Quotes from Keith Gessen

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 sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, 'the freest country in the world.'

Brodsky was born in May, 1940, a year before the German invasion. His mother worked as an accountant; his father was a photographer and worked for the Navy Museum in Leningrad when Brodsky was young. They were doting parents and much beloved by Iosif Brodsky, who was their only child.

I think that the basement where Orwell washed dishes in Paris was his first lesson in anti-humbug - and part of the lesson is that you have to keep renewing it. And Orwell did that.

People who can't speak Russian will be less susceptible to Russian propaganda. But they will also be less susceptible to the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.

During two decades, on and off, reporting in Russia and the post-Soviet states - in the turbulent '90s, the wealthy but depressing aughts and, finally, during the eruption of violence in Ukraine - I occasionally heard people talk about how 'the Americans' wanted this or that political outcome.

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

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 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.

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.

From the start of his administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with Russia and refocus American attention on a rising China; he had made clear he wanted no part in the problems of the post-Soviet periphery.

One of the best and most challenging books about Orwell is by the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams. As a critic - and, in some ways, as a figure, at least within the academy - Williams was what England had in the generation after Orwell, and toward the end of his life, he became more critical of his predecessor.

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.

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.

In 1959, Moscow gave space to an exhibition of American consumer goods, and my father, also a member of this generation, tasted Pepsi for the first time.

While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of 'Giselle' in the opera hall. It was one of only a few performances to grace Astana's concert spaces in many weeks, and tickets were impossible to come by.

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.

I left the world of jail with plenty of relief but, more than anything, with a sense of unease that I still can't quite shake.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.

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.

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.

Left Bank Astana was beautiful at night, each building, it seemed, with its own nighttime color scheme and the street lamps all going full blast.

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