of people accelerate all over the globe.
But there is a difference, all right. One thing is when, say, a Westerner is coming to reside in an exotic land inhabited by people of a different civilization. Yet another thing is when Westerners are coming to a place, like Russia, which, for them, is what their West used to be only a couple of decades ago. Shall we call it an alternative West, or shall we just accept the verdict of Liana, the yoga witch, that Russia is simply normal, while others are not normal anymore?
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com