silkroadcowboy

On the day after Western Christmas, 1991, the country known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) dissolved. Mikhail Gorbachev, namesake (but no relation) of the Soviet leader at the time remembers exactly where he was that day. He was in the sack, late, after a night of raucous sex with a very cute classmate in his Harvard poli-sci class. Christmas night, she had pushed him back on the bed, pulled off her nighty and said, “Merry Christmas, Misha”. Misha believed he was up to the task, but she had worn him out.

On the morning of the twenty-sixth, through a fog of sleeplessness, he received a call placed in Odessa by his father to inform him that his country was dissolving and that he needed to get his ass on the next flight back to Ukraine. His father, also Mikhail Gorbachev, was the local Communist Party leader in Odessa. As the Communists no longer (formally) existed, they had to figure something out, fast.

“No more schoolboy, Misha”, he said. “Get home now.”

Misha was still trying to process what his father had shouted through the phone when it rang again. This time, his mother.

“Mishishka!”, she implored, “get to the Immigration department and request asylum! Then bring your poor, old mother to America!”

Ironically for Misha, who now goes by Mike Gorby, owner and CEO of a highly successful patio furniture manufacturing company, that day more than thirty years ago comes flooding back as he sits down to write a check for Ukraine aid to the World Food Kitchen. His mother had died after joining him in the US. His father had been killed just last week by a Russian missile. Little Miss Merry Christmas was his wife and the mother of their four children.

A Soviet kid, at Harvard via the connections of his Communist Party father, was writing checks to fight back against Putin’s war. Mike shook his head and got back to work.