Moscow Escapades of the Once and Future Russian
(who, to clarify, loves his home that is America)
by Alex Borshch
PROLOGUE
As I sit down to write an account of my trip to Russia, I wonder if anything I write can truly do justice to my experiences in the country where I was born and which I have not seen for over ten years. In one week I have experienced so much that my brain is still trying to separate the objective events from emotion. My first thought has in fact been not to start writing until at least a few weeks after returning, so as to have a more unbiased view on the events that have transpired. Yet, upon reflection, I have decided that the emotion embodied in my experiences cannot be left out. The concern (and fear) for me here, is that my narrative will become overwhelmed with emotion and what will come out are blotches of memories told in a fragmented, confusing manner. I am simply questioning if I am eloquent enough to be able to convey the feelings coursing through my body last week – feelings of fulfilled nostalgia, pride, sadness, and even a little longing for a place where I first saw the light of day. For these feelings can only be understood by a person returning to a place they wish they did not have to leave, but knew they had to. Now, before you label me a whiner or something of the sort (my family has off-handedly, and dare-I-say somewhat accurately, labeled me as “the biggest Russian patriot in the family”), let me make it clear that I love the United States and do not want to return to Russia to live there. I am the person I am today because of the many cultures I have experienced, and that I would not change. However, there is a part of me that wishes that things had gone well in Russia’s past, so that I now lived in a country with a high level of life and no suffocating corruption. Alas, that is not the case – and so I have a new home in a country where I will be able to achieve success.
Now that you know how I feel about my old homeland, let me get back to concerns about this narrative. As things normally go, a story with a long beginning often culminates with an abruptly short end. This is sometimes true of real writers (of which I of course am not a part), who just seem to either get bored or run out of ideas and simply slam a preposterous ending on a promising beginning. This is not the case with me. The position I find myself in is at a point two months removed from graduation and struggling to keep up my hard-earned GPA. In fact, this semester is proving to be the worst since my first semester here at Georgetown, in which, I must add, I successfully failed to keep up a GPA at a level even remotely up to par. So, work I must, and work hard. And that unfortunately means that my time together with this memoir is mightily limited. To that end, please forgive me for any inconsistencies or abrupt transitions – I wish I could convey the built up emotion I feel, yet I know that a lot of what is contained in my heart will be lost. I wish I could just metaphysically open up my heart and let the emotion flow out into the blank pages, yet in the real world I have to first filter them through my brain and out through my fingers. What an unfortunate bottleneck! Mostly, this memoir is for myself, for my family that has not seen their country for as long as I have (and let’s be honest, haven’t really expressed a desire to), and to the other two or three people that will skim this account and forget about it.
The trip comprised a total of ten days, including thirty hours of travel time. I have decided that the best way to organize my story would be to break it down into mini-chapters, one per day. Every day has turned out to be truly different from others, so if you find yourself getting bored (a tribute to my narrative skills), try skipping to another day. I will try to stay entertaining, and I think I have some interesting things to tell, but I have no illusions of being Tolstoy (although, I do think I have a better sense of humor). And with this, I move on to the story of how I returned to my former homeland for nine days after a ten year absence.