Senya Maximov came into my life through the Fulbright program at Missouri Southern. After I shared the only three Russian words I knew (da, spoceba, vodka), and after he shared perfect British English, shared language led to shared life. Joplin felt like Senya’s new home. Though he wanted to stay, his visa expired. I scheduled an interview at this new coffee joint on second and main called Cooper’s—they made a great pulled chicken sandwich, a rather unexpected virtue for a coffee shop. Senya popped open his kettle chips and I flipped on my recorder.
For twenty-six years Senya lived in Russia. “I grew up in Moscow,” he said, “and it’s a huge city. I was born in the Soviet Union.” He remembers enormous lines for loaves of bread, bone-bare shelves in shops and waiting necessities. “You’d come to a shop and one shelf, there would be like… chicken. And on another shelf, there would happen to be soda. So everyone would be buying soda and stand in line for it. Your neighbor would come home and say, ‘Hey! There’s fish today!’ And you would rush to the shop and try to get the fish before all the other people.”
Senya, like many internationals, found himself overwhelmed with the American idea of choice. I mentioned how our brain shuts down for a moment when confronted with excess choices. This didn’t surprise him. “You can buy anything here. I was surprised, but you can buy egg-crackers, potato-eyers, avocado-peelers, apple-core-extractors, there’s a tool for everything, as if you couldn’t use a spoon or a knife. There’s a turkey-baster, but back then we didn’t have basic needs. You had to always ask, ‘Where are they selling chicken? Where are they selling fish? Is it fresh?’”
I quoted Stephen King: “My generation could have changed the world, but we opted for the Home Shopping Network.”
Senya chuckled. “One cannot live without a banana-hanger. Where would you put your bananas?”
In Moscow, they had no supermarkets, no businesses. Everything was state-owned—there was nowhere to take a date. The cinema ran Soviet films. A few were good, but most were terrible. Senya did speak with pride about the real theaters and their plays. But in spite of the theater, he remembers a gray Moscow, never renovated and lathered with dust. Dust cakes his memory, a gray, hollow town. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles came up, of life after extinction on Mars and the humans who stumbled upon the ruins of civilization—that’s how Senya remembers the Soviet Union. “You were not supposed to look attractive. You were supposed to wear standard, dusty gray like a functional cell of this huge society. Your purpose was to be obedient and efficient, not original or interactive.”
Propaganda covered everything, but Senya also remembers an underground culture, people who listened to The Beatles, hippies who wore jeans and grew long hair, who protested their oppressors. Had he been a teenager, Senya thinks he would have joined them. This reminded me of the movie Pirate Radio with Philip Seymour Hoffman where Britain banned pop music. People bought ships and broadcasted radio into Britain from international waters. “In the Soviet Union, there was a radio called ‘Freedom,’ where you could get all of the jazz and rock and Beatles and Rolling Stones.” Sometimes Hollywood gives the impression that the Russians only just discovered rock-n-roll.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, freedom came too hard, too fast. Underground movements flourished, but so did mob bosses who became something like the Fat Cats of the 1920s—rich men manipulating government to make money. Famine followed. Profiteers rather than public servants controlled Russia. People would buy up cheap goods in Europe and resell them in Russia, much like China and America today.
After that, Putin came to power and cast out tycoons. Some fled, some went to prison, some submitted. Ten years later, everything is controlled by a system similar to the former Soviet Union. Russia appears free, but under the façade sits a hungry oppressor. During current Occupy Moscow protests, Putin organized anti-protests, bribing supporters.
When he came to America, Senya expected certain things. His first visit in 2007 cast a positive image on the United States. He liked the people, the way the cities thrived. “I thought I could feel this freedom and diversity. This civilized way of organizing society. It looked to me like an ideal place.” He cared little for politics then. The consequences of 9/11 had yet to hit him. His impression was that of a world free of prejudice and state control. In Russia, people appear to be recovering from severe trauma. “[Russia] feels like an ailing society, an ill society. Here I saw something completely different. A freedom. People seemed to be living the lives they chose.”
In Russia, many people are passive about their lives. “Do you love your wife? Not really. Will you spend the rest of your life with her? Yeah. Why? I dunno. It just happened. Because everybody does it. That’s the way a lot of things are in Russia, at least how I perceive them. It’s a land of people to whom things happen. They don’t make them happen. And then they complain.” Here he had found something entirely different.
