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The day the first wave of protests broke on January 23, my boyfriend and I had to stay in. I had a haircut appointment made in the late afternoon, but the entire area around Pushkinskaya was blocked off to traffic. Later, I needed to get some beef and spices for tacos—a first for my Russian boyfriend—at the store. He refused to let me go alone—just in case. A couple weeks later, my boyfriend wouldn’t answer his phone after a night out with his friends. I wasn’t quite sure of the protest activity planned for that day, but I was panicked, convinced he’d somehow gotten tangled up with some meanderings protesters and been subsequently arrested. See, protests are different here. There’s a real threat of arrest, of the kinds of consequences that seem for many Americans to be relegated to the world of spy movies—and I don’t just mean rubber bullets and tear gas. In fact, when the first wave broke,...

The end of my relationship began with a coat. Yes—a coat. "What's that?" His brows furrowed, he stood, intensely scrutinizing something resting a little ways up my butt on the back of my winter jacket. "What's what?" Making a futile attempt to turn my head a full 180 degrees, while simultaneously grabbing at my coat, I tried to discern what he was talking about. Finally, after furrowing my own brows, a circular stain began to appear. "Oh that. I don't know. Some stain." I was ready to move on—he wasn't. Thus began one of the biggest fights of my entire year and a half long relationship: the oil stain on the back of my winter coat. I met this man (let's get stereotypical and call him Vlad) in 2017, a little more than a year after I first moved to Russia. Oddly enough, even though, at this point I had lived in Russia for over two years, not counting the...