
If you watch enough American TV, it’s easy to assume that most families follow the same old routine. They go to soccer games together, travel, go on hikes, picnics, play catch, or celebrate kids’ birthdays in the green backyard by the pool, parents sipping cold Coronas and spreading gossip about neighbours, hotdogs steaming on a BBQ.
One of the guys is always fat, always named Bob, and always wears a Hawaiian shirt with a ketchup stain on the chest. The conversation always goes like this:
“Dude, last night’s game was awesome!”
“I know, right? Honey, would you get us more chips? And there’s more beer in the cooler!”
In my family, we never did any of those things. There were no picnics, no BBQs, no park hikes—at least not while we lived in Moscow, where it snows nine months out of twelve, and the winters are dark and depressing.
My father’s idea of quality time with his family was watching TV. And not just any TV, but films about Russian criminals in the 1990s.
These were movies filled with violence, crime, theft, bribery, and background music that stays with you forever, making the hairs on your arms stand straight every time you hear it on the radio.
People give me wide-eyed looks when I say that. But these are some of the most cherished memories I have of my family.
When it happened, it happened the same way. After the dinner dishes were put in the sink, we would cuddle on the couch in front of the TV—Kate and I on one side, empty-handed, my parents on the other side, glasses of red wine in hand, boxes of Milka chocolate on the coffee table. My father had a thing for Milka.
“Back in the USSR, the only chocolate available was this disgusting ninety-percent crap that makes your tongue swell,” he said. “This,” he continued, munching a piece, shaking another one with his thumb and index finger as if to prove a point, “is something else entirely.”
The choice of what to watch was never ours. Dad simply put something on, and the three of us—Mom, Kate, and I—had to accept whatever it was.
There would be music clips and concerts of famous Russian singers from the 1990s and 2000s. My father listened to the music of a generation before him—something I do as well, and, I imagine, so do most people. According to Woody Allen, we all believe we were born just a tad too late.
There were songs about “Soviet boys lost in the sands of Afghanistan.” Songs about women urging men to leave; men desperate to come back; songs about Siberian colds and cathedral-shaped tattoos on the backs of your prison mates.
I watched my father squint and shake his head to the rhythm. He’d see me nod to the music and say, “Isn’t it something, huh?”
“Yeah,” I’d reply coyly. He seemed to think I knew exactly what he meant, but, embarrassingly enough, I understood nothing. I simply pretended to see something I could not.
Then there were the TV shows.
In my early childhood, we watched reruns of Brigada—an immensely popular Russian TV series about a group of twentysomethings in the early 2000s who rise to political and business power through bribery and murder. That TV series was so popular in Russia that people would quote the protagonist, Sasha White, on the streets. He was played by a popular Russian actor Sergei Bezrukov (last name literally meaning “handless,” though both of his hands, I am happy to say, were intact).
Sasha White is more than just a movie character: he’s a figure of modern Russian lore, the embodiment of authority, power, and masculinity. He’s someone every boy adored and wanted to be. He’s someone you mention to any Russian between the ages of eighteen and sixty and see a smile of recognition form on their lips.
The other TV series we rewatched constantly was called The Bandit St. Petersburg, which follows the story of a cop-turned-thug in—you’ve guessed it—Saint Petersburg, played by a popular Russian actor Dmitry Pevtsov. (His last name means “singer.” And he does sing, though these days, mostly pro-Putin songs.)
There’s a scene from that show I remember as if I watched it last night. We are sitting on the couch, a cosy November evening. On the screen, a woman is tied to a radiator as three Chechen men undress her and her husband is forced to watch.
As the scene goes on, my father puts down his Milka and squints ever so slightly, as if trying to find some hidden artistic meaning.
My mother exhales loudly, then screams, “Oh for fuck’s sake, is this really necessary?! We have kids in the house!”
The spell is broken, and my father comes back, as if from a trance, and fast-forwards the scene. But the damage had been done.
Those images, in my sister Kate’s words, “still visit her in her dreams.”
There’s a reason why my father watched these shows or liked them so much. And it goes beyond just his taste for violent TV drama.
The “roaring ’90s” was a strange time in my country. It’s both feared and missed. It was a time you could find, according to my mother, kids high on glue in the underground passages of Tverskaya Street. It was a time of bandits in oversized leather jackets—young men who had just come back from the Chechen war and possessed only one basic skill: how to kill—taking what they wanted, simply because they could. It was also a time of opportunity, when no laws were in place when you could do anything, as long as you had imagination or balls.
Thugs were the elite in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Russia. They controlled most of the assets, the government itself. They held businesses, and power. For a long time, the words “businessman” and “criminal” were synonyms in Russian culture. To some older people, they still are.
In the power vacuum and chaos that Russia was in the late 1990s, bandits, romanticized by the TV shows, became role models for young men, someone to emulate. Much like everyone in the States wanted to be Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger—simple but strong guys who fight for justice, with a passion for witty aphorisms (“Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!”)—everyone in post-Soviet Russia wanted to be Sasha White: strong, powerful, without a moral compass, or anxiety about the future.
My father wasn’t of the oligarch generation—he missed the boat by about a decade. Still, what exactly he was up to during the 1990s and early 2000s is a mystery that will never be revealed. Every time I ask him, he shrugs it off, eyeing me with suspicion.
“What do you need to know that for?”
My mother, who knows him better than anyone and met him during their freshman year at university, when they were both seventeen, says my father had spent a chunk of his twenties driving a beat-up Mercedes with his “bros” over puddles, watching as the water splashed on the sidewalks, cosplaying Brigada characters who, at that time, were already coming out of fashion. I also know that he launched several businesses in his mid-twenties, including a grocery store—which was raided by bandits at one point—and a sports pub named “Doping.”
