Will / David
Will and David (and possibly Sukie’s boot) at Lowell House.
Will in Samarkand with tour guide and innkeeper, 2000. Photo by David.
Old Believer Maria Myasnikova with her son and mother near Lake Baikal—living in the Russian Conundrum.
Will in Kyiv, February 2014, as the pro-democracy protests reached their crescendo and the corrupt president fled into exile in Russia.
Peter Agoos, Sukie Amory, Kathy Lally, Will and David, at the Lincoln Center debut of the oratorio Émigré, lyrics by classmate Brock Walsh.
David, 2024.
03-15-2025
When Lowell House roommates Will Englund and David Amory used to debate the relative sanctity of Yankees versus Red Sox, they never imagined they would reunite in Moscow 25 years later.
In those intervening years, Will and his wife and fellow journalist Kathy Lally were foreign correspondents based in Moscow for the Baltimore Sun and later, The Washington Post, covering a new Russia emerging from the former Soviet Union. During that time Will also covered wars in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring in Cairo, and the uncanny orderliness of North Korea. Along the way, Will was interrogated by the KGB, and he and fellow reporter Gary Cohn won a Pulitzer for their investigative series tracing the hazardous world of shipbreaking from Brownsville, Texas to the sands of Gujarat, India.
Not bad for a boy from Pleasantville, New York, whose siblings once described him as “never very adventurous.”
In 2000 Will and Kathy gave David a 12-day crash course in the beauty and complexity of their home away from home, the country that Churchill characterized as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Adventures ensued from St. Petersburg to Samarkand!
Now, another 25 years on from those (relatively) youthful exploits, David asks his roommate to reflect on what his experiences can tell us about “the Russian conundrum”—and our own—from Putin’s early training in Cold War Dresden’s “Valley of the Clueless” to Will’s takeaway from the late Alexei Navalny’s memoir Patriot—have faith and live life as if they aren’t trying to oppress you.