A Generous Harvest of Hopelessness

A generous harvest of hopelessness is gathered by many Russian emigrants in their new American motherland. But is that America’s fault?

Respected readers, at the end of the first part of my story, I promised that we would walk the streets of suburban America (while American immigration services are busy checking whether the visiting Russian journalist Oleg Sultanov is making a fool of them) and look closely at how our former countrymen are doing.

Their fates are very different. …

Alla and Vadim* have been living in Charlottesville, Virginia for more than six years. They became U.S. citizens several months ago. They have two grown sons who are completely assimilated into American society. One son is living separately from his parents; the other one is still living with them.

Both parents are ill; they don’t work, and they have disability status. The disability pension they get is just over $1,000 for both of them. They live in so-called social housing, for which they pay 25 percent of their income — around $300 a month. It took them more than two years to wrangle that housing from the town’s government. The apartment in a two-story, barrack-like house consists of three tiny rooms, a small bathroom and a small kitchen. Being disabled, they don’t pay for electricity and water, but if they go over a certain quota of usage, they have to pay.

The family came to the U.S. from Russia by a task recruitment of the International Organization for Migration. In Russia they were refugees from one of the Caucasus republics. Vadim and Alla are happy that they ended up in America and claim that they are living quite nicely on $700 a month. Every member of the family has a used car, a bank account, a cell phone, a personal computer, a TV and a circle of acquaintances. The children speak fluent English after six years in the country. But their parents have a hard time communicating in English, probably because their age makes it hard to learn a new language. According to American laws, disabled people don’t have the right to work. If they have a source of income other than the disability pension, that side income — however tiny — is automatically subtracted from the pension.

It’s worth noting that the total computerization of all financial operations in the U.S. made all monetary incomes and expenses of its citizens absolutely transparent. As a result, it became practically impossible to play tricks with cash flow, as all sorts of swindlers often do in Russia. In every retail store in the U.S., customers usually pay with credit or debit cards. And that means that if you have an income of, say, $60,000 a year, but you are buying a car for $150,000, the tax service or some other controlling authority has the right to ask you where the money came from. And even if customers pay for purchases and services in cash, the cashier will ask for either their telephone number or their social security number. Everybody is under constant close surveillance. Of course, if you just buy a $6 pack of cigarettes with cash, nobody’s going to ask for your identification number. But if I bring a suitcase full of $10 bills to a store and try to exchange it for, say, a luxury Lincoln SUV, I will have to reveal my identity. Otherwise, the car I chose will have a different owner. …

Another telling detail is that $100 bills are virtually absent from circulation. In half a year, I personally have only seen a cashier handle such a bill once, and bills rustling in my wallet were usually “worth” no more than $20.

Smart emigrants from Russia are especially wary of exposing their identities. It’s no secret in the small town of Charlottesville that many of them have jobs in which they are paid “under the table” in cash, because it’s not easy to live on just their pensions. But not all emigrants from Russia are the brainy sort. For example, there was a large family clan of Meskhetian Turks who came to the U.S. from the expanses of Krasnodar. Upon arriving in Virginia, they were granted pensions by the American government. But after a while, the government had to ask the “poor” refugees: Where did you guys get the money to buy those very expensive cars and luxury houses, and do you really need our pensions?

But let’s go back to the lives of normal emigrant families. Valentina met Jim in an Internet chat room. Later he traveled to the Siberian town where she lived and took her back with him to Virginia. Now both of them are working, they own a house, they are well-to-do and happy, and their family is governed by mutual respect and love. Their family achieved the American dream — a house, well-paying jobs and retirement savings.

Unfortunately, the lives of many other emigrants from Russia and other countries of the CIS are not as blissful. For example, Bakhtiar is a 40-year-old political refugee. He’s been in America for more than 10 years but still hasn’t achieved U.S. citizenship. He speaks fluent English but hasn’t made a career — he’s a food busser in a hospital in Virginia. He doesn’t own a car or a house; he doesn’t have any business connections. His abilities may be far from the highest world’s standards, but his general level of development is much higher than that of the majority of his Americans peers.

The fate of another political emigrant, Valery, is also typical. He used to manage a branch of the biggest Russian oil and gas company when he lived in one of the CIS countries. In the U.S., he earns his bread by cleaning rooms in a hotel. He claims to be happy to finally live in a free country. Do we believe him?

