Sometime in 2016, I opened the door of my Brooklyn apartment to a woman dropping off her toddler to play with my toddler. “Aren’t you so ashamed to be Russian today?” the woman asked me, by way of a greeting. I’m not Russian, but at the time, I’d lived there on and off since the Nineties and I was married to a Russian — not an émigré kid, but a Russian-Russian as we sometimes say. I don’t recall which development in the Trump-Russiagate story had been in the newspapers that morning, but it was early days enough that I was still trying to argue people down. I’m not ashamed, I told her. This is all fake.
I was right, and the recent Tulsi Gabbard document release suggests the same. I knew I was right, because elite Moscow power circles are fairly small, and back then, we were in them. My then-husband (we are now divorced) worked for a Russian oligarch; his father was a Russian ambassador. No Russian officials were sharing state secrets with us, but we thought a Trump–Moscow relationship was the kind of thing you’d pick up from silences, or too many denials, or the puzzle pieces of some previously unexplained corruption suddenly falling into place. Russians are not loose-lipped, but one can read the tea leaves. Instead, there was nothing. And to Russian eyes, the details as they emerged were more nothing — paper trails littered with suspicious Cyrillic e-mail addresses, as if that proved anything, shady and powerless people being played up as Kremlin insiders.
We thought that our friends would believe us and be grateful for the information — foolishly, as it turned out. Instead, as a binational couple with a foothold in both worlds, we watched our lives, and our faith in Americans and their institutions, fall apart as the relationship between our two countries did. This has been a tragedy. I lived in Moscow briefly in 1998 and again with my husband from 2003 to 2006, and I remember the heady, early days, when Americans and Russians were exotic and intriguing to each other, business relationships were being developed instead of severed, and, on the Russian side, there was at least a skeptical hope for good political relations.
What’s gone wrong has not been Russian imperialism, but the American kind, characterized by a stunning rejection of fact and assumption of innocence. Events today, including those in Ukraine, are based on a stealth American chauvinism that flowered during Russiagate. I know, because I experienced it firsthand, over my own dinner table, as my liberal friends, sometimes trembling with rage, Russiasplained its government to us.
This might seem like a narrow thing, a matter of our personal social lives, but it was eerie and stunning to live through the sea change. We remembered that six months earlier, these same people had been generally friendly and culturally tolerant about Russia, despite its many problems, but no one else did. We saw the extremist frame lock into place: Russia murders journalists, or it annexed Crimea, or it’s not a democracy, or it’s anti-gay, and those things are Very Bad and must be opposed by the good Americans. It was time for a reckoning.
We felt helpless, and to some extent, I still do. Some of those things are bad, and Russians know it better than anyone. But some are much more complicated. And American persecution produces Russian defensiveness, and has the frustrating, contrary effect of strengthening Vladimir Putin and blocking paths to necessary organic change within Russia. I saw this in my own life. In the new climate, my husband and I occasionally found ourselves defending Putin, which was new for us. A family photo that included the Russian president which hung on our living-room wall became a battleground with our friends, several of whom told us to take it down. Its original intent had been somewhat ironic, yet we refused, and we felt violated, too. Our Russia was a troubled place, but it was still ours, and not for Americans to dispose of.
The simplicity and ignorance of the frame came to seem like a crime in its own right, and a betrayal of American liberal values. Such thinking — “Russia is bad, and we must oppose it with all our might” — denies a country’s right to set its own values and to have its own imperfect governance. It’s a form of American cultural imperialism; it creates an enemy; it’s stupid and belligerent foreign policy; and it’s richly hypocritical. Americans, after all, invade other countries and manipulate elections themselves. We discovered to our surprise that liberal Americans think they’re critical of their government, but beneath the surface, they’re convinced they’re the good guys, even when they’re harming their own cause and have no idea what they’re talking about. There was delicious irony in being lectured about freedom of the press by people being deranged by fake news.
“There was delicious irony in being lectured about freedom of the press by people being deranged by fake news.”
My Russian husband and I separated in 2020 and divorced in 2024. This was determined mostly by our personal issues. But his experience of being besieged and harassed as a Russian, both personally and professionally, didn’t help. Despite our differences, my now-ex is a smart, savvy businessman with enormous personal honor and unusual skill at translating between the Russian and American business climates. He had much to offer this country, as did his employer, who was sanctioned in 2018 on the abstract grounds of “participating in the Russian energy sector,” and who departed New York, pulling the financing for the US businesses he funded along with him.
These people were the future of relations between our two countries. They were valuable, and they and others were destroyed by a dirty campaign trick and the paroxysms of self-righteous public rage that followed it. Barack Obama’s response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was measured, taking the mixed populations and military assets, as well as Russia’s legitimate interest in the peninsula into account. Yet in December 2016, he rushed through a package of punitive sanctions, threw out diplomats, and seized property on the grounds of the alleged collusion.
And Trump in his first term was noticeably “tough on Russia,” perhaps through inclination, but one suspects it was also an expedient choice to battle the collusion narrative. He hardened and extended sanctions and rapidly escalated hostile, anti-Russian militarization in Europe, including providing Poland with Patriot anti-missile systems, and supplying Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles — for use against Russians.
Current events in Ukraine are more of the same. It has always been obvious that too much Western armament, or Nato membership for Ukraine, would lead to war with Russia, with potentially catastrophic potential for expansion. Russia, at least, has said so clearly. Washington under both Joe Biden and Trump nonetheless pushed these agendas, with the kind of liberal voices who might once have called for moderation fallen silent. On the eve of full-scale invasion, Biden failed to reassure Russia on the Nato question, an enormously provocative act, though naturally supported by the anti-Russian American public.
The results are destroyed cities, more than a million dead, untold economic suffering in Europe, growing hostilities with China and India, and a vastly increased risk of nuclear catastrophe. For what, beyond Americans’ self-righteous belief in a fight for freedom and democracy, based on an enmity they only half-understand? Is this really so right and wonderful, given the current consequences for Ukrainians and the potential consequences for us all?
For me, the outbreak of war in 2022 was Russiagate all over again, including the shockingly distorted coverage in the major media. There’s a creepy thing that happens when people call me “just to check in” or “say hi” or on some pretext, but what they really want to do is discuss Russian politics. They don’t know it’s obvious, but I do, because the phone has been ringing all morning. And there’s no chance they’re going to listen to me, despite that I’ve spent more time in private spaces listening to high-level Russians fume about American provocation in Ukraine than any of them ever will. The blindness concerning our own rectitude is astonishing, especially coming from people who are highly critical of their government in other contexts.
In 2022, the people around me believed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” and that it could be explained only by Putin’s actual insanity. But it’s not insane at all. Putin seeks an independent Russia, one among several players in a multipolar world, for which he needs the power of strategic military deterrence against Uncle Sam. The people waving their Ukraine flags may believe they’re for “peace,” but they’re actually supporting the reckless expansion of American power and war. The enmity comes from us, and we don’t even realize it.
