Zhenya ended up finding me before I found him. On a Saturday morning in March 2017 while living in Kyrgyzstan, I got a Facebook message in Russian:

“Hello, Jeff!!!! Do you remember me???Leningrad??? Our friendship? Where have you been????”

It was Zhenya, irrepressibly. His exuberance and energy popped from the punctuation marks. Four exclamation points, three question marks. I answered immediately:

“Zhenya, is that you? I am alive and healthy. I have missed you.” 

And we were off, rekindling our friendship. More exclamation points and questions marks followed.  

“I searched for you on the internet, searched for you in the articles of Sports Illustrated and News-Sun. I knew that you take a lot of risks by traveling throughout the former USSR! It’s very dangerous!!!! God has blessed you that you are still alive!!!!! There was no information about you anywhere! I thought that you had moved to Communist China! But all has changed there now. Tell me where you have been these past 22 years????? Where do you live? Where can I see photos of  your life? Maybe in Twitter? Did you get married (smiley face)???? But thank God you are alive.”

Zhenya, I learned, was still consumed by politics and geopolitics. He had gone from the soapbox to political turmoil. This time the words came in all caps. 

“I am where there is always REVOLUTION!!!!! I live in UKRAINE!!!!! Do you remember how I campaigned for Sobchak???? How a small, unknown Colonel Putin worked in our Leningrad University?”

Yes, indeed. Russian President Vladimir Putin had been a university bureaucrat in the early 1990s at Leningrad State University when Zhenya studied there. Over the ensuing decades, as Putin ascended to power in Russia and came to dominate the political landscape of the former Soviet Union, he had targeted Ukraine with economic pressure for her turn to the West in what came to be a standoff with Europe and the U.S. Now, with Ukraine at war with Russia over Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and support for breakaway movements in eastern Ukraine, Putin was Zhenya’s enemy number one.   

We then turned to our friendship forged in those years of disintegration. Zhenya asked about my meditation practice and remembered the Buddhist monks from Korea who had visited. 

“I remember you used to meditate sometimes in the morning. You said Buddhism was closer to you. I remember you had a guest visit with a big hat. I helped her find a samovar!!!! I am curious. So many years have passed. How has your inner life changed? Your world view? What religion is closer to you?”

The barrage of questions made me realize that, despite the distance, Zhenya and I had stayed connected — as if we were part of that rushing river metaphor from A River Runs Through It. My thoughts over the years of Zhenya in Siberia and memories of him catching the frisbee were, indeed, “timeless raindrops,” and now 20 years later we were rediscovering the words under the rocks.

Just as I had never forgotten him, Zhenya had never forgotten me.

“I have suffered from believing all my life that something happened to you. I learned so much from you. You influenced my world view. I loved you like a brother!!!!!!!!!! It was horrible. In 1994 I moved to the Far North. There’s a place near the North Pole called Oimyakonskaya Depression.  The winter temperature there is 65 to 76 Celsius below zero. In such conditions your eyes can freeze. I was there until 1996. It’s the polar circle. On the shores of the Laptev Sea. After this I returned to Ukraine. For 20 years I have prayed to God that all’s good with you!!!!!!”

***

Zhenya and I met again in April 2019, 25 years after our last meeting in St. Petersburg. We caught up when I visited Ukraine on a work trip. I had talked to him earlier in the week about our meeting, and he told me he weighed a lot. I recommended he start working out – with Zhenya we always had a very direct way of communicating. During dinner at a Georgian restaurant in Kyiv, we returned to a comfortable, immediate style of communication. There we were — two men in our fifties, one gray, one bald, bantering back and forth as we used to. As before, we took on different roles: I became his coach to encourage him to get in shape, he the not-so-earnest athlete. He became my professor of Ukrainian literature, and I the thick-headed American. He the gigolo on his fourth wife. Me the puritan with just one wife. The roles blurred one into the other, with levity and laughter linking one moment to the next. 

Over Georgian cheese pizzas and dumplings, I found a Soviet-formed person transformed into a Ukrainian patriot. Zhenya, who had spoken little of his Ukrainian background during the time I knew him in the Soviet Union, speaks Ukrainian side by side with Russian and is steeped in his country’s history and literature. In this sense, he reflects perfectly Ukraine’s transformation over the last three decades into an independent and free country. He works as the head of the grain export department of a Ukrainian company and is settled – finally — into family life in Cherkasy, Ukraine. His wife Oksana, a Ukrainian woman whom he married in the late 1990s, seemed to me to be just the kind of person Zhenya needed to balance his energetic, impulsive personality. They have a daughter, Katya, who was studying in university and has since gotten married. 

Zhenya’s career path went through the frigid Russian Polar North, where he worked at a gold mine, to Ukraine where he returned after the collapse of his third marriage. It was 1996, the same year Ukraine passed a new constitution. That step toward sovereignty convinced Zhenya to stay in his homeland. Needing a salary, he got a job teaching science and supervising a girls’ dorm. He then landed a job at the newly formed Central Bank of Ukraine, auditing regional branches of banks. That’s when his career took off. Quick thinking with a mind for numbers, he proved adept at finding banks’ hidden accounts. Regional bank heads who had borrowed government money dismissed Zhenya at first as a foolish schoolteacher. The job was dangerous, with high level bargaining between regional banks and Central Bank officials involving payments made in return for auditors looking the other away. But Zhenya bucked the trend, leveling fines on the regional bank heads. 

