I hate Russia.

I hate my country. I always did.

I hate the Russian school system. I was afraid of my teachers because they psychologically harassed me as a kid. When I was 12 and had just moved to Russia after living in California for two years, I asked the teacher if she could stop yelling at us. I was so nervous about doing it, I cried. When the lesson started, the teacher asked me to stand up and made fun of me. “Look at him, pretending he’s smarter than me, better than me,” she said. The whole class laughed, and I desperately wanted to disappear by falling through the floor.

I hate the Russian medical system. Although it’s cheap — and often, free and funded by the state — it’s horrible. When I had my first panic attack, I called an ambulance because I thought I had a heart attack. It arrived in one hour (!), and I was diagnosed with VSD (vegetovascular dystonia) — a made-up illness that doesn’t exist in any medical dictionary except for the Soviet one. They also gave me a sugar pill. My friend told me about going to the doctor once to check how his body reacts to sugar. (He was afraid he had diabetes.) The doctor took a glass, filled it with sugar to the brim, and then mixed it with water. It took the doctor 15 minutes to dissolve that much sugar in water, after which he handed the syrup to my friend and said, “Drink it.” My friend did and, after several minutes, fell into a sugar-induced coma, right in a state clinic corridor. (He survived to tell the tale.)

I hate the Russian people. Ordinary, average, and gray people, walking through the…