The Incidental Soviet

I was born in the Soviet Union. Never Russia, never Moscow, always the Soviet Union. I cannot count the number of times I have, playfully or defiantly, uttered these words or cynically tucked them into some personal statement or other. The fallen republic is all things to all people. It is Lenin at the Finland Station and the early lost promises of a people’s state that could serve as a beacon for the world. It is Stalin and the Siberian gulag, a tyranny unrivaled in modern times. It is the breadline and the red star, bottles of vodka scattered on the depleted earth, an endless gray horizon and the first man in space.

I do this because I like self-exoticizing—it makes life more interesting. Truth be told, and no offense to my engineering brethren, my vision of the Soviet Union is kind of a glorified version of SEAS. It is no surprise that it seems like every other Russian immigrant is a computer programmer—this is a society that put all of its eggs into the technical basket. Far from generating a New Man in charge of his destiny, it created a well-educated but radically de-politicized generation, whose members, when faced with boundless opportunities to exercise their skills in the United States, swiftly set about to using their talent to ascend to a middle-class prosperity which had been denied to them in their homeland. Their children went into finance and started bringing home some of that gold with which they had been told America’s streets were paved.

But when I mention my upbringing in this Russian community, which was dominant in my life until high school, it’s really to distance myself from it. It is as if to say: aren’t I special? I didn’t turn out like those other Russians, prostrating themselves before Mammon and gleefully casting ballots for George W. Bush as bombs rained down over Iraq. I read español much faster than russki. I don’t like beets and I don’t even know calculus! And I have never been known to wear a tracksuit in public, although I do betray a distinct fondness for vodka.

This rejection of immigrant identity is a little bit tricky, though. The whole reason I’m not down with the stereotypical Russian-American is that he appears indifferent to U.S. imperialism, insensitive to his own white privilege and the grave inequalities of American society, and blind to the great social movements of the world. Capitalists, the lot of them. Isn’t it ironic, then, that my way of rebelling against this is to Westernize myself, to give myself to the privileged American left-progressive counterculture which is generated by the system itself? All those Western freedoms must have gone to my head.

But when I speak indignantly to my relatives about my passions and my activism, I speak a tongue that is unintelligible to them. When I look to South America as a place where the word liberation still has meaning, there is no response. I even encountered something I never thought I would hear: an argument against doing any kind of community service work, in principle.

What I suffer from is not exactly the traditional immigrant issue of not fitting in either your ethnic group or the society in which you live—I fit in quite nicely with what Sarah Palin would call the “un-American America.” It is rather an issue that I imagine that many younger immigrants of all nationalities face—a sort of mystification regarding their origins, a sense of embodying a historical break with their blood. The greater the confusion, the more I feel the need to make sure that people know that I was born on Soviet soil, the greater the novelty of that fact becomes.

For the first time in 17 years, my family and I are making the journey back to Russia this winter. The streets of Moscow will be as foreign to me as Bolivia or Nicaragua once were, except that I will actually know less about them. They will be haunted by the ghosts of all those who changed the world and those who kept their people in subjection. But who will be the people that walk beside me on the snow-covered plazas? Where will be the many forgotten uncles and cousins with my mother’s eyes?

It is very trendy to be obsessed with identity, and ultimately I spend about 50 times more time thinking about Bolivia and Manhattanville and the revolutionaries of our day than the frozen mysteries of the motherland that produced me. That said, I am neither an Aymara peasant farmer in the Andes nor a working-class person of color from Harlem. It is a peculiar phenomenon to fight in the name of identities eminently rooted in place and culture while steadfastly ignoring one’s own. While I do not believe any rapprochement with my roots will change me, we all owe it to ourselves to seek truth beyond kitsch and myth in where we come from.

Andrew Lyubarsky is a Columbia College senior majoring in Hispanic studies. Cliché Guevara runs alternate Thursdays.
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