I Thought I Was Safe. But My Story Was Only Beginning
I never dreamed of moving to America.
I didn’t grow up looking at pictures of California and thinking, “One day I’m going to live there.”
By the time I left Russia, I already had a life. I worked, I had friends, a person I loved, my paintings, my clothes, my plans for the future. I loved Saint Petersburg. I had worked hard to build a normal life for myself.
So leaving Russia was not about chasing money or a beautiful life by the ocean.
It was about reaching a point where staying started to feel more dangerous than leaving.
I grew up in a small village in the Transbaikal region of Russia. My childhood was poor, and I started working very young. I collected mushrooms in the forest, helped older people with their gardens, chopped firewood, and sold wild mushrooms along the road.
As a child, I learned something very early: if I wanted my life to change, I had to move.
First I left my village.
Later I moved to Saint Petersburg.
That city changed me. For the first time, I started earning my own money, buying clothes I actually liked, meeting very different people, and understanding myself better.
I also started understanding my feelings toward men. I met people involved in drag and travesti performances and sometimes performed with them. It was never the center of my life, but it helped me experience a kind of freedom I had never known before.
I was building a life that I actually liked.
That is important to understand, because I did not leave Russia simply because I hated my life there.
I didn’t.
There were many things and many people I loved.
But over the years, I started feeling that I had to control myself more and more.
What can I say?
Who can I trust?
Should I talk about my personal life?
Should I post this online?
Should I share my political opinion?
Maybe it is safer to stay quiet.
The dangerous thing about living like that is that you slowly get used to it.
You tell yourself, “I have a job. I have a home. I’m okay.”
Until one day you realize that you spend too much of your life thinking about what you are allowed to say instead of thinking about what you actually want.
Ukraine was also never some distant country to me.
I have relatives there. I traveled there. I visited people there. I knew ordinary Ukrainian families.
So when the relationship between Russia and Ukraine became more and more dangerous, it felt personal to me.
I am a pacifist.
I don’t want people killing each other. I don’t care what flag is above someone’s head. I don’t want to kill anyone, and I don’t want anyone to be killed in my name.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, I was riding the Moscow Metro to work.
It was early.
People around me were sleepy, looking at their phones, going to work like on any other morning.
I opened the news.
The war had started.
I read the headline several times because I did not want to understand what I was reading.
When I got on the escalator, I had a severe panic attack. I grabbed the handrail because I felt like I might fall.
I remember thinking:
“This really happened.”
That evening, I joined an anti-war protest.
I was not going there to fight anyone or destroy anything.
I wanted to say something very simple:
I am against this war.
I do not want people to be killed.
I was detained.
After that came two weeks of detention, threats, fear, and an extremely difficult psychological period.
That was when the situation stopped being something I watched on my phone.
It became my own life.
And still, I did not leave Russia immediately.
Leaving your country sounds simple when someone says it quickly:
“Just pack your bags and go.”
But go where?
With what money?
Where are you going to sleep?
What happens to your job?
Your belongings?
Your friends?
The person you love?
Your entire life?
I first went back to Transbaikal to stay with relatives and recover.
Later I returned to Moscow and slowly started preparing to leave. I sold computers, phones, jewelry, paintings, clothes, and some of the old stage outfits connected to my life in Saint Petersburg.
Friends helped me.
My partner in Moscow helped me financially then and continued helping me after I left.
On September 21, 2022, mobilization was announced in Russia.
I took out my military documents.
I had previously served in the Russian military, and one of the military specialties listed in my documents was military food service cook.
Maybe I would never have been called up.
I will never know.
But I was not willing to stay and find out.
For me, it did not matter whether someone gave me a weapon or told me to cook food for the military.
I did not want to participate in that war in any way.
On September 29, I boarded a train to Kazakhstan.
At the border, officers checked our documents. Some men were taken off the train.
When an officer took my passport, I remember sitting there and realizing that I had absolutely no control over what would happen next.
Then he returned it.
The train moved.
I had left Russia.
But I had no real plan.
My first city in Kazakhstan was Atyrau.
I arrived with no hotel reservation, no apartment, and nowhere to stay.
I thought I would simply buy a ticket to Almaty and continue my journey.
There were no tickets for several days.
After mobilization, huge numbers of Russians had arrived in Kazakhstan. Hotels were full. Apartments were difficult to find. Transportation was overloaded.
Outside the station, taxi drivers, money changers, and other men immediately started approaching me.
Some joked about the way I was dressed. Some joked about Russians running away from mobilization.
Maybe they thought it was harmless.
I was terrified.
I was alone, carrying what was left of my life, in a city I did not know.
I walked away and found a café.
There, I did something I often did when I felt alone: I started a livestream on Bigo Live.
I told my viewers:
“I’m in Atyrau. My train is not for several days, and I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight.”
One of my Russian-speaking viewers suddenly wrote:
“Vadim, I live in Atyrau. You can stay with me.”
And he meant it.
A person who knew me only through my livestreams gave me a place to sleep for three nights until my train left.
There were people who hurt me during my immigration journey.
But there were also complete strangers who saved me.
Eventually, I took the train to Almaty.
