There are maybe two or three screenwriters in Hollywood who can switch between English and Russian at will, and I am one of them. This is not a self-aggrandizing statement—no evidence suggests I’m a genius in either. Still, I have been writing for a living for 30 years, since the age of 15, when a daily newspaper rather bewilderingly printed a sci-fi short story of mine. And these are the hardest words I have ever had to write in all these years, because they feel like lopping off half of my brain in public:
As long as Vladimir Putin remains in power, I will not write in Russian anymore.
In doing this, I am neither assigning collective responsibility nor weaseling out of it. People and their governments are different things, in autocracies especially. I have plenty of Russian friends and colleagues who hate what their country has become but are objectively powerless to change it. Using the famed Soviet “salami tactics” of reducing freedom one slice at a time, Putin’s regime has cut off all avenues for electoral reform or even peaceful protest. On the streets of Moscow, where 10 years ago 100,000 could march unimpeded, people go to jail for one-person pickets. Where an independent candidate could once win a regional or municipal seat, all opposition has been replaced with tightly cropped AstroTurf. Every viable resistance figure, from Alexei Navalny on down, is imprisoned or in exile. Only extralegal means of change are left, and one cannot demand of Russian people that they go that route. Certainly not from Los Angeles.
Language is never the enemy. In my American life, I am, in fact, ultrasensitive to any point where anti-Putinism shades into Russophobia. I smile at Stephen Colbert’s barbs about Putin but not at the comic accent he adopts to deliver them. I feel a bit sick when The New York Times uncritically quotes a former U.S. official calling Russians “organically ruthless” or gives a platform to the idea that lying is a Russian invention. And yes, it was just as offensive to me when Ukraine curbed public use of Russian as part of its national policy. Because language, I repeat, is never the enemy.
So why the hell am I doing this? The starkest possible answer is because Russia doesn’t want me right now, and I don’t want it.
My identity as a Russian American is an accident of history: I am an American Jew born in the Soviet-occupied Baltics. In the words of Hannah Arendt, “What remains? The language remains.” My Russianness is entirely cultural: I grew up on Russian literature, Russian movies, and, perhaps most important of all, Russian underground rock music. My family came to the U.S. as refugees when I was 16—too old to lose my native tongue, just young enough to pick up a new one. Sure enough, I felt that I was put on this planet to build a bridge between the two great cultures. At least that was the dream. I couldn’t write like Nabokov or dance like Baryshnikov—who could?—but, in 2012, when I found myself working in Moscow after 20 years in the U.S., I finally got a chance to try.
All my Russian film and TV work was dedicated to one crushingly simple idea: Russia is part of the world. My first series, Londongrad, was a lighthearted picaresque adventure filmed in the U.K. Its one subversive feature was that its characters, bilingual Russians, didn’t see themselves as exiles; it was arguably the first piece of Russian pop culture to present emigration as anything other than tragic. The Optimists, set in 1960, revolved around a group of young diplomats with international backgrounds, tasked with explaining “the Western mind” to older Soviets. (There was arguably more than a touch of meta in this pitch). Leto, a film I cowrote with my wife, Lily, was designed to work the other way: to expose the West to the Russian indie rock of my childhood. When it screened in Cannes (thanks, no doubt, to Kirill Serebrennikov’s brilliant direction), it gave me the proudest moment of my life— seeing the black-tie Palais de Festivals crowd groove, then sob, to the songs of Viktor Tsoi. Here was that bridge I’d dreamed of building all my life.
Even as the political screws tightened in the wake of the 2012 protest wave against Putin’s return to the presidency and the 2014 annexation of Crimea, I got away with a lot. None of my scripts were trimmed beyond the global broadcast standards, and perhaps less. (The Optimists’ characters smoked like chimneys; Londongrad contained an objectively risky polonium-tea joke.) At times, the absence of censorship was so glaring I became paranoid that the state was using me as a kind of human Potemkin village.
But something else broke. Slowly. Imperceptibly. While I was crafting my little bits of cosmopolitan entertainment, the ruling regime was hard at work choking off oxygen to its own country’s mind. A nonnegligible, though by no means main, part of Putin’s post-Crimea strategy was to make sure that Russia had little use for people like me, and that people like me had little use for Russia.
