BERKELEY, Calif. — A few months ago in Chicago, where I was visiting for a wedding, a department store clerk asked me what kind of accent I had. I admitted it was Russian. “Would you take our president home with you?” he asked. His question threw into sharp relief my predicament: As a liberal Russian living in the United States, I am now associated with a man whose xenophobic, antidemocratic agenda I detest.
American attitudes toward Russia and Russians have always been hostage to the larger relationship between our nations. During the Reagan years, Russia was the “evil empire,” purveyor of nuclear arms, spies and Hollywood villains. The Russians repaid in kind: At a New Year’s show in the Kremlin Palace that I attended at the tender age of 9, the antagonist was an agent of the “rotting West” sent to steal Soviet children’s gifts.
But there were always counterpoints. Which American intellectual didn’t lose him or herself in “The Brothers Karamazov”? Which Soviet dissident didn’t hope to be shouldered by the American government, the guarantor of human rights, dignity and freedom of conscience? As we listened to the Voice of America on crackling radio transmitters in our tiny Soviet kitchen, devouring the facts that our government concealed — about the war in Afghanistan, the dissidents thrown into mental asylums, the Chernobyl disaster — we couldn’t help but admire America as a moral counterweight. Of all my beliefs assailed by the realities of Donald Trump’s America, this one is the hardest to let go.
