Pip: ExpatAlien opens a Russia chapter, and it starts exactly where you'd expect a Moscow story to start — with a coffin, a bribed Marine, and a held breath all the way to landing.
Mara: This episode covers the first installment of a memoir-style piece about arriving in Moscow in the 1990s — the uncle who made it possible, the city that made it difficult, and what it cost to get there.
Pip: Let's start with Moscow itself — and the year everything was supposedly wide open.
Moscow in the 1990s: History, Heat, and a Harrowing Arrival
Mara: The post opens not at the beginning but at the end of something — a death, a diplomatic scramble, a package that needed to disappear. The question underneath all of it is: how did a thirty-two-year-old from Washington, DC end up in Moscow in the first place?
Pip: The uncle, Gerome, is the key. Career State Department, fluent in Russian, second posting to Moscow — and his go-to summary of the place was, "things have changed but things have not changed."
Mara: That line does a lot of work. It's 1993, the Soviet Union has collapsed two years earlier, and the post describes Russia as "wide open — history in the making, anything was possible." Gerome had seen the before. He knew what the after was worth.
Pip: And yet his final assignment wasn't Paris or Fiji. Moscow in the nineties — which, fair enough, is exactly the kind of posting that sounds glamorous until you're in an un-airconditioned airport watching your clothes stick to you.
Mara: That arrival scene lands hard. The post describes slogging "past surly looking customs officials through the double doors" into the heat, then a ride to a Soviet-era compound — prefab concrete blocks, a security gate, small windows with no screens.
Pip: The accommodation verdict: "It wasn't horrible. It was adequate." High praise.
Mara: Gerome's apartment was two bedrooms, fairly functional. Two weeks after arrival, she watched it briefly snow in the kitchen window. The post calls that a welcome to Russia moment, and it earns it.
Mara: What gives the whole setup its weight is the framing at the top — the coffin, the bribed Marine, the breath held from embassy to airport to landing. That's where Moscow – a blip in time, part 1 begins, and it promises the rest of the story will be worth the discomfort of telling it.
Pip: The post itself says as much: "I find it hard to write about my time in Russia. I try to block it out most of the time. But I need to tell you my story. I think it is important." That's a real opening.
Pip: A diplomat's final posting, a niece who talked her way into a visa, and a city that greeted her with heat and concrete. Part two has a lot to live up to.
Mara: The Soviet Union fell, but the surly customs officials remained. We'll be back when part two arrives.