Take my guilty plea, Mr. Mueller. Because this Californian has been colluding with the Russians.

To be sure, I didn’t subvert any elections. But one recent week this spring, when my colleagues were out of the office, I snuck away to visit that most alluring of Russians, the Russian River, which seductively winds its way through Mendocino and Sonoma counties on its way to the Pacific. Perhaps the special counsel, who knows the territory from a stint as U.S. Attorney for Northern California, will cut me some slack in sentencing.

To travel the length of the Russian—as I did at this moment of maximum paranoia about all things Russian—is to be reminded that California and Russia are too intertwined for scandal to keep us apart.

For one thing, Russian interference in California is older than the state itself. For another, our state’s defining industries, entertainment and technology, have themselves been defined by Russian emigres from songwriter Irving Berlin to Google’s Sergey Brin.

But at heart our connection is mystical. California and Russia are two of this planet’s greatest puzzles. Each territory is considered too vast, and its people too strange, to ever be truly understood. Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”; anyone who has ever watched Californians try to govern themselves knows that those words apply to the Golden State too.

On my excursion, I approached the river from the south, via Sebastopol, a town named for a late 1850s fistfight so brutal it was compared to the British siege of the Russian seaport of Sevastopol during that decade’s Crimean War.

I made my way through Bodega Bay, which Russia’s earliest colonizers to California used as a port. Then I crossed over the river on my way up the sumptuous Sonoma coast to Fort Ross, a Russian settlement established in 1812.

That was an eventful year for invasions, with Britain fighting the United States, and the Russians repelling Napoleon—a victory so great that the Russian composer Tchaikovsky’s overture about it is still performed each summer at the Hollywood Bowl, accompanied by fireworks and the USC Trojan Marching Band. Fort Ross was established by the Russian-American Company, a trading firm backed by the Russian crown, to provide food for its Alaskan operations. The Russians’ presence gave the river its name.

But like so many who would move to California, the Russians found the beautiful place harder than they’d anticipated. The cost of living was high, Southern Californians (then Spanish) were hostile, and the fur trade proved unprofitable. Still, the Russians made a historic mark, constructing the first windmill and first ship ever built in California, and becoming the first Europeans to record California’s distinctive flora.

The Russians in California sought to salvage their colony by enlisting the support of the new Mexican government in the 1830s, on the condition that Russia would recognize Mexico. But the tsar wouldn’t agree to that condition, and so in 1841 the Russians sold off Fort Ross like a failed startup. The buyer, John Sutter, had everything of value hauled back to his home in Sacramento, a move that prefigured modern California’s centralized tax policy.

Ever since, the cover story has been that the Russians abandoned California to the Mexicans and then the Americans. But California actually preserved the old Russian colony as a state park in 1906. The state has since added three times to the property, and even re-routed Highway 1 around it.

Fort Ross State Historic Park. Photo by Joe Mathews.

In recent decades, with tens of thousands of tourists visiting from the motherland, Fort Ross sees far more Russians than it ever did under Russian rule. Among the guests have been Russian generals, the speaker of the Russian senate, and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. And then there are the Americans who use the fort to play Russian. On the day I visited, fourth graders from a Santa Rosa school, dressed in 19th-century Russian garb, occupied the fort, claiming to have seen ghosts in one building while cooking carrots over an open fire.

The Russian presence here doesn’t merely honor the past. It also seeks to shape the future. From Fort Ross, I drove back to the mouth of the river in tiny Jenner. On a beautiful bluff, I saw the unmistakable hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union flying over a restaurant called Russian House #1.

Inside I met the restaurant’s founders, Tatiana Ginzburg and Polina Krasikova, Russians who split their time between Sonoma County and St. Petersburg, which is where the Russian-American Company was headquartered.

When I started asking questions, Ginzburg, a psychologist, answered with questions of her own. She lamented that we didn’t have a few days to talk, so we could connect over a “long Russian story.” So here’s the short version: The restaurant, which in 2015 replaced an Indian joint called Sizzling Tandoor, is less a restaurant and more a project for those interested in civilization, quantum physics, transpersonal psychology, self-actualization, and “a space for dialogue between two great cultures and peoples.”

The place also challenges capitalist and imperialist structures. There is no menu. You are not greeted by a server; the Russian food, home-cooked, is laid out buffet-like. And there are no prices and no bill—you pay what you think is right, in a bowl by the door.

All these practices are designed to get people to stop, think, and ultimately experience a change in consciousness, she said.

Ginzburg says her work draws from the 20th-century Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, who taught that many humans live their lives “asleep” and thus behave as unconscious automatons who are easily manipulated into thoughtless horrors, like world war. But through dedicated work, humans can ascend to a higher state of consciousness and become more fully human.

Gurdjieff was a composer of music as well as a spiritual master, and the restaurant has a piano and a harp, and hosts events and performances. It also contains two chessboards, and various puzzles. The word for puzzle in Russian is “Golovolomka,” she noted, “which means something that will break your head.”

“We try to see the fundamental things here, and our intention is to create a new type of being,” she said, adding as she left for a rebirthing: “There is a connection here on the river, between Russia and this place.”

After perusing the restaurant library, with titles from Le Carré to Dostoyevsky, I thought about connections as I continued my river trip. There is a magic in the scale of the Russian landscape or the giant trees of the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. Both Russia and California love the arts. The dachas there might be the large Wine Country estates here, and both exist uneasily amid the poverty of people who do the farm work. Then there’s the joy of carousing. Russia loves its vodka, and the Russian River runs on wine.

Through Guerneville, Forestville, and Rio Nido, my mobile phone didn’t have service. But on the radio, NPR reported on the investigation into Russian interference in American democracy. The news was framed as an ongoing invasion of our country.

