The repairman had a distinctive accent.
“Where are you from?” I asked, making small talk, the way I do with most people who come to my home to fix what breaks.
“Russia,” he replied.
“That must be tough right now,” I said.
“Everybody hates us,” he said with a shrug.
Later, he took out his phone to share a photo of Ukrainian neo-Nazis to prove that Americans have it all wrong about Vladimir Putin, who has said he wants to “denazify” Ukraine.
I am aware that Ukraine has its own far-right neo-Nazi paramilitary groups. Like our own neo-Nazi groups, they may get a lot of attention, but that doesn’t mean the country is teeming with Nazis.
Anyway, I was not up to debating history with someone whose worldview was so jarring to me.
Until that moment, I had just assumed that Russians living outside of Russia, with access to factual coverage of the war instead of pro-Putin propaganda, would agree that the war is a misguided and brutal assault on the people and sovereignty of a neighboring state.
Perhaps I was misled by a story last month about two USA Today/Suffolk University polls, which found that nearly all of the U.S. residents who identified as Russian or Ukrainian were united in their opposition to Putin’s war.
Or maybe I forgot about the influence of dictator-friendly figures like former President Donald Trump, who described Putin’s invasion as “genius,” and Tucker Carlson, who publicly wondered why he should oppose it and has amplified false Russian claims about the U.S. funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
But it does seem that most of the world is on Ukraine’s side and that Russian Americans, far from supporting Putin, are instead worried about being blamed for his aggression. Ukrainian Americans have worried about being mistaken for Russians. In story after story, we’ve read about businesses victimized by ignoramuses who see the word “Russian” and reflexively strike out, often at fellow American citizens.
In West Hollywood, the heart of this region’s Russian-speaking community, Rina Atroshenko has changed the menu of her restaurant Traktir. It no longer boasts of serving “authentic Russian cuisine.” Instead, it touts “Eastern European cuisine.”
This sort of thing is happening all over the country.
I know what it’s like to live in a place where your home country is reviled. During the height of the Vietnam War, my family lived in France for a year.
My folks were ardently liberal and antiwar, and they often took the four of us kids to anti-Vietnam War marches. Our year abroad was no different. I remember walking with them in a cold drizzle in a big demonstration against the war. We were taken aback when we realized that, all around us, people were chanting “Yankee, go home!” We didn’t take the insult personally, because we too supported getting the U.S. out of Vietnam.
Whether it’s the misbegotten American involvement in Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide or the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s my birthright as an American to disagree with my government.
As I handed the repairman a check, he mentioned that he used to work out nearby.
“Oh,” I said, “you must know Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
He scowled.
“I don’t like him anymore,” he told me. “He was talking about vaccines and said, ‘Screw your freedom.’ ” Indeed, last August, Schwarzenegger was brusque about resistance to anti-COVID measures. Freedom, said the repairman, “is why we came here.”
Then how, I wanted to ask, can you support taking someone else’s away?
Robin Abcarian is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
