What happened to the Russia I loved?

For three and a half years, between Autumn 2018 and 2022, the most thrilling words I could say to anyone – especially myself – were ‘I live in Russia.’ I had read about the country since I was a child – obsessively from my mid-twenties onwards – and it was Holy Land for me. Other people I knew had flirted with the place on study-courses, temporary work-placements or backpacking, yet always with an end in sight.

But I had a child growing up in Rostov, in southern Russia, had put down roots, integrated into its society and planned to grow old there. For the rest of my life, I thought, I would be taking evening strolls down Pushkinskaya Avenue, experiencing its suffocating summers and snowy winters. The city’s bath-houses – whose extremes of heat, along with the cold, had become a kind of addiction – were just a weekly taxi-ride away.