Toly - 41

ESCAPING

I was born in Leningrad USSR. I had a pretty comfortable upbringing. My dad was a successful entrepreneur running a business packaging instant coffee, in the new country called Russia. After the USSR collapsed, it became the land of opportunists and brave entrepreneurs. It was common in the 90’s and early 2000’s for small and medium size business owners to be approached by local mobsters, who often would become business partners and take a cut from company profits, in exchange for their “protection” of that business. Due to my dad’s business success, he had to have a business partner like that.

Initially, everything was going well. We lived in abundance. As an example, at one point I even had a driver/bodyguard taking me to school every morning. However, nothing lasts forever, and my dad’s business fell into financial trouble and profits dropped. One day my dad came home and informed us that it was no longer safe for us to stay in the country, and that we had to leave Russia immediately. We couldn’t tell anyone, not even our friends and relatives. My parents were able to secure urgent visas to the Czech Republic for our whole family. My little brother was only 7 at the time. I was 19, an adult, so I told them that I didn’t want to move that far from my friends and my girlfriend at the time. My dad insisted that it wasn’t safe, and I had to leave the country as well. I chose to move to Sweden where I had friends through playing international ultimate frisbee tournaments over the years. This would allow me to travel back frequently, through Finland, to my hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia, to take exams at school and to see my girlfriend. Every time I would sneak into the country, I had to be incredibly careful and act incognito.

Living in Sweden was tough because we couldn’t take much money with us from Russia, so I found myself alone, in a foreign country with absolutely no money. There was a point in my life at that time that I couldn’t afford decent food. I was renting a cheap studio with no furniture, sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag, boiling water in a soda can and eating candy bars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because it was all I could afford. Reflecting, that time definitely made me tougher. I learned that as humans we are survivors and can adopt even to the toughest environments and circumstances when we are forced to. If you had told me a year prior to our escape from Russia about all the hardship I was going to go through in the following years, I would’ve never believed that I would be capable of that.

Two years later, after I was done school in Sweden, I moved back to St Petersburg hoping that enough time has passed, and it wasn’t dangerous anymore. At that point, my dad discovered that the “bad guys” found out where he was, so my family had to keep moving. They applied for Canadian visas and soon moved to Toronto, forced to start life from scratch all over again. My family invited me to join, at first, I said No as I was enjoying my life in a big city as a 21-year-old, surrounded by friends, and working a job I loved.

One day I was walking down the street when a black SUV pulled over and a few of these thugs jumped out, one of which was my dad’s former “business partner.” They started drilling me with questions, then told me to pass on the message to my dad that they were looking for him, got back in their car and started driving away. This incident shook me, I didn’t want to take any more risks in case they decided to come back at another time and use me as a hostage. The next day I called my parents, who at that point had settled into life in Canada, I told them that I’d love to come check out this new country they were so fond of. A couple of weeks later I landed in Toronto and have been calling Canada home ever since. I became a Canadian Citizen in 2011.

As a proud Canadian, I’ve represented our country at numerous international ultimate frisbee tournaments, and even won a gold medal as part of Team Canada at the World Championships back in 2008. This year I’ll be representing Canada once again at the World Championships, this time in Australia. Wish us luck!

Music - Toly’s music choices during our photo session included Jungle, The Beatles and Lykke Li.