“Wow, so you’re from deep Russia, then?”
“No. Not Siberia. It’s near the Ural Mountains.”
“I actually just wrote about the Ural Mountains! That’s where the Hungarian language is from!”
“Hmph...”
There’s a certain way many of the Russians I’ve met speak. A directness, maybe coldness, a desire not to be misunderstood or misrepresented. It feels almost pompous, maybe a little presumptuous. It avoids the kinds of embellishments that saturate American speech. There are few metaphors, very little irony. Americans speak as though human connection were a performance, as though a conversation was something to be won.
At first I thought this might just have been this one person, but a coffee with a Serbian I’d met in the city the following day suggested that this is, in fact, the stereotype. Russians had been moving to Belgrade in droves since the war began, pushing housing prices higher than most could handle on a meager local salaries. War is like that, I suppose.
We were all sitting in the beautiful backyard area of our hostel. Late summer twilight turned the tattered red couch a deep chestnut. It was this Russian, a French woman, a British guy, and me.
The Russian and I hadn’t gotten along earlier that day. He didn’t like it when I’d place my foot on the bench he was sitting on and I didn’t like being accosted for doing so. There no tact in how he asked me to stop, “Can you not do that.” “Sorry, it’s just how I like to sit!” “Hmph.” It happened three more times after that.
I don’t remember what we’d been discussing. Hostel-talk always seems to circle around an unchanging set of six topics for me — foreign languages, differences in how we went to high school, things we’d red in the news, where they’d been, where they’re going, and if “I would have read something that you’ve written” since you “claim to be a writer”. I’m mostly freelancing right now, okay! I re-engage with the Russian. “I have to ask… what’s Russia been like lately?”
The Russian government had claimed that the “engagement” would be over quickly back in February. Troops were gathering on the border for a routine, bloodless annexation of functionally Russian territory, just like in Crimea. The propaganda settled in layers thereafter. His grandparents were the most susceptible, his parents only believed the propaganda selectively, and his friends in his own generation (he was in his late 20s) were terrified of the whole thing.
He mentioned the emptiness of the streets just after the first videos of the destruction started circulating on Telegram and the sanctions started. How could Russia be bombing cities of ethnic Russians? Why would a liberating force do that?
Russian foreign policy from the perspective of a self-aware Russian doesn’t frame conflict in terms of its violation of the rules of Western liberal democracy. He talked about the troubles of the west, of American imperialism, of capital-driven globalization — not as justifications of what’s happening now but as items in the category of bad things which, regardless of context need not be happening in the world.
Unseen by the rest of the group, a Serbian man from a smaller town, in Belgrade for “business”, was standing in the doorway. He’d been ironing a shirt, unseen inside the hostel’s common area just beforehand. He chimed in, “You know this is the Americans fault though.” He mentioned Joe Biden. It wasn’t positive. “You know, Americans bombed this city when I was a teenager. Bombed civilians.” The French girl looked at me. “Yes, but Russia is also killing civilians.” “Alright, but Russia is just asserting itself in a world where the Americans do whatever they want without consequences”. “BUT THEY’RE KILLING CIVILIANS!” The back-and-forth proceeded as such. The Russian remained silent.
He wasn’t wrong. NATO (alright, let’s say it, the Americans) had bombed Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. NATO went against the UN Security Council, which had refused to authorize the engagement because of vetos from China and Russia, and carried out the bombings on the basis of humanitarian necessity.
Albanians were being ethnically cleansed in Kosovo and the Serbian government under Slobodon Milošević refused to acquiesce. And yes, Joe Biden was one of the leading politicians in the US advocating for Bill Clinton to approve the bombings. NATO itself reports that 500+ civilians died as a result. The Yugoslav government put the numbers in the thousands. Today, you can look at the bombed out buildings on guided tours through the city.
The Russian looked to the Serbian. He looked with sorry, with empathy, with bemusement. He looked knowingly. He look from above, down at the world is clearly was. He sat silently a looked at how the young of the world, of east and west were forced to justify decisions they couldn’t have made. How we were forced to co-sign and then denounce bombs dropped on cities we’d never visited.
The sun had set by this point. Some of us went to a techno club, a short taxi ride away and drank Zaječarsko beer until the sun rose the following morning. We danced and danced, succumbing to an involuntary movement that at least felt human, at least felt consensual. We danced and escaped our homelands, escaped territory and geopolitics and gunpowder. We walked home in the early morning twilight. I didn’t see the Russian much after that night.
I really hope it worked out for him.