It succeeded. Over time I realized I stopped understanding my own audience or how I could or should address it. Pop culture, which had an exciting, lively amateurishness about it in the 2000s and early 2010s, now felt slick but stagnant. Literary fiction peddled the same phantasmagorical PoMo claptrap it had since the 1990s. Russian hip-hop, which I passionately followed and which had birthed some of the country’s best new music and poetry, curdled into apolitical, TikTok-friendly hedonism; rappers with anything real to say were forced to flee, silent, or silenced. On TV, everything looked great—the technical side of filmmaking now routinely bested Western European standards and was closing in on Hollywood—but it only served to show how outmoded the interpersonal relationships were, how timid the satire, how backwards the values.
The first sign of this disconnect came when even my ultraliberal, Westernized friends began to lavish praise on a comedy miniseries that tackled HIV as a topic. Intrigued, I watched it; both the humor and the pathos felt like something a U.S. show would do in the mid-1990s (after the main character tests positive, his girlfriend burns his clothes, etc.). The more I rifled through the media landscape, the less tethered I felt to the common cultural baseline without which there can be no dialogue between the author and the audience. Men were soulful alcoholics. Women were sex kittens or man-eaters or moms. LGBTQ+ representation was next to nonexistent, but at least there was the excuse of the noxious “gay propaganda” law behind that. The rest was a choice.
And it was all so fucking white. A gloriously multinational country with a massive Muslim population, Putin’s Russia had zero interest in addressing huge swaths of itself, rarely exploring locations beyond its two largest cities and shoving all non-Slavic actors into caricatured bit parts. Aleksey Agranovich, a brilliant artist who carried both me and my feature-directing debut, The Humorist, hadn’t gotten a single lead film role before, and hasn’t since, because of his distinctly Ashkenazi Jewish appearance. When I cast a Black actor in a project, the distributor wanted her out until the producers said I was a loose cannon who would probably go public with this. (I suppose they weren’t wrong.)
In my bridge-building fervor, what I wanted to do most of all was make things whose appeal would be based on the characters’ own, individual, quirky humanity. It proved futile. Human-size stories were of no use in this new reality. It felt like every good new Russian film or series (and there were many fantastic ones, don’t get me wrong) was primarily about the grand condition of being Russian in the world. Here was a country that was spending almost the entirety of its creative energy relitigating its own image. There would be no Russian Worst Person in the World, no Russian Drive My Car. Everything was either “our answer to (a specific Hollywood title)” or the author’s statement on Russianness.
Londongrad, which was shot before the Crimea annexation but premiered after, was marketed with the tagline “This is how our guys do it!”, the promo campaign implying that it was about the Russians not just living in the U.K. but somehow triumphing over it. The vehemently anti-totalitarian The Optimists was sold to the public as a hymn to the strength of Soviet diplomacy. (In a surreal P.R. coup, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, now on international sanctions list, commented approvingly on it.)
My latest feature, Jetlag, came out in the summer of 2021. It was meant to be a Noah Baumbach–esque romantic comedy about a middle-class Moscow couple who split up en route to the airport and end up in two separate, far-flung love triangles; the action took place in Berlin, Thailand, Portugal, Detroit, and Cannes. (Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to shoot most of it in Moscow and Turkey.) Jetlag was, once again, a pointedly cosmopolitan movie about dislocation. This time the reaction of the Russian audience was less indifference than rage: The main characters (who lived in a tiny apartment and flew lowcosters) were seen as part of an amoral, unpatriotic elite. More charitable readings held the film up as a satirical indictment of the creative class. Nary a review considered the characters as…characters. When you live in a society that devalues individual experience, the individual becomes a symbol, a marker, a statement. Scrub politics out of everything, and everything becomes politics.
I am not megalomaniacal enough to think that my exit from the Russian scene constitutes some sort of loss for Russia. It is, if anything, a form of egotistical self-care. I don’t know how to speak to a country that’s busy destroying its neighbor and itself, so I won’t. I thought I’d built a bridge. But when they’re sending tanks over it, it’s easier to burn it and start again elsewhere.
A voice in my head reasonably notes that I didn’t give up English, or move to Europe, when the United States attacked Iraq in a similarly cruel war of choice under a similarly flimsy pretext. The difference is that, as citizens of a democracy, we had recourse: The 2006 elections curbed some of the neocon agenda, and 2008 stopped as much of it as our imperfect system allowed. With Putin’s unending rule, the link between the culture and the state is now existential. One must not blame the Russian people for it; it’s the only possible outcome of living under a madman’s boot for 20-odd years. I would love nothing more than to get back to writing in Russian for the people of free Russia. For now, there’s enough work left at home—not least of all to make sure that the same reactionary ebb of culture that always follows tyrants does not reach here.
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