The Russian dream? Our writer profiles a new kind of North American expat.

Episode transcript

Gail Chaddock: You are a Canadian farmer looking for a better life and convinced that moving to another country is the best way to get there. Would Russia be your first choice?

Last September, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree easing the requirements for residency for people from “unfriendly” Western countries. No need to speak Russian. The government of Nizhniy Novgorod set up an agency to help immigrants find a job, housing, manage legal hurdles. Twelve foreign families have taken up the offer, including Arend and Anneesa Feenstra, and eight of their nine children.

[MUSIC]

Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking today with Fred Weir, who has covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for the Monitor since 1998. He recently met with the Feenstras and is here to talk about it with us today. Fred, thank you for joining us.

Fred Weir: My pleasure.

Chaddock: What appealed to you about writing this story at this time?

Weir: Well, I’ve been aware of this new mini-surge of immigration to Russia for a couple of years. I was looking for, actually, an American family. I did find a couple and they were very reluctant to talk to me. They’re suspicious of Western media. Anyway, I did contact the Feenstras, and they were more forthcoming, so I decided to go out there and meet them. I am a Canadian and they’re Canadians. So we had that in common.

And also I wanted to go to Nizhniy Novgorod. I hadn’t been out of Moscow in a couple of years. And so, just to see a provincial place was, at this point in the war and in the Putin era, it was quite interesting and I stayed a couple of extra days for that.

I think it’s fascinating to talk to people who’ve come from somewhere else to live in Russia, as I myself did. I’m not an immigrant. I haven’t taken Russian citizenship, but I’ve raised a family here. I’ve lived here for almost 40 years, so I approached that story with a certain amount of sympathy as well as a journalist’s interest.

Chaddock: What was it like meeting this family?

Weir: I was actually surprised at how well they’ve adjusted. They’ve got a house almost completely built. They’ve got several outbuildings under construction. Arend, the father, is one of those guys, I guess they used to exist, private farmers, family farmers. They’re patriarchal. He’s a patriarch for sure. Very capable in all spheres. You know, a wizard with machinery who can build a house from the ground up. He may be a little bit politically naive, but in this sense of jack-of-all-trades, he’s really impressive. And he’s got of course his labor force: eight children. And they all were doing chores while we were meeting. It’s a very, very traditional setup.

Chaddock: I spent a lot of time watching some of their YouTube videos. Could those kids possibly be as charming in person as they are on the videos?

Weir: You can’t tell very much about what really is going on inside a family from a brief visit. But from what I did see, they seemed quite happy and well-adjusted. And they were very hospitable. We avoided arguing about religion, because apparently they’re very, very religious. And when I entered the house, he put his hand across the threshold to shake. And I said: “No, in Russia, there is a superstition about shaking hands over a threshold. You’ll have bad luck.” And he said: “Well, I’m a Christian. I don’t believe that.” So anyway, we avoided a quarrel.

Chaddock: Did you get a sense talking to them that they were aware of some of the pitfalls of moving to Russia, you know? A backlash against foreigners down the road? Difficulties in not speaking Russian?

Weir: They have this agency in Nizhniy Novgorod, OKA. They provide interpreters. So for all the bureaucratic stuff that he has to go through, they help him. Otherwise, you know, he doesn’t need any Russian laborers ‘cause he has got his children. I think it’s because it’s a private family farm, that’s what it will be. He’ll rule the roost there and probably he will get along without ever learning Russian, but the kids are picking it up very fast. So I guess in future, he’ll have no trouble finding interpreters.

Chaddock: How did you feel about his response to some of your questions, such as, “I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Putin,” or, “I don’t see any signs of the war in Ukraine,” or “Government here works together with the people for a common goal.” Was it your sense that that was an accurate statement of what he saw, or was he careful about his speech because of where he was?

Weir: Well, I suppose he was being cagey. But as I said, he didn’t seem to show much interest in politics at all. And not seeing signs of the war in Ukraine in Nizhniy Novgorod is not surprising. There aren’t any. And I don’t think he’s penetrated very deeply into even the local community around him. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in his generalizations about what people think. He clearly is naive and doesn’t know much about Russia. But he probably doesn’t need to, because he’s gonna be a farmer there. And it seems to me he’s exactly what Russia needs. This kind of jack of all trades hardly exists in Russia, because collective farming in the past didn’t produce that kind of self-sufficient person who knew how to do every aspect of the farming job. His lack of political interest is also exactly what they need.

