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Глава 1
I was made for other things.
O. Wilde, De Profundis
Mom will never put up with it. Just as with the fact that in my mid, or better, late thirties I’m neither married nor engaged without any immediate plans to become either.
Going to Russia (Russia!!!) as an expat PR specialist was just a tad too much for her.
I guess she would prefer my coming out as a gay, transgender or both, but staying home and pursuing some decent office career, paying out my mortgage for another couple of decades and retiring around 60-65 to start a senior fitness or cooking blog.
But there is a but, I am one of those misfortunates who try to escape from themselves. While Martin Eden failed, many keep cherishing rather vain hopes for a fresh start on a foreign turf.
Oh, I can hear you asking, “Ok, but why the heck Russia? Why not Italy or France with good wines, healthy food and climate, nice music and fine arts all over the place? Why not, by God, good, old Britain? Same language, though with a twist, a change without the shock. Why take your white Oregonian ass to Siberia. Even if Moscow is not exactly Siberia geographically, it still is culturally and politically just as bad”.
Well, I still remember that email written in strangely correct English. You know, that textbook, precise and clear-cut style smacking of the Cold War era. No typos, deliberate avoidance of complex phrases and tenses. Just the amount of emotion prescribed by an old-fashioned template from a business correspondence handbook. That is none. A chilly hello directly from KGB read out with a thick Russian accent with its very distinctive falls and rises making it sound aggressive. Yet, it was not the infamous secret service addressing me.
What it actually was is a message from a recruiter named ….ugh… Snezhana. She represented a tiny but ambitious IT startup (legion is their name and they are many) fooling around with blockchain and, obviously, demonstrating all signs of corporate delusions of grandeur.
After the “Dear Jeremy” line the letter exposed to me the titanic achievements the company made over the first year of operations. The main achievement seemed to be a speech by the CTO delivered in bad English (the link to a video was enclosed) at some executive meet-up in a luxurious venue in Malta (I had to consult the map) and an extensive documentation for a non-existent product published online (another link in the letter).
Then she got down to business and inquired whether I was interested in joining their great team of world best programmers, engineers and managers as a PR specialist and evangelist.
By then I hated IT. This endless parade of yet another app, yet smaller device, yet new and innovative cutting-edge something that at a scale failed to change a thing or achieve anything but helping some first-world customers to kill off some of their precious but vacant time granted by their exuberant, even arrogant life expectancies. Life expectancies there are, meaning of life there is still no. A paradox of modernity.
Well, philosophy aside, I certainly entered negotiations and eventually got the position. Next thing that comes to my mind when I recall this story is a flight to Moscow. Mid-November it was. The plane started descending at Sheremetyevo. The captain said it was around 1 degree Centigrade there. Centigrade? Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, of course they have to use a different scale! Anyways, when the plane dived below the clouds I noticed how gloomy it was. I then asked the girl in a seat next to mine whether it was always that cold. Apparently, she was Russian, despite wearing a smile which I would attribute to the shape of her mouth, though. In a decent though seemingly rusty English she replied that I was actually very lucky. It could be much colder in mid-November, let alone in winter proper. I told her I knew that in winter temperatures could fall below minus 30 in the Moscow region. Then I asked whether it was always that gloomy. Her smile widened, became somewhat mischievous if not outright mean as she said, “No, in fact, it is always sunny at minus 30.”
Russians…
Moscow is a mixture of an overpriced Prague without its gothics and some Mumbai relocated up the globe. I mean Mumbai, not Dubai. No, I don’t want to say that Moscow has actual slums, it doesn’t. It’s just there are days when it somehow achieves depressing you without ghastly sights of extreme poverty. Doesn’t sound too positive, yet I came to like it soon.
Taxi fare is cheap, grocery stores are marvelous and many are open 24/7, food is good and healthy. Locals look up at foreigners if they are white and speak a European language. I had never been so popular with shop girls and bartenders in my whole life before.
Speaking of stereotypes, they may work with the exception of bears and balalaikas. Speaking of the job, it was just like anywhere else. Boring.
For the first three months I worked from the office located in what they call Moscow City or City of Moscow, or Delovoy Tsenter. Intended as a posh sky-scraper heaven, it is a windy, unhomely, misplaced collection of glassy towers that would more become a 1980s cityscape than a modern one dominated by green trends. Anyway I soon moved the bulk of my activities to an apartment I rented in Medvedkovo (yes, the bear corner, you guessed it right). It is an old and comfy district with parks and gardens that struggles to keep its unique flavor and vibes of the past.
It was then that I started thinking I made it. Made my escape from myself a reality.
Глава 2
But, of course, I d
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