Such news is maddening, and put me in mind of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the massive novel of that French invasion back in 1812, when Russia met California. “Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad,” Tolstoy wrote.

He also wrote about love and enemies: “Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.” Tolstoy believed that when we muster love for our enemies, when we see God in even those we might kill, we reach a level of love that “nothing, not even death” can shatter.

I don’t love authoritarians who attack democracy and innocent people. But Putin is not Russia, and America is not Trump. And at least I was questioning myself and my consciousness, just as the women at the Russian House #1 advise. “All we can know is that we know nothing,” Tolstoy wrote. “And that’s the height of human wisdom.”

I still don’t know what I was thinking when I reached Healdsburg and walked to a beach along the river. A man had let his dog run into the water, which somehow inspired me to remove my shirt and shoes and wade into the Russian in my blue jeans.

The water was warmer and deeper than I had expected.

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Wall Street Journal International Security Reporter Julian E. Barnes opened a Zócalo discussion with “Morning Edition” host David Greene with that question, encouraging Greene—a former Moscow correspondent, and author of Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey Into the Heart of Russia—to shed some light on what makes Russia tick, and whether or not we have anything to fear from the nation.

“The West sees this situation as very black and white. In America, there’s this sense that Russians must be naïve, stupid, or just victims of propaganda,” Greene told a packed audience at MOCA Grand Avenue. “It’s true that the Kremlin propaganda machine is powerful, but you talk to so many Russians who are very smart, and they have incredibly nuanced, analytical takes on Putin.”

It’s not that all Russians believe it’s ideal for one person to be in power and control the entire government, Greene explained. Instead, it’s a matter of safety. “The world is incredibly unpredictable,” he said. “No one knows what will happen after Putin goes. So if not Putin, then what?”

The discussion touched on the roots of this viewpoint, and the fact that Russians are living in the midst of a chaotic time in the nation’s history. As an example of their mentality, Greene pointed out that many Russians consider Libya worse off now than it was before 2011, when dictator Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown. Greene described a “fatigue” among Russians, an unwillingness to struggle more than they already have: “It’s a real closing of the ranks, in terms of family. ‘We can tolerate this. I don’t want to go through a revolution and chaos and some bloody battle. I have what I need.’”

Barnes pulled a Russian saying from Greene’s book that illustrates this fatigue: “All good things come on their own.” It’s not a lazy sentiment, Greene agreed, but something deeper—and something deeply foreign, from an American perspective. “There’s no faith that if I stand up and fight, it’s going to lead to something good. I may as well just wait for that thing to come along.”

The result, Greene said, is that Russians have begun to pose questions about the world that are really uncomfortable to Americans, and add to our unease about their place on the world stage. He touched on the ongoing tensions and different perspectives of the East and West, including whether Western interventions are justified, but said that Putin’s current aims—and the potential for his aggression—are largely unknowable right now.

Is Putin trying to reassemble the Soviet Empire? Barnes asked.

“Lots has been written saying Putin made his move in Syria because he ‘lost’ in Ukraine,” Greene said. “But I still don’t think we totally understand what Putin was trying to accomplish [in Ukraine]. If his goal was to mess up Ukraine and create a frozen conflict in the East, he might have won. And I don’t know if Putin has some vast plan to invade Eastern Europe, but that fear of influence is really powerful either way.”

Putin’s motives in Syria, too, are hard to decipher, Greene said. It’s possible he felt some level of failure in Ukraine, or maybe he’s there to support Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Or maybe he really does want to take down ISIS. “For years, Putin has felt the greatest threat to the world is Sunni extremism,” Greene pointed out. “And while you could certainly make the case that Russia is a threat to America because of its nuclear arsenal and its ideological oppositions to our values, in some ways, in terms of global threats, the U.S. and Russia both are threatened by the same force.”

Regardless of his motives, Putin only seems to be more popular as Russians feel more threatened by the threat of ISIS, Greene said. And Barnes saw a big question in that: Can anything be done to stop him? Would economic sanctions work?

“One reason that Putin has been able to maintain popularity is that people are doing better now than when he first came to power,” Greene said. “If the economy truly takes a tumble and people feel it in a real way, then I don’t know what happens.” But the Russian economy is incredibly complicated, Greene pointed out—which makes it very hard to predict.

A lively question-and-answer session broadened the scope of the conversation, touching not only on Russia’s relationship with America, but the rest of the world. Greene talked about how Putin is always on the lookout for natural alliances, and that “one of the great questions of the world” is what would happen if Russia and China banded together—which would be an especially difficult alliance for the U.S. But such an alliance still hasn’t materialized, Greene said, even though he would’ve expected it by now.

Other closing remarks took the conversation full-circle by returning to the nature of the Russian character, and the paradoxes in the culture that can be so difficult for Americans to parse. Barnes mentioned a Russian au pair he hired who said that Americans were always telling her to put on a happy face. “You write about this scowl the Russian people wear,” he told Greene. “Yet you also write about how everyone’s warm and welcoming. There’s this contrast between this cold exterior projected to the world and an incredible inward warmth.”

“In Soviet culture, when you’re on the street, you keep your head down and take care of yourself. But when you’re at home, that’s where you’re warm.”

He went on to emphasize that it’s important to have an understanding of Russia before anything else—to see things from their perspective before generalizing, and certainly before denigrating, the nation’s culture.

“I felt naïve after the fall of the Soviet Union, because I thought Russia would be on a very quick path to democracy,” he said. “But I’ve learned that the world is complicated, and that the system we have is not a system everyone in the world wants or dreams about. We have to ask: Is it helpful, harmful, or somewhere in between to believe that what we have is something the entire world wants to work toward.”

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