Freedom, My Dear

For the full essay, see it on The Butter.
Originally published on January 21, 2015.

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In college, I was a terrible Russian language and literature major. I never finished reading Crime and Punishment, I still haven’t touched War and Peace, and I never went to the public Russian baths. Even though I spent a significant amount of time in the Motherland — a month living in a Siberian village on Lake Baikal, fourteen months in St. Petersburg, and a month studying in Moscow — I never had a proper public banya experience.