Konstantin at his club in Cambridge, MA
Elena and I snuck out of Saint Petersburg on a cold December night in 1991, heading to the airport and New York City. I was a twenty-nine-year-old martial arts instructor, and she was a fashion model. We had married three months earlier, when she turned eighteen. No one knew that we were leaving Russia, except for two of my friends and our parents.
Before going, I gave my gun, a grenade, and a knife to Andrey, one of my friends. My pockets felt empty because I was used to carrying these things all the time; before entering our apartment building, I would take the grenade in my hand, ready to pull the pin and toss it at an assassin, should one be waiting for me inside.
I owned the biggest martial arts club in Russia; I had more than a thousand students. Police, special forces, and Russian Mafia members all trained at the club. It was called the School of Military Art because we taught marksmanship as well as fighting. I was a powerful man because I had students working in personal-security jobs all over the city, and they all were loyal to me. Brute force meant everything in Russia.
One day a few Mafia guys visited me at the club right after one of their colleagues was assassinated. One of these guys was a friend of mine, and he told me to take a walk with him. “Konstantin,” he said, “I don’t know what happened, who did it, but I heard your name, you have some power behind you, so you’re the number one suspect.” I told him I wasn’t involved, and we negotiated a resolution. But after that, I always looked over my shoulder. That’s when I started going home with a grenade in my hand, and that’s when I knew I had to get out of Russia. The decision wasn’t easy, but I wanted to get married and have a safe environment for my future family. Also, I was dreaming about Hollywood. I thought I could be the next Sylvester Stallone. Then, two weeks before we left, a friend in the KGB told me he heard that the government was sending someone after me. He wouldn’t tell me who or when, only that I should expect to be hit.
We arrived at the airport at two o’clock in the morning and waited in a huge line to check our luggage. Then we got to the passport station, and the guard looked at our passports and said, “OK, the girl can go. You can’t.”
”Why?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “you have to have government permission to leave the country. You have to go back to the ministry of international affairs to get a stamp.”
I tried to pay him off, but he wouldn’t take the bribe. Then I asked to speak with the officer in charge, a KGB captain. I explained the situation, that we needed to go to the United States for a month. He said, “Nothing we can do. So the girl, if she can-if she wants-she can go. But you, you have to stay. You have to go and get permission.”
I said, “We have tickets, everything.”
He said he was sorry, and then I blew up. “What the fuck?” I screamed. “We’re going on our honeymoon! People are waiting for us there!”
The officer in charge then said, “OK, give me your passport.” He took my passport and left. Passengers began boarding our plane, but there was nothing I could do.
Finally the officer returned. He looked me in the eye and said, “You’re just one lucky son of a bitch.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I just called my superior officer, woke him up in the bed, and told him the situation. And he said, ‘Let the fucker out of here.’ He probably just wanted to go back to sleep.”
Even after we got on the plane, I still was very nervous. The plane was a Russian airliner, so it was Russian property on Russian land. Until we took off, my heart continued to beat hard.
When we landed in New York, the weather was freezing cold. Somebody in Russia told me that in December it’s warm in New York. Bastard. We brought only light jackets and very little baggage, and I had only $300 in my pocket. I looked around JFK airport and I realized I had no idea what to do. I spoke no English at the time.
A friend of mine in Russia had called an old Jewish couple who had emigrated to New York ahead of us. The friend gave me their phone number and told me everything was set, that the couple would take care of us. I had met them once, when I gave them a ride from their home to airport, and they said, “When you’re in New York, stop by. Come to visit us.” So here we were.
At a pay phone, I tried to dial the number, but something was wrong. The machine was talking back to me in a foreign language. A Russian guy from our plane was passing by, so I asked him for help. He explained that I just needed to put more money into the phone.
When I finally got through to the couple, their greeting wasn’t a warm one. It was as if they hadn’t expected us to actually show up in New York. They said we could store our luggage at their house for a few days, but that was it.