A few years later, Senya awoke to the political situation, of how America interfered in the Middle East, “this aggressive lifestyle of imposing your values and trying to pass it off as helping people.” He saw a film on human trafficking and heard this phrase: We have spent for instance fifty dollars on every Iraqi citizen to make them free and happy. The film used this as a plea to redirect finances. “The idea that the whole thing was about helping people in Iraq is ridiculous. In politics, things never happen because someone wants to help. It’s about control, power, profits. When you try to gain control of something and gain a profit, and then try and make out like you did it for the happiness of those people you took control of, that’s hypocrisy.” That aggression made him wary for his second visit.
In this same vein, he mentioned the film Wag the Dog where a media mogul, after an order from the White House, invents an imaginary war to distract people from politicians. A bright marketing agent diverts attention from Washington to this imaginary war.
In Russia, every time Putin becomes unpopular and needs to boost his image, there will be a terrorist attack all of the sudden and he will be on top of it, fighting terrorist, keeping orders [sic]. People who study politics say that his ratings rise after every attack. Right now he’s not very popular. Are we going to have another terrorist attack? Are we going to have terrorists from Georgia or Armenia this time?
There was a bombing of the metro system in Moscow. A lot of people died. I’m still afraid of going somewhere by Metro. In the news, they said it was a terrorist attack, but nobody ever got any… Terrorists want to make it known, to claim it. No one received a video. There were no messages from the terrorists and no terrorists were found. No one knows what happened. I’m not saying special services organized that, but it’s quite possible.
People here want democracy exported to Iraq. Senya finds this absurd. The Soviets exported their doctrine on surrounding countries. When he first came to the United States, he had no idea how aggressively America tries to export their culture. “Now that I see it is going on, it’s similar to what the Soviet Union was trying to do. They were trying to export communism. They were trying to export atheism. Their actual aim was not to help people but to gain control of as much as they can.”
A few days ago he saw a job offer for a Russian to work for the American embassy in Ukraine. The job was seasonal because of Ukraine’s upcoming election. The American embassy is promoting one of the parties—they openly admitted this in the offer. They hire Russians to work Ukraine, to influence public opinion. Senya qualified for this job.
“Fulbright—what is that about? Their actual aim is to impress us, to show us how wonderful the country is and they want us to go back to our countries—Russians, Chinese, Europeans, South Americans—to tell how wonderful America is.” When he first came to the States, they told him his mission was to expose Americans to his culture and then export American culture. He’s supposed to go back to Russia and tell his friends how in America, everyone is free. In America, everyone is equal and it’s justice for all. He experienced something different. They’ve asked him to stay in touch with the embassy and offer him jobs like the one in Ukraine. He’s now “privileged” because he’s “one of the Fulbrights.” They intend on using him as an asset. “I know the president of Chili is a Fulbright scholar,” he said.
A few weeks ago, he walked into a classroom. “It was a flashback to the Soviet Union. For children and adolescents, they had special youth groups they had to belong to. These groups brainwashed them and forced them to praise Stalin and Lenin.” If you refused, you would be put into a concentration camp. The school in Joplin reminded him of that. He walked in and they were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. “I asked the teacher, ‘Is it alright if someone doesn’t want to recite The Pledge?’ And she said, ‘Why would not someone want to recited the pledge?!’”
Most countries use oppression and propaganda, countries where the political situation is worse. Here, Senya found hypocrisy. The government tries to make out “as if there’s justice and freedom and liberty for all and everybody’s equal. That’s what they told us at Fulbright—‘You are the chosen ones. You have this opportunity to come to the land of democracy and freedom. You have a mission: you are going to represent your country in the best country in the world.’” He finds it stranger that people support horrible medical, education and political systems, comparing the support to brainwashing in China. His friend in Kansas City had cancer and had to pay for it out of pocket—but people support that system. “They’re okay paying tax to support the military, but won’t pay for universal healthcare? For education for all?”
One of the things that impressed him here was that the rights of certain people are protected. He’s still impressed by the way disabled people are treated. Disabled people in Russia terrify him. People here get decent pensions. People are not afraid of retiring here. If you’re disabled in Russia, you have no life at all. More than this, he loves how certain people defend their rights.
In addition, he met great friends and started building deeper friendships. And maybe that’s where goodness, honesty and integrity starts anyway.
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