Talking to emigrants from the republics of the former USSR, I noticed that most of them find living in the U.S. distressing not because of some social or economic problems, but because of a cultural shift. In their homeland they had a decent education and had a family that was connected to other families. They had jobs which were beneficial to society and which developed their inclinations. But in America the choice of profession for an emigrant is a matter of chance. If you happen to fit into the environment, you are lucky. If not, you are doomed to drag out a miserable existence.

In Charlottesville I met Aleksey, a former retail worker from Moscow, who lives on a disability pension in the U.S. His American life is a sort of a kaleidoscope that consists of weekly Saturday trips in his old car to the local dumps. An average American lives a semi-nomadic, traveling life. If there’s a job in this town, he lives here. If tomorrow he finds a better job in a different state, he gets rid of his stuff and moves to where his new job is. His stuff ends up either sold at a yard sale for next to nothing or is just dumped. So our Aleksey goes around to the dumps, picking up whatever could be useful in his household. On the one hand, that’s practical, but on the other hand, I think that’s humiliating. Native-born Americans would never rummage through trash, even if it’s for functioning household appliances. The majority of those sifting through trash are either illegal Mexicans and Puerto Ricans or, sadly, our former countrymen.

I don’t want my readers to think that all I’ve done in half a year in the U.S. was reporting the “national situation” from the dumps. That is, of course, not true. In the small, cozy town of Charlottesville, I have visited very well-to-do families of Russian emigrants who give America their skills and knowledge and get a comfortable, wealthy life in return. But most of the people in that category left Russia when they were very young and had time to completely adapt to life in the U.S.

One of them — my namesake, Oleg — is the head of a medical laboratory. He is a professor in his late 30s, confidently climbing the American career ladder. He is appreciated by colleagues, he is well-respected by neighbors, and his financial status is getting better every year. He’s into sports, and his body is trim, which is, honestly, a bit of a rarity in the U.S. these days. …

Why are Americans so fat? They eat all the time: in the movie theaters, at the wheels of their cars, in the street, at home, on buses. They keep chewing and sipping Cokes. It probably is a disease when, out of any amount of culinary creations, a person chooses a hamburger, a pizza, a soda and popcorn for dessert. The abundance of food in American grocery stores far surpasses product inventories of any European country. From the Russian point of view, that means cooking the most delicious dishes. The amazing quality of products, the fantastic variety and the freshness would enable any Russian woman to cook wonderful food. But not Americans …

One day I was sitting with my American neighbor on a bench outside the house, chatting about the ups and downs of life. She glanced at her watch and suddenly jumped: “Oh, my husband and son are coming home for dinner in half an hour, and I don’t have any food!” She promptly got behind the wheel of her Ford and hurried away, presumably to buy some groceries. She came back in 15 minutes with two bags in her hands: two hamburgers in one and a couple of Pepsi bottles in the other.

Her men soon arrived, gave their “caring” wife and mother a thankful, tender look and sat down to eat the McDonald’s grub right there at the table outside the house. They were eating with gusto, as if they were at the expensive “Gordon Ramsay” restaurant in London, feasting on tender Cornwall lamb and foie gras. That’s some “cooking.”

There are 45,000 people in Charlottesville, and to serve them, there are dozens of shopping malls. Every one of those consists of dozens of stores where one can buy everything, from a needle to a car. In Moscow I live next to the “Ashan” shopping center on Lublinskaya Street. That’s a huge store, isn’t it? In the small town of Charlottesville, there are dozens of shopping centers as large or even larger, and the variety of products in them is far better than in ours.

The products are mostly made in China, Pakistan or South America. But the quality is excellent! In Russia we are used to dismissing an item with disgust when we see the label “Made in China” — junk! But the “junk” the Chinese make for the U.S. is so good that many French fashion houses would envy the quality.

I won’t even start to describe the quality of stuff on the shelves in the grocery stores, so as not to upset our slender Russian housewives. But the size of the American women passing by those shelves is something rarely seen in Russia. That’s especially true of black women; it looks like the descendants of the slaves that were brought into the U.S. are deliberately overeating to make up for all the hungry anguish of their tormented ancestors. …

To be continued.

*AUTHOR’S NOTE: All names have been changed.