Today it’s not like the Soviet Union. I did live five years in the Soviet Union, where the oppressive power of the state was sort of present in every aspect of life. In the Putin era, people live their private lives more or less without any reference to the state. You only get in trouble if you take an active political position on something like the war. But that’s a very small minority of people who do that. And most people seem to be more or less conformists in Russia. Everywhere else I’ve ever been, that is the case. Most people don’t make waves, they get along.

Chaddock: What exactly did he have to commit to to be allowed into Russia on this special dispensation, if you will?

Weir: I did ask him what was your statement, cause you’re allowed to say in your own words, how you share values with Russia. And the decree is pretty vague. The presidential decree says that people should have shared values with Russia and not with the “destructive neoliberal” tendencies of the country that they came from. In the case of the Feensras, I think it was, they’re Christians, they believe in traditional Christian family values. And that would be about it.

Chaddock: Now I grew up in the ’50s convinced that we were gonna be bombed with nuclear weapons at any moment, and that Russia was all about godless communism. How is it that this Christian family feels that they’ll be in a better Christian environment in Russia than in Canada?

Weir: I know Russians. If you ask them: “Do you believe in God?” The vast majority of them say yes. But if you ask them: “Do you go to church?” The vast majority of them will say hardly ever or never. It’s a very, very secular country. And it’s been modernizing. The past three decades especially has gone through quite a lot of stages of development – social, economic development. It’s not very well appreciated about Russia, but it’s a fast changing place.

What Feenstra said to me was: “Well, maybe people don’t go to church, but they hold to traditional values.” And I guess that’s how it looks around him. And in general they do. I mean, I grew up in the fifties as well in Canada, and it looked like quite a traditional, conventional place. What Feestra says about Canada today, he says: “Rainbow flags everywhere, LGBTQ causes being bandied about.” Because Canada has changed a lot in that respect. It’s become, in my view, a much more tolerant place than the Canada I grew up in. But he doesn’t see it that way.

Chaddock: Did you discuss the negative responses on the internet to him and his family because of that claim?

Weir: Yeah, I actually, I forwarded him a couple of articles about him and his family, which were written, I guess, by people who’d never met him, but who watched his videos. He was quite angry by reading them.

I also forwarded him my own story after it was published. And his only comment was: “It’s not too bad.” So he’s a bit of a curmudgeon.

Chaddock: No, no. I come from old farming stock in Southern New Hampshire. That’s also Yankee talk.

Weir: Hmm.

Chaddock: It’s a sense of humor you have to kind of get a grasp on.

You know, one of the interesting things in the aftermath of our last elections in the United States is there’s a lot of soul searching in the Democratic party in how it came to be that these issues, especially the trans issue, became such a prominent thing. Democrats are now saying: “Look, it’s important, but it wasn’t that important.” And the claim is that it’s Russian bots that really emphasized that point, in a sense, manipulating the election into thinking that that was the most important issue for Democrats. What do you make of that?

Weir: I don’t think so. For one thing, all these claims about how Putin can manipulate American society, it just doesn’t ring very true, because I can’t see how Putin or most of the people around him have much understanding about these things. The fact that they themselves react with horror to simple civil rights movements that have come to prominence in our societies. And it will eventually in Russia as well. Because there are all these different types of people, but they’re in the closet. It doesn’t mean they’re not there or that the society is healthier.

Chaddock: You note that you were the first Western journalist to interview this family. At least that’s what they told you. You write: “The Feenstra family has received a lot of press attention in Russia. But surprisingly little in North America.” Why surprisingly, and has the Canadian press covered this story?

Weir: Hardly at all. You know, I used to be for many years the correspondent of Canadian Press in Russia. Canadian Press is like the AP of Canada. It’s a wire service. We would write about everything, every activity of any Canadian who landed in Russia. It was a story that’s fascinating for Canadians. So that lack of interest does surprise me, and whatever interest there was is so negative, just assuming the worst, and even sounding, some of it sounding like they wish the worst on this family. I only located two or three articles, and they weren’t in the big mainstream media at all.

Chaddock: Well, you know, a lot of this story is playing out not in the mainstream media, but on the internet. I was interested that the Feenstras have an extensive YouTube presence telling their own story of selling the farm in Saskatchewan, 28 suitcases, eight children on the plane to Moscow, their hopes that President Putin would meet them at the airport, and so on. How much of their own YouTube account of their own lives did you follow before interviewing the family, and did it shape your approach to reporting the story?

Weir: A little bit of it. As you know, if you’ve delved into it, there’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of their coverage of themselves. Some of it mind-numbingly dull. So I can’t say that I waded through it all. They did ask me, are you going to link to our YouTube channel? And I said, yeah, “I usually do. I guess my readers will want to inform themselves.” And they have apparently got a huge following. But I think that it’s a sideline. I think farming is what the guy really wants to do.

