How can I make sense of the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine? Each day we awake and write to family and friends (in Kamianske, Kharkiv, Kyiv…) to make sure they’re still alive. It’s a grim ritual. I don’t want to ask them to write back if they don’t have the capacity, either emotional or material. But I can see when my messages are read, and that means something. A friend in Kharkiv has no electricity and no water, but he wrote to say they’re hanging on. What do you do with that information, when you yourself are not under threat, but people you know and love are?

This is a thought exercise, short and sad, to explain how I use academic and non-academic means to deal with (geo)political tragedies that implicate my personal and professional lives.

Russia was my chosen home for over twenty years. I married in, built a family, a couple tiny businesses, made a life. Went back to school, got a couple masters degrees, started a PhD, and started working toward an academic and public policy career with Russia at the heart. And then I got kicked out of the country in a very unpleasant way. I’ve written about this elsewhere. It was terrible.

I had to rebuild my life and career plan in fundamental ways. And it’s more than just the practical things, like how can I write about Russia – the country I know best – if I’m not allowed to go there. It’s also hugely emotional. There’s a number of levels of trauma and loss to cope with, and it’s no easy task. One of the things I did was to reorient myself towards Ukraine, where I can still travel. I had the good fortune to go Ukraine a number of times in the past few years, and I made real friends. My wife has relatives in the east too, so it’s an easy fit.

And now we’re watching in horror, from afar, as Russian troops destroy beautiful cities in Ukraine. Cities I know and cities I don’t know. Places I’ve been and places I’ve wanted to go. Obviously I’m not forced to deal with this in the same way that people on the ground are. But I also have figure out how to deal with this in my own way, implicated but at a distance.

How can I process the fact that the hall where I lectured on urban geopolitics in 2019 has been obliterated? How to cope with the fact that a young Russian man followed orders, pushed a button, launched a weapon of unmistakable death, and destroyed the university? How do I process the very real possibility that one of these days, I will write my friends or relations as usual, and they will not write back?

I am powerless to stop this and my tears don’t help anyone or anything, but I still can’t stop crying.

And then I remember how I managed my expulsion from Russia. I wrote about it a lot. Privately, journaling to myself and sharing with friends. I wrote here too, in this blog. And eventually these explorations translated into the academic sphere and I started looking at authoritarian practices in Russia and beyond, and started writing and publishing professionally on it as well.

So there will be much more on Ukraine coming from me in the future, because I don’t know how else to make sense of things other than appealing to extant literatures and building on them. (It’s awful timing that I submitted two project proposals a few months ago to study Ukrainian geopolitics, since the cities where I was planning on working have been devastated if not destroyed. But that doesn’t matter, of course, in light of what people are actually dealing with on the ground).

But what about internally? I want to share my private method for managing these traumas, without which I wouldn’t be able to dream of doing academic work, much less just managing to get through the day.

My approach stems from urban geography, even though I haven’t published enough in those domains either. In essence, I build an internal city, a personal urban landscape that’s invisible to everyone but me. It’s composed of buildings and neighborhoods and parks and streets from everything and everyone in my life that I’ve loved, or that has touched me. There are entire pedestrian boulevards dedicated to certain childhood impressions, and I love how this internal space ignores physical limitations and terrestrial imaginations. Albuquerque, New Mexico, mixes easily with Geneva, Switzerland, in a gorgeous topological fantasy that, to me, is natural and significant and whole. Sometimes I take real places (the University of New Mexico duck pond, for example) with impressionistic constructions inspired by feelings (the sensation of throwing bread to seagulls with the alps in the background). My life in St. Petersburg, Russia, brings a dark, artistic beauty to certain secret neighborhoods, which then open up onto grand imperial boulevards lined with majestic buildings that look like nothing so much as wedding cakes in a perfect row. My friends and loved ones have parks and wild open spaces for them, or deeply welcoming buildings with gorgeous embellishments that, to me, are deeply significant.

And in this deeply private city, I’ve built monuments. For me, these are based on Soviet memorials to loss and tragedy and, sometimes, victory. I have a beautiful memorial complex in my internal urban landscape for Russia – for the Russia that was, for the Russia that could have been, and for the Russia that is.

And now, tragically, I am building new memorials for so many different places and moments in Ukraine, for my family and friends there, hammered out from the heartsick worry that we’ve been living with since the war began.