Sunday Long Read: The Day The Curtain Fell

Our Sunday Long Read comes to us from Michele Berdy, the Arts editor for the independent Moscow Times, who had lived in Moscow for more than 40 years, as she recounts her career and her escape from Russia as she mourns the future of journalism in Putin's regime.

The day before Russia launched its war against Ukraine, I was in the seaside city of Sochi in southern Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border, attending an arts festival and enjoying a break from the dark and snowy Moscow winter among palm trees and verdant hillsides.

Sochi is on the Black Sea, as is Ukraine. My colleagues and I had been talking for months about aerial photographs that showed a build-up of troops near Russia’s borders with Ukraine, apparently threatening a new invasion. Was it preparation or intimidation? Nothing seemed to be happening, even as the U.S. started warning of an imminent attack.

I work at The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper founded in 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union that publishes online in both English and Russian. As the paper’s arts editor, I was planning to attend the Sochi Winter International Arts Festival beginning on February 16. A few days before I was to leave, I asked my editor if I should go — would it be safe for me to be on the Black Sea coast if war broke out?

“You’ll be in a group,” she said, “and I don’t think it will start.” I said, “I don’t either, but the thing is — I didn’t think Russia would annex Crimea in 2014.” She said, “I didn’t think they’d invade Georgia in 2008.”

I recognize now that the dots were all there. We just couldn’t connect them. We couldn’t imagine a full-scale invasion because a full-scale invasion was unimaginable.

And so I went to Sochi, what now feels like a thousand years ago, and spent every night in the city’s seaside Winter Theater watching the best of Russian and foreign culture, a mix of traditional and very untraditional musical and theater performances, with standing ovations and curtain calls and the local babushkas holding the hands of grandchildren while whispering instructions on proper theater etiquette.

I flew back to Moscow on the evening of February 23. The next morning the war began.

Everything changed in the blink of an eye. Within two weeks, I would find myself in a minivan with a driver and six people, three dogs and mountains of suitcases and bags, getting ready to cross the border out of Russia. I would be the last one of the Moscow Times staff to leave the country, part of an exodus that included most of the foreign correspondents in Russia and thousands of Russians.

I was leaving a place I’d lived for more than 40 years.

 

It's amazing to me that journalists who had lived in Moscow for decades simply didn't see -- or refused to see -- Putin's invasion plans and his military invasion of Ukraine. His goal was always to rule Russia as a new czar, and to reconstitute the Soviet Empire.

I'm glad Berdy was able to escape, but such lotus-eating globally is how we got here in the first place.