I’m Russian — So If You Start Treating Me Worse, I’ll Understand
How the war in Ukraine is destroying the Russian legacy.
When I was a kid, about seven or eight, we used to play “war” with other kids in our dacha (country house). We would divide into two teams — “Russians” and “Germans.” Nobody wanted to play “Germans,” of course. They were supposed to lose. We would run around, shouting “grenade!” or “missile coming,” or “pf-pf-pf-pf!!!” — pretending to shoot one another with tree branches.
One day, as our “war” went especially violent and we were running, screaming, and ambushing each other, I noticed an older man standing by the sidewalk, watching us play. At first, I didn’t pay attention to him. He was carrying a black stick in one hand, relying on it for support, holding a bag of groceries in the other. I could see white onions — the cheap ones — through the white plastic.
The man waited until we were exhausted from all the running, then came up to me and said, “You think this is a game?” I was confused. “What do you mean? We were just playing,” I replied. He looked me in the eye — his skin was like a raisin, his left eye twitching — and said, “War is horrible. So horrible, you wouldn’t even know. People die. Cities are ruined. There’s no food. It shouldn’t be a game. Have some respect for the generations…
