Connected

This old man is Dim.

He’s Russian

and I’m American.

We’ve been friends for more

than half of my life.

We met on the eve

of the Soviet Union’s collapse,

when Dim was 58,

the age I am now.

I’m Dmitry Zimin...I just took appeared on a program

whose name I’ve already forgotten,

but it doesn't matter.

I happened to be born in 1933, by the way.

Here's also an amazing thing:

He was an American, by the way, young enough to be my son,

and we became friends for life.

His Russian is about as good as my English,

very bad that is.

In December 2021, a week before Christmas,

I got a call from Dim’s son, Boris,

he urgently summoned me from Chicago

to Dim’s bedroom in a rented apartment

in far-away Cyprus.

There, Dim told us of his plan:

at the end of the year,

he would undergo euthanasia in Switzerland.

I asked to be buried in ski boots.

Here's the headstone, here's the picture

and then the inscription:

this subscriber has been disconnected.

In 1992, during a brief period of friendship

between our two superpowers,

we built a very successful

telecom company -

VimpelCom,

It became the first ever Russian company

listed outside of Russia,

and the first telecommunication start-up

listed on the New York Stock Exchange,

making us both independently wealthy.

30 years ago,

connecting people, we were looking forward

to a very bright future.

Two months after my friend’s passing,

Russia invaded Ukraine.

I found myself silently grateful

that Dim didn’t have to see it.

He wouldn’t have to witness the horror

and atrocity I saw the Russian army

commit in the Kyiv region.

The prosperous future for Russia,

Dim’s country,

and America, my homeland,

that we dreamed of in the ‘90s

was gone.

Our story became a poignant chronicle

of the clash between

the American dream and Russian destiny.

When I watch this footage,

I don’t know what to make of it.

Had Dim given us hints about his plans?

Could we have figured it out?

This is probably going to be my last journey.

In September, Dim invited us to

what he dubbed his “last journey.

I assumed it was just an older man's way

of describing an adventure.

Maybe a cruise?

Dim left Russia in January 2021,

just as Russian opposition leader

Alexei Navalny was getting arrested.

For more than 12 years,

Dim’s family financially backed Navalny

along with other causes fiercely

opposed by their country.

In Russia, Dim was the only one

openly doing this work.

My dear Augie, you haven't changed a bit

since the last time I saw you.

Three months before his assisted suicide,

no one realized that Dim had meticulously

orchestrated every detail of his final days.

Bringing his wife, Maya, onto the boat

wasn't easy, but it meant a lot to him.

He also invited a friend, a film director,

to capture footage and leave behind

memories for his grandchildren.

You remember everything!

Plexsys systems are in the back.

Is it okay if I tell your story, Dim?

I know he would have said, “Yes.

I've thought a lot about why he chose to end

his life on his own terms,

and why he did it before 2022.

Dim had cancer, but it wasn’t terminal.

He was beginning to lose his memory,

which terrified him.

“What’s the point of living without

my memories? Dim’d ask.

But more than anything, he feared

witnessing the outbreak of a new

large-scale war—one that the US

would warn about daily that fall.

I got excited.

Can I have a cognac? A little one.

Gentlemen, cheers! My hand is shaking horribly.

It'll stop shaking when I have a drink.

Our story began in the '80s,

when Russia was still part of the USSR.

Dim was a top-secret Soviet radio engineer,

working on developing an

anti-American missile radar system.

For decades, the Americans and Soviets

had been bitter enemies.

In the minds of most Americans,

myself included,

the Soviet Union was the evil empire.

But then, out of the blue for us

regular folks, the new Soviet leader

Gorbachev shook things up

with the perestroika,

tore down the Berlin Wall,

and dismantled the communist system.

Suddenly, the endless race between

our military tech came to a halt.

Let us look forward to a future of

Clear skies.

for all mankind. Thank you.

Thank you.

We must realize that we lived under a totalitarian regime.

A totalitarian regime cannot exist

if it has no enemies.

I think I welcomed Gorbachev from

the very beginning.

He was very appealing to me.

Gorbachev and his whole new way of thinking.

He revolutionized politics.

I was 22, a sophomore at Stanford,

walking around the university campus one day,

when I passed the Slavic department door

and saw a sign advertising

an upcoming trip to the Soviet Union.

For some reason, I was intrigued.

Just like that,

I found myself in Moscow at the same time

that the Soviets were finding out

what perestroika meant.

There, my first deal was trading

a Walkman player with headphones

for tickets to the Bolshoi theater.

Back then, I had no idea

what the second one would end up being.

I would say there have been three

major periods in my life.

The first period lasted 30 years.

I worked in the military-industrial complex,

at the Mints Science Institute.

I was the deputy chief designer of this giant

radio locator station.

Have you seen any pictures of it?

This is a radar station belonging to Moscow's

missile defense system.

The missile defense systems were developed under

an agreement with the Americans.

The famous Brezhnev-Nixon agreement.

The most important event in

the development of Soviet-American relations

was the visit of Leonid Brezhnev,

The General Secretary of the Central

Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

to the United States.

Despite the Cold War’s fear and tension,

back then you could still see the Soviet Leader

and the American President together

in the same helicopter.

I was about seven or eight

years old back then.

Ten years earlier, my parents had emigrated

from Mexico and Colombia to the States

with 24 dollars to their name.

This was shortly after

the Cuban Missile Crisis,

when Russia had engaged in nuclear

blackmail for the first time.

My father, a highly trained engineer,

worked tirelessly in various jobs.

For a while, he even pumped gas day

and night, hustling to build a new,

peaceful life for his children.

According to that agreement,

the famous Nixon-Brezhnev agreement,

We could have one missile defense system each.

The visit resulted in a new set of Soviet-American

agreements, including an agreement

to prevent nuclear war.

We chose to deploy our missile defense system around Moscow.

The Americans chose to deploy their missile defense system,

At a place that I've forgotten the name of, where their

missile launch facilities aimed at the Soviet Union

were located.