"Just Like Home"

I remember the exact moment I got interested in American politics. It happened in the run-up to the 2000 election, which means that I spent my first nine years in America not caring a whit about Democrats and Republicans and mostly trying to navigate the already confusing enough world of American sports, college and dating. Two of these things were in place by 2000, as I was married and working and trying to understand what the life as an American adult entailed, besides being perpetually depressed by the Buffalo Bills.

So it came to pass that in the fall of 2000, with the Bush v. Gore slugfest about to commence, a co-worker asked me whom I was going to vote for. I was genuinely baffled and, in lieu of telling the truth (that being I never bothered to register), I said something like: “Oh, I don’t know, Ralph Nader, maybe.” I honestly have no idea why I said that. Maybe because I genuinely felt that there was no difference between the major parties. Maybe, because I thought a president named Ralph would be hilarious. Who the hell knows. The 25-year-old me is, frankly, as much of a mystery to myself now as he is to you.

The reaction this prompted from my extremely white, extremely suburban, extremely 40-something supervisor was a condescending smirk: “A socialist, huh? Just like home.” And this was it. This was the precise moment I felt very passionate about something that was even tangentially political. It had nothing to do with Nader, Bush or Gore. It had everything to do with the idea that the place of my birth defined me as a human being, marked me as someone fundamentally other, made me a foreign growth on America’s epidermis. Fuck, I hated that dude right then. Hate him now, too. Because this is the attitude that eventually gave us Trump, the ultimate believer in immigrants’ incompatibility with whatever he imagines “real America” to be.

The underlying assumption here is that, as someone who had the temerity to be born somewhere else, I am forever dragging my old country with me. That any thought I have, any decision I make, any opinion I espouse, carries the charge of my inherent Sovietness. That my job, as an immigrant, is ultimately to render this ticking bomb harmless by deferring all political opinions to “real Americans” or going along with whatever the most conservative side of the spectrum wants me to be. Any vocal dissatisfaction with America’s current state of affairs constitutes disloyalty and ungratefulness (and must be countered with the swift “Go back to where you came from, then”), and any political affiliation anywhere leftwise of the staunchest of reactionaries is to be viewed with utmost suspicion of lingering Communist loyalties. Best if I just stay quiet, appreciative and subservient to the master race, i. e. folks who had the work ethic and the wherewithal to get born here.

Which is why when folks find out I am both a Soviet immigrant and registered Democrat, all too often I get either a knowing smirk or an incredulous, but no less insulting, comment about how I escaped socialism only to want to drag it with me to America. And that's from the natives, which constitutes the best-case scenario. Most fellow Soviet immigrants, who fall off the right edge of the political spectrum the moment they deplane, will issue forth, spittingly, with screaming insults about my being a "kommunyaka", a "wokist" and a deranged, mentally-ill degenerate while bemoaning the fates of the poor children I teach.

Fellow Soviet immigrants who are raging Trumpists (which is an overwhelming majority of them) don't bother me too much. Ironically, it is they who still live in the Old Country reality of absolutes: absolute white, absolute black, absolute hatreds and absolute fears. To them, the left side of American politics comprises the things they fear (black people and gays) and don't understand (compassion and community), so they choose to classify it as communist, based solely on its geographic location to the left of Hitler.

But here is a question for my American-born friends, who likewise tend to equate Democrats with Soviet-style socialism. I dare you to find a single thing that Democrats have EVER done that is more Soviet than what is described here.

Because, guys, I grew up in the USSR and I honestly don’t know anything more Soviet than doctoring history to fit the narrative of the nation the government wants to promote. It’s not an accident that the Soviet Union was called “the country with unpredictable past.”

In fact, Donald Trump, the most far-right president in America’s history, is also its most Soviet leader. A geriatric authoritarian obsessed with showcases of military might, demanding absolute loyalty and conformity from politicians, celebrities and the masses and imposing a one-party system and a centralized rule by the force of arms? Controlling and censoring the cultural and educational discourse is but another vital part of a Soviet dictator’s starter kit.

So, seriously, I don’t know, maybe Barack Obama’s Republican-invented health care reform was the clarion call of impending Communism to your ears. Maybe you think that DEI is socialist (yeah, nothing more Soviet than ensuring minorities get MORE rights). Maybe whatever it is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to do to promote clean energy that screams at you “Gulags are next!” I will give you the right to have that opinion.

But if you think that there is, and always will be something buried deep inside Slava that makes him forever a Soviet boy in his Young Communist Pioneers neckerchief, then you must at least trust my qualification to say that Trump is the most Brezhnev-like leader you guys have ever had.

(And Obama, incidentally, was the least.)