Losers of the cold war

When the Soviet Union broke up, the support systems of millions of people dissolved overnight. For some, this was positive. There was no more secret police; but there was no more functioning police force at all. The thugs in St. Petersburg and Moscow could murder old ladies for their apartments. There was no more oppressive bureaucracy; but there was no functioning bureaucracy at all. The kleptocrats took over entire countries as their fiefdoms, bringing feudalism back to people who had left it less than a century earlier.

In Kyrgyzstan, the Russians escaped as quickly as they could with the fall of the Soviet Union, but some of the old people had no families in Russia, and so they stayed. They had apartments, maybe, or furniture. But they no pensions. Or bank accounts. And they lost their apartments, one by one, or froze to death in them because they could not afford to heat them.

I was walking with my boyfriend, S, past an old Russian woman holding a bouquet she'd found tossed in the garbage. She was trying to sell the old flowers, their edges brown and curled. S gave her 200 som, about 5 dollars, for them, probably 100 times what she was expecting, and she smiled and said spaceba, spaceba; thank you, thank you.