Meet the reporter: From Russia, and stops in between, to Crawford County, Ohio

It’s hard entering a new community, and it’s difficult for a community when residents feel like a stranger is writing about them. Here is a little about me so we won't be strangers.

I can only imagine the reactions if a foreign, let alone an American, reporter appeared in my small hometown in Russia. Even my grandmother, a very nice lady who bakes homemade pies for the family regularly and who is an avid reader and gardener, but who grew up in the Soviet era, would struggle.

After all, we all lived in a community where everyone knew everyone. My high school teachers were former students of my great-grandfather – a long-time history teacher and a principal of a one of the schools – and most of the town knew my great-grandmother, who was for decades a department head in the local hospital, a position she passed over onto my mother.

How I became a journalist

Journalism was literally a swear word in our family. Reporters of the Soviet time had the bad reputation of writing only what the Communist party decided was true, and what in fact was an obvious lie. My family hoped I would become a doctor or an engineer, like the three previous generations of my family, or a teacher as some of us had.

My heart made a different choice, and that choice defined my whole life. I wanted to be a journalist and nothing else. Moreover, I wanted an American degree in journalism. I wanted to do American journalism in Russia even when I couldn’t yet put this desire into words.

When I think about it now, I haven't a clue of how I dared to dream so big, a little girl in a small Russian town with zero connections in journalism and zero understanding of where to start.

I reasoned that first of all I needed to have topics to write about, and since inter-religious relations were big in Russia at that time, I entered the department of Asian and African Studies in the oldest university in the country and moved to the capital, Moscow, at 17.

In my second year of college, I studied Indonesian language, history and culture, and through a recommendation from my university professor I started freelancing for one of the Moscow newspapers, writing about religious issues in South-East Asia. I was invited to become their staff author. Soon, I received a Fulbright Scholarship for a graduate degree in journalism in America. It seemed like my dream almost came true.

The next thing I did, I declined the scholarship.

When big politics enters your life

I grew up in what is now one of the best times in Russian history – the time of great freedoms, fast economic development and great hopes for the future. I do not remember Soviet times; the Soviet flag was replaced by the Russian flag when I was 2 weeks old.

My generation was raised in the belief the Cold War and the danger of nuclear weapons were in the past. Like many young people of my generation, I speak several languages, and due to the oil revenues of the 2000s I traveled around all of Europe and visited many Asian countries (and lived in two).

When I started to do journalism in Russia, it was a very different country from what it is now. Unfortunately, a lot of the Russians these days say we literally live in the history textbook as we witness the return of the torture and purges, Soviet newspaper style, and one of the largest waves of emigration in the country’s history.

Working in one of the recognizable newspapers in the capital, I started to notice changes early. Something was happening, but we were not reporting on it, and nobody could tell us why.

But I still believed in the best, and when I was unexpectedly invited to join the Russian Embassy in Indonesia as a junior diplomat due to my proficiency in the Indonesian language and familiarity with Indonesian Islam, I took the offer.

I felt the need to give back to my native country rather than benefit from the American scholarship, having already received two scholarships in Russia. In addition, diplomacy is close to journalism – it’s about solving the issues without arms through the power of words, and that was what appealed to me.

At that time, I was 24. I served as a junior diplomat for two years mainly dealing with translations, interpretations, organizing of the meetings and greeting official delegations and helping them navigate Jakarta.

Through my day-to-day communications with the country’s officials, such as consuls, ambassadors and department heads, I started to realize something was going on, and the country was changing – it was a few years before the start of the current big war. Could I imagine what was to come? Absolutely not, but the absurdity of the day-to-day operations were telling me (with my degree in history) we were entering one of the darkest times of national history.

I resigned. I left the country, and I did the only thing I could think of at that time – I applied for an American degree in journalism again, and again I was awarded a scholarship here.

I went to Boston at the beginning of the pandemic. I graduated with honors for the fourth time in my life a few months after the war in Ukraine began. A few months later, after intense communication with my friends, former colleagues and mentors in Moscow, I gave up the hope of a soon return home and applied for political asylum here.

I sent out 500 job applications, and I got a job in journalism, and then another job and then one more. I moved a few times, and reporting in South Dakota I met my husband – he is from South Carolina. South Dakota was an unlikely place for us to meet, but we met.

Hopes

I insisted we connect with the Ukrainian part of our family, and we found out my great-uncle, my grandmother’s brother who lived in Ukraine with his family, died of a heart attack a few months before that, about a year into the war.

I miss Moscow, but I know what I miss is not the beautiful city, but the people and the atmosphere of freedom, love and joy we shared. Most of those who I miss are not in Russia anymore.

I am getting my American reporting experience. This February, it’s been two years since I started reporting here. I still hope one day I will be able to apply my skills learned here to build a better Russia of tomorrow. Every day, this hope wanes.

Every day I read the news of my small hometown, and every day I see messages about the soldiers, my peers and younger, who died in the war. My Ukrainian friends on Facebook post about their losses in their small Ukrainians towns.

That reminds me every day, we are not that different to wage a war anywhere. We are all humans, and we are all from a small town somewhere.

This article originally appeared on Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum: Crawford County reporter shares her journey from Russia to Bucyrus