On the train, I traveled with another Russian who worked in IT. Later an elderly former teacher and her brother joined our compartment. I gave her my lower bunk.
We talked for hours.
She asked why we were leaving Russia. We told her. She told us about Kazakhstan.
That conversation reminded me not to judge an entire country by a few unpleasant people I had met outside a railway station.
When I arrived in Almaty, I first rented an apartment short-term for about two weeks.
During those two weeks, I searched for a place I could rent for at least a month.
I still had no idea where my life was going.
I was not planning to go to America.
At that point, I did not even know if I would stay in Kazakhstan, go to Europe, or find some other place.
Then I found an apartment.
Or at least I thought I did.
I went to an office.
There was an agent.
There was paperwork.
They called someone who was supposedly the owner of the apartment.
He confirmed that he was expecting me.
Everything looked legitimate.
I paid 300,000 Kazakh tenge for one month of rent and another 300,000 as a deposit.
600,000 tenge total.
For me, that was an enormous amount of money.
I got into a taxi and went to the address.
Nobody was waiting for me.
I called.
No answer.
I called again.
The phone was turned off.
I returned to the office.
The agent was gone.
The manager was gone.
Nobody answered the phone.
The apartment did not exist for me.
My 600,000 tenge was gone.
I felt stupid.
I felt ashamed.
Because those were not just my savings.
My partner had helped me. My friends had helped me. My relatives had helped me. I had sold my belongings.
People had helped me put together the money I needed to survive, and suddenly a huge part of it was gone.
I tried going to the police and tried to find a solution, but I could not quickly recover the money.
Then, once again, a stranger helped me.
I met a local Russian-speaking man and told him what had happened.
He worked in a regular grocery store.
He told me:
“I don’t have a separate bedroom, but you can sleep in my living room for a while.”
So I did.
While sleeping in someone else’s living room, I started searching for my next country.
I looked toward Europe.
I tried to understand whether there was a legal way for me to seek protection in Germany. I searched official information, contacted organizations, filled out forms, and tried to communicate online.
But I had no European visa and no clear way to get there.
At the same time, I started meeting more Russians who had also left after mobilization.
That is how I met Roma.
He was a dentist and surgeon from Russia.
He was in almost the same position as me.
He had left, but he had no idea what came next.
We became friends very quickly.
To keep ourselves from going crazy, we moved constantly.
We explored Almaty. We traveled to canyons, mountains, forests, and tourist places around Kazakhstan.
We also explored the local LGBTQ community.
We personally experienced Kazakhstan as much more traditional and religious than the environment we were used to. We encountered homophobic jokes and uncomfortable reactions, and sometimes hostility toward newly arrived Russians.
At the same time, Kazakh people had also personally helped save me more than once.
Both things can be true.
Eventually, Roma told me that he had an old friend in the United States.
She lived in San Diego.
He had known her for many years, although he was unsure whether staying with her would be a good idea.
I had my own contact in Los Angeles who had told me he could help me when I arrived.
And slowly, an idea appeared that sounded completely insane:
Mexico.
Then the United States.
We started collecting money again.
My partner in Moscow helped me.
Friends helped.
Relatives helped.
Roma flew from Almaty to Istanbul and then to Cancún.
I found cheaper tickets, so my route became much more complicated:
Almaty.
Doha.
Dubai.
Amsterdam.
And finally Cancún, Mexico.
I barely slept.
I kept checking my passport and my phone.
But eventually my plane landed in Mexico.
Roma and I met again.
In Mexico, we found a nonprofit organization that helped vulnerable people seeking protection, including LGBTQ refugees.
We submitted our information and were told that the process would take a few weeks.
We traveled to Tijuana to wait near the U.S. border.
We stayed in cheap hotels and sometimes moved from one neighborhood to another.
During the day, we explored the city.
At night, we were scared.
We heard gunshots.
We saw the aftermath of street violence.
We saw drugs and prostitution openly around us.
And every day we knew that we still had not reached safety.
Then November 30, 2022 arrived.
Roma crossed earlier.
I went later.
My processing at the U.S. border took around six hours.
They checked my documents, asked questions, took fingerprints and photographs, collected biometric information, entered my information into the immigration system, and prepared my documents.
They also contacted the person who was expecting me in Los Angeles.
He confirmed that he knew me and was prepared to receive me.
I sat there waiting.
And something felt different.
Nobody screamed at me.
Nobody humiliated me.
People explained what they were doing.
Eventually, they returned my documents.
I had been allowed into the United States.
I was placed on a bus and taken to San Diego, where an organization offered temporary accommodation.
But I already had another plan.
Roma and his friend were waiting for me in San Diego.
I had already bought a train ticket to Los Angeles, where I was supposed to go next.
I thought I would stay with them for a short time and then continue to Los Angeles.
But that evening, exhausted after Russia, Kazakhstan, losing my money, multiple flights, Tijuana, and hours at the border, I changed my plan.
I stayed in San Diego.
At that moment, I believed the most dangerous part of my journey was finally over.
I was in America.
I thought I had made it.
I thought I was safe.
I had no idea that another difficult chapter of my life was about to begin.
This is only the beginning of my immigration story.