It’s Russia once again, unimaginably enough, for the first time in more than seven decades, and to say that it is falling apart would be the understatement of the century. The eternally indestructible, matchlessly mighty Soviet Union is no more. The world has gone topsy-turvy, completely. Listen to this story and other feature stories from FP and other magazines: Download the Audm app for your iPhone.Įarly 1990s in Russia. They didn’t go through their entire lives without saying “I love you” once to their women, especially to their wives - on whom, admittedly, they cheated mercilessly nonstop, but … well, men would be men, wouldn’t they? In Santa Barbara, men didn’t die of cirrhosis of the liver barely past their mid-50s, and there did not appear to be millions more women than men there, in Santa Barbara, or in America on the whole. In Santa Barbara, men were men, real men, handsome and gallant, even if they were not necessarily very good people in all other respects. Nor did they come home dead drunk past midnight and plop down on the couch face first with their shoes on and immediately start snoring.
And they certainly did not, out of pure malice, slip slivers of tar soap in other people’s pans with soup boiling on communal kitchen stoves. They didn’t occupy the only toilet in the communal apartment for a good half-hour or keep their dirty combat boots and homemade barrels of pickled mushrooms in the communal bathroom. They didn’t smash lightbulbs in entryways or drink cheap eau de Cologne first thing in the morning. The men didn’t urinate in hallways or write obscene words on the walls of elevator cabins. That’d be the first place I would go if I could ever make it to America,” a middle-aged salesclerk at the grocery store said to me with mild reproach. On several occasions I was asked, typically by women, whether I’d been to Santa Barbara myself and, if so, what it was like. There were other signs of Santa Barbara’s presence in the city - improvised tributes to the American soap opera in the historic downtown area: a hole-in-the-wall café called Santa Barbara here, a Santa Barbara strip joint there.
It was the first time I’d been back since immigrating to the United States seven years earlier. Petersburg, Russia, when I returned to the re-renamed city of my childhood and youth - Leningrad, USSR - in 1993.
Санта Барбара Форева! - Santa Barbara Forevah! - was stenciled boldly in tall purple-chalk lettering on the side of my parents’ apartment building in the southwestern part of St.
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