Keith Gessen

“In truth, I was desperate to leave New York. And Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born.”

“My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.”

“My friend Leonid Shvets is a long-time journalist, commentator, and editor. He was born in Belarus and came to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, to go to school, then moved to Kiev for work.”

“I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.”

“I've travelled to some of the places where Russian language and Russian culture were made part of the fabric of life long before Lenin arrived at Finland Station - and where Russian is now being rolled back, post-1991.”

“The government, as a rule, discourages specialization: Military officers and diplomats are constantly transferred from one post to another, from one region to the next. Still, specialists do emerge.”

“Baba Seva - Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman - was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a textile factory, and her mother was a nurse. Her parents moved to Moscow with her and her brothers when she was a child.”

“In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book 'Everyday Stalinism,' called 'ordinary life in extraordinary times.'”

“To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.”

“My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six, and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian.”

“I met with an Automaidan activist who was part of a self-appointed group drafting a lustration law for parliament, which would exclude from political life people who actively participated in Yanukovych's criminal regime.”

“One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.”

“I remember reading Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' in my grandmother's Moscow apartment and feeling this call to be a better person.”

“Astana has been the capital of Kazakhstan only since 1997, three years after Nazarbayev told a stunned parliament that a prosperous, independent country like Kazakhstan ought to have its capital 'in the center' of the country, rather than on the border.”

“I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.”

“We will be judged as a society and as a culture by how we treated our meanest and most vulnerable citizens. If we keep going the way we're going, we will be judged very, very harshly - and sooner, perhaps, than we think.”

“The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.”

“Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph's mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.”

“In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled 'Inside the Whale,' about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and 'Tropic of Cancer.'”

“Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy. The best and brightest of them are in exile or in jail; others, after feasting on leverage during the commodities boom, now have tummies full of debt.”