Seven Aprils ago, we flew home from St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Boston locked-down after the Boston Marathon bombing.

A different kind of lockdown than today’s inspired by coronavirus.

It was a strange world event to view from Russia before the second Cold War. All we could understand was some kind of global English news … Sky TV or CNN World News maybe and some cryptic Facebook messages on the kids’ phones. Not believable at first. And from a distance, it was easy to conflate the Marathon attack with a heavily reported chemical factory fire in Texas the same day.

When we got back to Boston, my colleagues urged me to write something about the situation. Having missed the actual event at home, I grabbed onto what I knew of how colleges and others were reacting to the trauma of it.

It was a moment, like 9/11, when Russia and the U.S. seemed to have a common enemy. But they didn’t grab at the opportunity to make peace. Instead, they stepped up a new more complex superpower relationship.