We took a $20 cab ride to the old couple’s house in Manhattan, which left me with $280. They took pity on us, offering us dinner and then letting us stay at their home for the night. But the next morning they got the paper and began looking for a place for us to rent in Brighton Beach, where many Russians lived. The couple spoke to each other in English, so we had no idea what they were saying, but they told us they found an apartment and gave us the address. We took our luggage, got on the subway, and headed to Brighton Beach. The apartment had three bedrooms, and we could have one of the bedrooms for $400 a month. But after the subway ride, I had only $278.50, and we needed $800 to move in.
”Can I pay you for two weeks?” I asked the landlord. She just looked at me. When I offered to give her our gold rings as a deposit, she said, “Okay, I kind of like you guys.”
We spoke no English, had no working papers, knew nobody, and had only $78.50 left after I paid the landlord $200. My dream of becoming the next Sylvester Stallone wasn’t looking so good.
Elena and I then went to a supermarket to get some food. I had been to Germany, so I knew what a Western market was like, but she had never seen food like this. It amazed her. We filled our basket with potatoes, bananas, cereal and milk, hot dogs, then she saw the ice cream and begged me to buy some. “Honey,” I told her, “I’m sorry, but we can’t.” She stood in the middle of market and cried. She was eighteen and wanted freaking ice cream, and I had to say no.
I began looking for a job the next day. I went to the Russian businesses in the neighborhood: a garage, a flower shop, and finally a Jewish community center, where they gave us a big holiday basket of food that kept us going for a while, but no job. After two weeks, we were down to $30 and couldn’t pay any more rent, so we went to the head rabbi at the local synagogue to ask for help. He was an old man with thick glasses and he was dressed in traditional garb. He silently studied us for a while before speaking. “Hmm, your wife,” he said, “she’s probably not going to work as a prostitute?”
I resisted the impulse to kill the man right there. Another day passed, and I started having some crazy ideas. I thought about robbing a store. I knew it would have been stupid, but the thought did cross my mind. Our time at the apartment was running out; we had to pay more rent or move out.
A friend at the synagogue took pity on us, or maybe he just liked us, and offered to let us move into his basement. I went to look at the space without Elena. The ceiling was so low I couldn’t stand up straight. There was no furniture, no carpet, no sunlight, no hot water, pipes everywhere. There was a little kitchen, a shower, one lightbulb, and cockroaches. The room was next to a shop where a Brazilian guy made vases from clay and sang songs in Portuguese all day long.
”Honey,” I told Elena back at the apartment, “I found a place we’re going to live in.” She jumped into my arms and kissed me. Her joy didn’t last. In the basement, bent over so that her head wouldn’t hit the pipes that ran along the ceiling, Elena declared, “I’m not going to live here.” And then she cried.
“Babe,” I said, “we have no choice. We have to live here. We have no money.”
We found a couple of cushions from a couch somewhere and slept that night on the concrete floor, using the cushions as pillows and my coat as a blanket.
Back in Russia, I knew a guy named Rustam Kamsky. I trained his son, Gata, a chess prodigy, in fighting. Lying on that concrete floor, I remembered that Rustam and Gata emigrated from Russia to New York City. So the next day I went out and found some chess magazines and looked through them for a picture of Gata. I found plenty; he was the world’s youngest chess master, and his photos were everywhere. It turned out that Rustam also was living in Brighton Beach, so I called him, and he invited us to his home and welcomed us with open arms.
He gave us some furniture and a huge bag of potatoes, and he called his friends at a nearby Russian sports club. They gave me a job teaching kickboxing that paid $105 a week. I then got my working permit and found a job in Manhattan as a masseuse, making $20 an hour. Finally we were able to move from the basement and into a real apartment, in Bensonhurst.
That was seventeen years ago. Elena and I now have two beautiful children, and I have my own kickboxing club again. I never sold a screenplay, but I did play Ivan in the Sandra Bullock film Miss Congeniality. These days, I no longer have to carry hand grenades to protect myself and my family. I’m a United States citizen now.
I don’t know if I would do it again, but what they say is true: Ignorance is bliss.