Did you take bribes, I ask? “I have never taken bribes,” he answers. “We lived poor, ate pasta and potatoes and drank tea. I walked to work.” 

In his current job, which involves pricing grain purchases, Zhenya often has to negotiate with Ukrainian farmers and grain brokers. During those sessions, Zhenya told me he never denigrates his competitors in front of his negotiating partner to make his company look better. “My competitors, when they negotiate, criticize the competition using insults. I say so and so company has its advantages, and they are good in this, but I then say what we are good at — that we pay immediately on site at the farm. I don’t smear others.” 

When I ask him why, Zhenya recalls our first meeting in 1989: “You gave me a lot in terms of world view. You gave me a push. This (Soviet) system and its propaganda developed me. I had these gates that closed me off to the new. When I saw you for the first time near metro station Primorskya, I was on the carton speaking. When you first talked to me, I thought you were an American spy working for intelligence. This was bred in us: if he’s a foreigner, he’s a spy. You don’t understand what a revolution you made in my mind. You yourself don’t understand this. For you it’s all principles of the American way of life. You don’t notice what you gave me – that there’s another way to live in life.”

Zhenya continued: “When you start to smear others, a rebound effect takes place. The other guys sees what a morally degraded person you are. Take our average Soviet person who grows up in the village, is unsatisfied with life and his salary. Many try to move to the city, and we say a person came from village, but you can’t take the village out of him. I am also from the village, but if a person is flexible and able to absorb new things like a sponge absorbs water, he can change and learn.”

Yes, I remembered. This was Zhenya’s survival skill, honed in those dark days of transition when he slept on my creaky couch: “From the threads of the rich, a poor man can make a shirt for himself.” And this was a confirmation of the need for all us to be flexible. We can stick to tired ways or change. We can be reborn.

***

Over the course of two days, Zhenya served as my tour guide through central Ukraine. We visited the village of Ukraine’s most famous poet Taras Shevchenko and the nearby village where Zhenya himself had grown up. There he clambered up playground equipment and pretended to play King of the Hill. For a moment, I was transported back to our frisbee games from decades before, to our friendship full of play and ligh-heartedness. Our conversations in his car flowed from one topic to another. I found Zhenya to be more contemplative, and his memory of decades-old events was uncanny. But most of our conversations wound back to Ukraine’s current predicament, a country haunted by its Soviet past and beleaguered by its Russian present. If Zhenya were young, he said he’d would grab a gun and go fight Russian-backed forces. 

And yet Zhenya himself is haunted by his own Soviet past, which keeps paying bitter dividends decades later. The way he sees it is that in 1989 he helped Leningrad lawyer Anatoli Sobchak get elected to the Soviet Parliament, where Sobchak distinguished himself as a fresh voice fighting for democracy and human rights in the Soviet Union. After his election as mayor of St. Petersburg in 1991, Sobchak gave Vladimir Putin a start in politics by hiring him to work in the Leningrad’s mayor’s office. That office became Putin’s career springboard, the place where he made contacts who surround him to this day as president of Russia. “I truly regret that 32 years ago, I helped bring to power Anatoli Sobchak and indirectly gave a boost to the start of Putin’s presidential career, with all its ensuing consequences,” Zhenya wrote to me. 

But before I could feel too sorry for Zhenya, his irrepressibly positive spin-on-life reasserted itself. “But the most important result of my working on Sobchak’s election was that I met the best friend in the world – Jeff Lilley. . Thank the heavens that I have such a splendid friend.”  All caps, followed by 50, yes, 50, exclamation points.

***

Zhenya is now in his fifties. He has been divorced three times and has children living in Canada and Italy. His wife Oksana herself lives day to day; after a 2012 operation, she still suffers from the remnants of a tumor in her brain. Zhenya himself was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago, a consequence, he says with a wry smile, of the “sweet life” he led in his youth. 

What was it that Zhenya said in our first conversations on Facebook: “Life has beaten me down, but I remain an optimist always. Surely pain was thought up by the heavens so that we don’t forget we are People!!!!”

Our two-day reunion came to an end. But not without a resolution. Zhenya and I agreed to walk the Santiago de Compostela one day. A five-week pilgrim’s walk from Spain to Portugal for a pair of friends growing older. Before my departure for the U.S., Zhenya told me he is already counting his steps every day on an app. “See, I am already getting in shape,” he told me.  “Coach, don’t scold me.”

END

Post-script: 2024

Vladimir Putin’s Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2022. I stay in touch with Zhenya who has remained in Ukraine since the start of war because he is of fighting age, meaning between the ages of 18 and 60. Our Whatsapp chats careen back and forth between updates on the war, Zhenya’s calls for the U.S. to do more to help Ukraine, and his daughter Katya and son-in-law’s new life in California. “At least some members of my family are safe,” Zhenya says. 

Zhenya is now a grandfather. He has lost weight and has made great strides toward getting healthy. Somehow, I desperately hope that Ukraine can prevail in this war and remain a sovereign country. When I need a boost, I think of Zhenya.

Zhenya in a grocery store in Ukraine in 2023.

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