I’ve mentioned in passing here and there that I spent two years in Moscow. I was only 14 and 15, so I don’t remember that much, but I figure it’s worth a post or two. And since skorloff had control of the blog for a while, I had the time to sit and scrape the edges of my brain for what memories I can remember.

The company my dad works for had an office in Moscow and they wanted his help there, so they sent my family over for a two-year assignment. We lived on the 14th floor of an apartment building on a narrow residential street called Bolshaya Bronnaya. It runs directly into a major thoroughfare called Tverskaya, which leads to Red Square and the Kremlin. At the corner of our street and Tverskaya was a McDonald’s – a neighbor I found particularly loathsome as the traffic (human and motorized) around us was always nuts. Also, it was exactly the kind of American culture that I didn’t think should have been allowed out of America. Heading away from Tverskaya on our street, there was a small orthodox synagogue. More on that later though.

Remember that sorry excuse of a coup that happened in 1993? I was there when it happened. It’s one of the few things I remember well, probably because it was so whack. Politics in Russia has never exactly been a stable affair and 1993 was no exception: old man Yeltsin wanted to make changes barred by the constitution, so the members of the parliament declared Yeltsin’s presidency unconstitutional and holed themselves up in the White House until the military forced them out.

My school, the Anglo-American School of Moscow, was then on the American Embassy, which was strategically located across the street from the White House. The Embassy was in the middle of the city. Students were immersed in Moscow’s hustle and bustle – a cultural experience to say the least. With that, though, came certain dangers. Russians built the embassy before the fall of the iron curtain and thoughtfully placed bugs in the walls of one, if not all, of the buildings. That building was abandoned, of course, but it loomed over the school as a symbol of how things used to be.

I don’t remember the details of what happened that day, but I remember we were at school when the siege on the White House began. Everyone was evacuated and told to go home, which I can’t imagine was the wisest thing to do as who knows what was outside waiting for us. We might have been safer in the school’s underground areas. At either rate, I don’t remember anything during the evacuation.

The memories that have remained come from my room on the 14th floor of our apartment. The White House sat squarely in my view and the damn thing was on fire. Literally, black smoke poured out of it. It was shocking. Russians had set fire to their own White House. There it was, the symbol of their government, being blown apart by tanks and burned from the inside out. Coupled with that view was the sound of gunshots ringing out day and night for several days thereafter as the military drove out the stubborn politicians and other skirmishes broke out in the city. Meanwhile, I probably had some Led Zeppelin or Nirvana playing on the stereo, something a 14-year-old have been listening to 1993, which is consequently what this 25-year-old listens to in 2005.

And that’s what I remember of the 1993 coup. Since Skorloff allowed himself to use the “stuff” category for just about anything that didn’t fit in the other categories, I will follow suit. Good idea, dude.