When I’d first met Anya at her family’s apartment in 1995, she was a skinny 11-year-old with a plain brunette ponytail. She was quiet and shy around the American visitors, and my strongest memory of her was the afternoon she sat at her family’s piano, dutifully practicing while Gary and I worked nearby on our laptops. Her serious expression, combined with an utter disinterest in attracting attention, made her seem more miniature adult than child.
I already knew what the now-31-year-old Anya looked like, having recently connected on Facebook. But when she walked up, I was still stunned. She was blonde, her long hair curling voluptuously over her shoulders, and she was dressed in tight jeans and a gorgeous gold-colored coat. Her dark eyes were accentuated with makeup, her fingernails perfectly manicured. She was, for lack of a better term, a knockout.
Yet Anya wasn’t just beautiful; she also carried herself with the supreme self-assurance of the Girl Who Has Everything. She’s one of those Russian women you see not only in Russia, but in New York, or Monaco, or Ibiza—the ones in designer clothes, carrying expensive bags, gliding past with chins held high and leaving traces of expensive perfume in their wake. I’ve always been fascinated, and intimidated, by these women, who in ordinary circumstances would walk right by my Gap-button-down-wearing self. But because I’d known Anya since she was a girl, she came right up to me with a big smile and a warm hug.
In 1995, Anya’s father Sergei was working as a business consultant, while his wife Lyuba stayed home to raise 16-year-old Masha and 11-year-old Anya. The family lived in a nice, though not opulent, apartment on Revolution Square in the center of town, where Gary and I stayed on that first visit.
When we first came to Chelyabinsk, I knew only two facts about the city: First, its economy was industrial, driven by metallurgy and military production. And second, a nuclear catastrophe had occurred nearby in the 1950s—an incident that the Soviet government tried to hide, but which was later revealed to have spewed a vast radioactive cloud over the region. When it happened, the Kyshtym disaster was the worst nuclear accident in history, contaminating thousands of square miles of territory and leading to evacuations and illnesses in the villages of the Chelyabinsk Region.[2]
Given this information, why would anyone want to come here? In truth, the only reason Gary and I did was because Sergei and Lyuba—who were friends of a friend in St. Petersburg—had offered to let us stay in their apartment. We arrived expecting to find smoggy skies, chemical-belching factories, and glowing green water, but Chelyabinsk turned out to be a charming city, with vast parks, plentiful pine trees, and a sparkling river running through the center. About a million people lived here, and the vibe seemed laid-back.
The same could be said for Sergei and Lyuba. They were a friendly, down-to-earth couple who, unlike many Russians in the mid-nineties, seemed deeply content with their lives. They’d been proud Soviets—Sergei a Komsomol leader and Lyuba active in the Communist Party—but once the USSR fell, they easily made the transition to capitalism. At dinner on our first night, Sergei regaled us with tales of their recent vacation to Italy, and Lyuba showed off her wallet full of credit cards. These were rare at the time, especially outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the couple insisted that their post-Soviet lives weren’t really so different.
“For me personally, not a whole lot has changed,” said Sergei, whose mustache, dimpled chin, and sturdy good looks gave him the air of a Russian Tom Selleck. “I lived well then, I live well now. There are a few things that have changed for the worse; it’s not safe on the streets anymore… But there are many things that are better too, like now people can earn as much as they will work to earn.”
He had little patience for those who spent time bemoaning the fall of the USSR, including the ragtag group of Communists that gathered on nearby Revolution Square each weekend to protest. “I can understand why they’re complaining,” Sergei said. “But that’s all they do, just cry. They don’t make any constructive proposals. Russians have a saying: ‘When your head’s been cut off, why cry about losing your hair?’ But the Communists just cry about the little things anyway.”
When I asked Lyuba how her life had changed, she told me, “The main difference between now and then is that before, things were calmer, more stable… If I could have things the best possible way, I would have the security and peace of mind we had then, with the opportunity and freedom we have now.” But like her husband, she added, “As far as I’m concerned, my life hasn’t changed too much. I was happy then, and I’m happy now. And if I lived in Tsarist times, I’d probably have been happy then too.”
Sixteen-year-old Masha told me about her seventh-grade class’s mini-rebellion at the end of the Soviet era, when she and her friends decided to stop wearing their uniforms and red Pioneer scarves to school. “Some of our teachers got upset, and told us, ‘You are Pioneers, you need to take these things more seriously.’ But in the end, they only really scolded us a little bit. A month later, they changed the rules at school so we didn’t have to wear the uniforms and scarves anymore.”
In her Doc Martens–style boots and miniskirt, with an angular short haircut, Masha was the picture of teenage cool. “People my age don’t really think too much about politics,” she told me. “Other than making fun of Yeltsin or the Communists or whoever, we really don’t think about these things. When I think of Lenin, I picture this short, bald little guy waving his arms at some tribunal. Even though he was obviously very smart—he got the whole country to follow him, after all—now he’s just somebody to make fun of.”
With all the economic and societal upheaval in mid-1990s Russia, this family was unusual in its equanimity. Unlike Valya in Vladivostok, who was skittish about spies, or Oleg in Ulan-Ude, who was afraid to let me board a public bus without him, Sergei and Lyuba seemed to take everything in stride. So, ten years later, when I prepared to return to Chelyabinsk, I had the feeling the family would be doing well.
And so they were.
The first indication of just how well came early in the visit. Sergei had invited David and me to stay in the same apartment as in 1995, but the family was no longer living there: they’d upgraded to a bigger, nicer place on Plekhanov Street, less than a mile away. We settled into the old apartment, which we’d be sharing with Sergei’s mother, Valentina, and on the second night Anya and Masha came to pick us up for dinner.
I knew the girls would be grown up, but I wasn’t prepared for the statuesque twenty-something women who rolled up in a sleek black Land Rover. David and I climbed in, and to my surprise both Anya and Masha began speaking excellent English. Anya’s hair was dyed jet black, and she wore a simple black shirt that showed off her slender figure. Masha, now 26, had a rather severe, unsmiling beauty. And both women exuded self-confidence.
When we walked into the family’s new apartment, I looked around in wonder: it was bigger than any apartment I’d been to in Russia, immaculately clean, and decorated with a vast assortment of souvenir plates that Lyuba had collected all over the world. As Lyuba made dinner, Anya invited us to surf the Web on their high-speed Internet—the first I’d seen in a Russian home—and play with their dog, a fluffy white Chinese Crested Powderpuff named Busya.