Seven decades after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union was teetering on the brink of collapse as internal unrest threatened to dissolve the once stalwart nation that had risen to global dominance. With Moscow losing control, the country dissolved as 10 republics seceded during the last quarter of 1991, that Christmas. President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, no longer having a country to run.
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In an instant, Diana Markosian’s world was turned upside down. Born in Moscow in 1989, her parents’ dream for their family was wrested away and their PhDs couldn’t save them in an economy with no jobs. As a child, Markosian and her brother took the streets to pick bottles to make enough money to buy bread. Her father made painted matryoshka dolls to sell to tourists visiting the Red Square, while the stress of destitution eventually broke the marriage apart. “I saw in my mother the sadness of ‘this can’t be my life,’” Markosian recalls.
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On January 2, 1993, the radiant light of escapism came from the most unlikely of places. The daytime soap opera, Santa Barbara, was ending its ten-year run that month, and would become the very first American television show broadcast in Russia. As a young girl, Markosian idolized the show, which chronicled the dramatic intrigues of the Capwell clan, who embodied the glitz and glamour of 1980s Southern California.
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But these images of wealth and prestige led Markosian to believe that America wasn’t a place she and her family belonged — which made her move to the actual Santa Barbara all the more a shock to the system after her mother decided to marry an American man and immigrate to the United States in 1996 in order to provide the best possible life for her children.
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