No More Carefree Days For Students

I never met Anthony Riccio, the American student who was found dead last month outside his Moscow dormitory. And chances are that our paths never would have crossed in the year that he planned to be here. But his death still moved me, almost as if he were a close friend I had inexplicably lost.


Although I did not know him, I assume Riccio came to Russia with the same goals that any student has -- to live in the country he had studied for years, to expand his Russian beyond the rigid contours of a classroom into the exciting world of everyday Moscow. He probably wanted just to live alongside ordinary Russians.


He certainly was doing the right thing. Being a student here is one of the best ways to get to know the country. With no office to report to and none of the cares of home, you can immerse yourself completely in the language and culture. You can go to art exhibits and hang out with Russian friends; you can spend long afternoons and even longer evenings around the kitchen table discussing everything from inflation to Tolstoy. You see an everyday life that many businessmen, diplomats and journalists miss.


I was a student here way back in the pre-perestroika era, and was so enamored of the experience that I later became a group leader of an American language-study program. I remember the satisfaction of student life, and in all my years of living here as a professional have not learned as much about daily life in Russia as I did back then.


I also remember the reckless abandon with which we students lived. I used to do things here I would never do in any city anywhere else in the world. Once I went to the theater with a man who, seeing I was a foreigner, came up to me on the street and asked me to go with him. I would ride the metro and take taxis alone late at night, usually sliding into my dorm just before the 1 A.M. curfew. My students were much wilder: one young woman disappeared on me for nearly two days, emerging to say she had spent the weekend partying with some famous artists she had met by chance at an exhibit.


Of course, back then we were "protected" by the KGB. In fact, our only concern was keeping the KGB from finding out about our Russian friends. Some students were tailed by agents when they left the dorm; most feared to call Russian friends from the dorm's bugged phones. We never worried about crime because we figured, rightly or wrongly, that nothing could happen to an American student here. So we took chances. We were not even concerned that the flimsy locks to our dorm rooms were all the same, with one key fitting them all.


The tragic fate of Anthony Riccio is a testament to the dramatic degree to which student life in Moscow has changed. With muggings and thefts an everyday occurrence, no foreigner is immune. Riccio's death has sent a shock wave through the foreign community, and frightened other students living here.


How do you go about your life here without putting yourself at risk? For students, this is especially hard. They are here to immerse themselves, to go places, to meet people. But the carefree (and reckless) past is gone. Ironically, in many ways being a student now is even more difficult than it was in the days of the KGB.