be it Lviv, Moscow, London, New York or Los Angeles – I have always had great people around me who became my multilingual and multinational friends. These friendships weren’t built on formal handshakes or by waving hands through the windows of limousines. One of my greatest friends was a young man Hassan from Damascus who used to study with me at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (now the Moscow State Technical University). I feel compelled to say how much I value these relationships that I have kept sound and rewarding through many years and hundreds or thousands miles that separate us from each other – especially thanks to the contemporary social networks.
Diplomatic Insulation vs. Diplomatic Isolation
As a result of the tit-for-tat reciprocal U.S.‘s and Russia’s diplomats expulsions in 2016, the ordinary cross-continental traveler is submerged in a sort of plague. This is a particularly useful example addressing the main theme of this book and showing how a fight of the political elites directly impacts basic rights of the ordinary people. The visa-issuance interviews now, as of the beginning of 2020, take several months of waiting time, but it’s not the whole story. Quite unpleasant things are the U.S. border customs’ increasingly stringent checkups and occasional randomly picked at-the-border interviews (I suspect this is also the case lately at the Russia’s Sheremetyevo passport control – and it does look equally ugly to me) – those kind of happenings after the 22-hour transatlantic flights, as well as the ever-widening list of prohibited items, i.e. liquids, fruits and vegetables, anything beyond the ordinary such as optics and the telescope mounts, (I remember the old days when I used to carry my multicomponent floor top stereo system to and from the JFK’s international flight terminals effortlessly with the only question ever asked of whether I planned to stay in the U.S. for longer than I declared), as well as inflation of the daily expenses (virtually undetectable for the native shoppers, but quite stingy to foreigners). All this makes the whole U.S. travel vacation story all but a challenge. For this reason, my biggest worry is that one day I won’t be able to see my dad or my mom in their final journeys.
But my circumstances are dwarfed by weight of growing suspiciousness threatening to transform into overt hostility. For example, Dennis Ortblad, a former career U.S. foreign service officer, and Krishen Mehta, a former partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, who wrote in their November 5, 2019, The National Interest’s article that “Those who are under thirty in Russia have known the freedom of travel and access to information in their new economy. It is this younger generation that U.S. policy cannot afford to lose with a sanctions policy that encourages them to believe that the West only seeks to undermine Russia and their futures”.
Active student exchanges with the United States and Europe can help counter among the young this drift towards resentment. We found a decline of student and academic exchanges exist throughout Russia. In Irkutsk, university leaders lamented that the formerly active student exchanges with the United States had ceased. In Crimea, at Simferopol University, an academic dean explained that a traditional exchange with a large U.S. university ended because, besides sanctions, the Russophobic climate of opinion in the United States made it politically incorrect.
Despite general lack of trust toward the West, Russians (especially, Russian millennials) have adopted and frequently use countless English and American loanwords such as implement, relevant, lifehack, chat, even such food glossary words as chicken and salmon, although, naturally, there are full native language equivalents. This means the common interest to learning the English language (and Anglo-American culture in this respect), as opposed to learning of foreign geopolitical interests, has been on the rise no matter what.
Following the reciprocal closure of consulates, our Moscow embassy has been unable to meet the increased burden of visa applications. Students and academics now need to wait for months sometimes years for issuance. This needs to be corrected if we do not wish to lose the younger generations of Russians (Iranians, Cubans, Venezuelans, to name a few nations now out of favor) who can be our hopeful ambassadors for a better future. The simple diplomacy of reopening consulates on a reciprocal basis would engender confidence and relieve the log jam of visas.”
Ironically, many Russian entry visa applicants, in order to avoid visa interview jams were obliged to travel to the U.S. Consulate located as far as city of Vladivostok (distance from Moscow is about 9,000 kilometers) in order to be able to travel to New York (distance from Moscow is about 7,500 kilometers).
According to Bank of America research, there are now around 77 physical barriers that delineate international borders compared with 15 in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The World Trade Organization recently pointed to the fact that the pace of growth in international commerce fell below the rate of economic expansion in 2019 for the fifth time since the financial crisis.
The Ubiquitous “Reciprocity”
In 2011 some 222 thousand Russian tourists visited the USA. In May 2017 the number of tourist visas (B-1/B-2) issued to Russians plummeted to only 14 thousand (annualized 168 thousand). In October, this figure dropped to only 6.5 thousand (annualized 78 thousand), and for the first time travelers the U.S. embassy interview waiting time increased to between 85 and 300 days, which, in turn, further undermined the Russian travelers’ interest in visiting America. The reason for this was the September 2017 mutual visa restrictions due to the exchange of expulsions between the Russian and the US diplomats in the aftermath of exchange of sanctions between Russia and the United States.
As I mentioned above, another painful issue of artificial reciprocal alienation became the mutual hiking of the entry visa fees. In 1990, the price of the US single entry visa for Russians was only $45 whereas at the highest point of the mutual diplomatic war it rose to a whopping $303 per application!
From the beginning of 2019, Russian citizens were required to pay an additional fee for obtaining a multiple-entry visa to the United States. The U.S. entry visa price increased from $160 to $303. The changes badly affected demand for the business and tourist trips to the U.S. The increased fee for a visa was based on the principle of “reciprocity” – the same amount is paid by American citizens for a visa of the Russian Federation. One thing to consider: Russian average monthly salary is $450 per month, and the ruble exchange rate collapsed from 32 per dollar as of end-2013 to more than 60 per dollar as of end-2019.
We can’t keep up with this doomed tug of war. Neither I, nor my parents across the ocean wish to endure such barbaric ways to carry out diplomatic disputes.
Now let’s admit that the political scene is in no way better than the shaky state of the global economy. Thus, a highly repercussive article devoted to the widening gap between expectations and reality among the Russian post-millennials appeared on January 9, 2020 in the Financial Times. The material was entitled “Generation Putin: how young Russians view the only leader they’ve ever known”.
It rightfully points out that “…Putin’s Kremlin has sought to create a generation largely numb to politics, through the repression of opposition movements, a propaganda-heavy media machine and a cult of personality.”
Even more: “Those who seek change from Putin have found they must compete against not just the might of the Kremlin and the truncheons of the riot police but also the apathy common among the vast majority of their fellow youth – a generation raised on a strict diet of political indifference”.
The FT claims to have interviewed almost 50 young Russians, all aged between 18 and 25 who live in Moscow, St Petersburg, Siberia and beyond. So this must be quite a representative sampling.
Indeed, by most calculations, Russia’s economy shrank by 60 per cent between 1991 and 1999, a bigger contraction than during WWII, and caused a huge domestic plunge in the birthrate, a spike in mortality and an emigration boost. There is only one remotely comparable example – the situation in Syria between 2010 and now.
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