“Your father wasn’t a criminal. He was too nice and too smart, but he really, really wanted to be one,” my mother always reassured me when I interrogated her for details.
This was a disappointment. The young me, growing up on Brigada, always imagined my father as Sasha White. And he was, in a way.
The phrasings, the tilt of the head, the cold stare. My father would quote the characters from the TV shows as if the words were his. Young photos of my father show him dressed in a leather jacket and white shirt, with his hair slicked back with a thick gel, bike sunglasses covering his face—a cosplay on Russian gangsters of the 1990s or, more likely, just one: Sasha White.
The turning point for my father’s gangster cosplay came when he was my age. A heated argument with a stranger on the dance floor of a bar in Podolsk got out of hand. The man took out a knife, but my father managed to turn his torso just right to only get a ripped shirt near the heart. One millimeter to the left and my life story might have been very different.
That moment, I’d learn, would become a bridge between my father’s childhood and adulthood. The times were changing, bandits weren’t walking the streets in leather jackets anymore, and it was time to grow up and live on.
Also, because half of my father’s classmates in Podolsk School Number One ended up in jail—with the other half in rehab—my parents wanted me to grow up in the country’s capital. By the time I turned six, we decided to move to Moscow.
In the next couple of years, my father would build a business with his mother, the first accounting firm in Russia. He would apply to Stanford and other competitive business programs around the world. We would eventually move away from Russia, allowing Kate and I to learn English and live in the Big World, make friends from around the planet, and learn about life outside of grim, grey, post-Soviet Russia. Living in California was far from Podolsk, bar fights, and driving over puddles. My mother was glad that Sasha White was buried deep in my father’s past.
The last remnants of my father’s gangster side truly went away when he married his second wife, my stepmother. She is the opposite of my mother in her approach to tolerating my father’s behaviour, which is to say, she doesn’t.
Every time my dad has a drink or two and transforms into one of the characters from his past, turning on an episode of Brigada on the TV with my two youngest sisters present, she snaps at him, “You’ve already brought up two—” she rolls her eyes in the direction of me and Kate, “—on this crap. Please don’t do this to our kids.”
The way she says “our kids” makes me feel like she means “your real kids,” but I don’t mind. She’s right—some things are best left in the past. Surely, my little sisters, growing up in the modern-day UK, won’t understand the bandit references from 1990s Russia. Nor should they.
I then turn to look at my father, who, unwillingly, obliges and sits staring into space, a drink in his hand. He looks beaten, defeated, as if unable to be his true self. But somehow also happy that he is himself and not Sasha White.
When, in late November 2024, Masha’s Russian friends invited us over for a house party in central London, I dressed up in the style of the 1990s. I put on a white shirt, a golden chain over my neck, and a fake golden watch on my wrist, using photos of my young father for reference. I shaved, took out an earring from my left ear—I’d get beaten up for dressing the way I do now back in the 1990s—and slicked my hair back with gel.
When I was done, I looked at myself in the mirror and expected to see Sasha White. But what I really saw was a young version of my father.
Not a criminal, but a young educated man with—as Masha’s father puts it, “Sad eyes of a Jewish boy”—and a penchant for pretending to be tougher than he really is.
The thing that happens when you grow up with certain movies or music is that, even if it’s horrible or just plain bad, you love it. Not at first, but eventually.
To this day, Kate and I listen to music our dad put on as he told us stories about his friends getting into trouble with gangster mobs.
Old prison anthems by Mikhail Krug (literally, “Michael Circle”) make us feel cuddled, as if under a warm blanket. Quoting characters such as Sasha White instantly creates a bond that nobody else understands—unless they also grew up the way we did; then they’re instantly friends.
I can’t say I feel the same things my dad did when listening to songs about Soviet boys in Afghanistan or cathedral-shaped tattoos on the backs of your prison mates. But lately, listening to old Russian songs after a long workday, I feel something. My teeth clench, my chest tightens, and I feel connected to a world and to a past larger than just me.
I imagine a bare-chested guy sitting in front of a fire, strumming his guitar, while his friends share bottles of Baltika and sing along. I feel a peculiar lightness of being and travel not just through time to a world I know nothing of but also to a worry-free place that feels strangely familiar.
Sure, the titles Kate and I were brought up on literally make some people vomit, including Russians who consider themselves intellectuals. But we can’t help ourselves. It’s who we are. Perhaps not everyone will feel cozy listening to Russian chanson—but everyone, I am convinced, has their own key to a door called Childhood.
It’s not the one you choose, so it’s not something you should apologize for.
These days, my sister Kate and I walk the streets of other people’s cities and countries and watch the kids play in parks, living a Western life so different from the one we’ve had. We put on a theme song from Brigada, one earbud for me, one for her.
Memories of those evenings by the TV with our dad surface, along with images of familiar characters killing each other for money or influence, women tied to radiators, gangsters taking over government assets, and becoming oligarchs.
And with it, a warm feeling washes over us both.
One that’s at once so close and so far away, unreachable, as if a distant dream.
One that could be best summarized by the closing scene of another cult movie from that period, Brother 2.
A woman with jet-black hair sits in the first-class cabin of an Aeroflot flight en route to Moscow from Chicago and asks for vodka. When the flight attendant refuses to serve alcohol during takeoff, she takes off her wig, revealing her bald head.
She looks at the poor flight attendant and says, “Boy, you didn’t get it. I said, bring us a little vodka. We’re flying home.”
Thanks for reading.
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