Chaddock: The motive that they gave for this move was that being a farmer in Saskatchewan was increasingly difficult, and they thought that their opportunities would be better in Russia. As a Canadian journalist and a long time resident of Russia, are both of those pieces credible?

Weir: I’ve never been a farmer in Canada, but I have heard that it gets harder and harder to be a private family farm. There are just too many intermediaries, middlemen, too many regulations, too many taxes, land prices are through the roof. But I’m pretty sure the family farm has been disappearing for a long time in North America, and there are probably solid economic reasons why. As for Russia, yes, you know, this is one thing where I don’t know whether he knew this before, but Russia is just a place where agriculture is booming, and it’s just opening up in a lot of ways. It’s only been less than two decades since land ownership has been a possibility. You know they went through this long period of decollectivization. It is possible for the first time in a thousand years. In previous centuries, it would only be a czar who could point to a piece of land and say: “I own this.” And a whole lot of laws to support farming have been passed. There’s a rather canny strategy that Russia has pursued to promote farming.

Since the sanctions started in 2014, it’s become an urgent matter to boost food production. So the Feenstras, knowingly or not, are riding this wave where you’ve got a huge country with vast amounts of arable land, most of it unused. So it’s cheap and available. And you also have the technology now. He told me that he wants to start an internet grocery. And that sounds weird, but a few years ago I went down to the Kaluga region and interviewed a whole bunch of farmers. The most successful ones were people supplying their products directly to a grocery store chain or restaurants, without any middlemen. They were doing very well.

Chaddock: Interesting.

Weir: Because the new technologies make this very possible and Feenstra is on top of that.

Chaddock: Well, it’s interesting. That was one of the fallouts of COVID for small farmers in this country. Supply chains were broken, the local farmer became very important, especially in New England.

Is it propaganda, this pitch to identify traditional Christians from Western countries deemed “unfriendly”? That was an interesting phrase too, in official language. What is the demographic challenge in Russia today? Why solve it by targeting disaffected Westerners to come?

Weir: Obviously there’s a propaganda dimension here. And, as I said, it’s a very secular society.

Chaddock: Exactly.

Weir: People drink, people sing. The only thing that he could point to is the absence of rainbow flags and so on in the streets of Nizhniy Novgorod to sustain the view that Russia is somehow a more upright society than Canada.

There is an information war going on between Russia and the West. In my view, it’s over real geopolitical differences like Ukraine. But everybody spins it into some vast ideological gulf. As I say, Russia is a modern place. It’s a capitalist country, has a fairly vibrant market economy, which is the reason it has survived all the sanctions. The Soviet Union never would have. But entrepreneurs just step in and solve economic problems, and reroute supply chains and all that is going on. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia basically accepted the overall system of the West. So there isn’t that kind of deep ideological difference. And I think a lot of it just gets invented.

Chaddock: Yeah, there’s an interesting historical precedent here. In the ’20s and ’30s, there was apparently a real push to encourage Black Americans to come to Russia on the grounds that they would be treated better than they were in pre-civil-rights United States. FDR had exchanges with Stalin about: “Just cut that propaganda, and there will be more recognition and support for the Soviet Union.” I understand some 12,000 Black Americans came to Russia at that time.

Weir: I was friends with a daughter of one of those Black Americans who came to Russia in the 1930s. She’s gone back to the United States. So that particular ideological immigration did not work well for the people who came to the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just [Black people]. It was white communists, people who were fellow travelers who wanted to live under communism. That was a different era, of course, but there were a lot of people like that. I don’t know if you know of Vladimir Posner. ...

Chaddock: Yes.

Weir: Yes. Well, he’s a friend of mine, and his father came back to the Soviet Union, brought him back in 1953. So that kind of interchange has always been there. A certain number of people come and go, and some of them stay in Russia and find a niche, raise families here. I did it myself, not intending to, but that’s how it’s turned out. I had started a family. I had a great job being a journalist in this country. It was better for me than going back to Canada. I do run into foreigners all over the place. I know of one Italian fellow who started a farm and is creating really good Italian-style cheese and marketing it, again, through the internet. If you can get on his list, you’re really lucky. So all that is happening. It’s a small phenomenon, but it’s a fascinating one.

Chaddock: Fred, thank you for taking the time, on Russian time, to be with us today.

Weir: Thank you. It was fun.

Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins and Jingnan Peng and Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineer is Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flat. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2025.