Despite its grand title—the capital of the USSR—the city of my youth held little charm. Life, at least for my family, was defined by scarcity, monotony, and drabness. I spent my teenage years longing for something better, so intensely it made my body ache.
After school, which was tedious in the extreme, my best friend and I had absolutely nothing to do. There were no extracurriculars offered. Apart from reading books from my parents’ modest library, we had little intellectual or aesthetic stimulation.
For hours every day, we wandered our neighborhood, or others just like it, lined with identical apartment blocks, the occasional park with broken-down rides, and stores with empty shelves, in the futile hope of something remotely interesting happening to us. All the while, we lamented our limited, excruciatingly boring lives, wondering if anything would ever change. From American movies that trickled down to us through illegal or semi-legal video salons, where VHS tapes were shown to paying audiences, we knew what our peers’ lives in the U.S. were like.
They went to malls and restaurants, attended parties and football games, ate pizza, and drank Coca-Cola. How we craved all of it, along with Levi’s jeans and graphic T-shirts! It seemed so unfair that other people were living life to the fullest while we were stuck in a looping eternity of sameness.
I never dreamed that I would see it all with my own eyes. Yet after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, I moved to New York with my family. I tried to make up for everything I’d missed, devouring every kind of experience.
I took and audited as many classes at NYU as I could, partied hard, shopped, went to exhibitions, film screenings, and concerts, and took up painting and dancing. But even though New York turned out to be as exciting as I’d imagined, and a place where I felt completely at home, I found myself missing Moscow, painfully, for no reason I could discern. Between semesters, I traveled there for short visits, and on one of those trips I fell in love with a man in a rock band and secretly married him.
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