I spent my childhood in Moscow as the tail end of the Soviet era waned. Despite its lofty label—the capital of the USSR—the Moscow of my youth carried little charm. For my family, life unfolded with scarcity, monotony, and a sense of dreariness. As a teenager, I longed for something better with a craving so intense that it felt like a physical ache. After school, which dragged on interminably, my best friend and I had no plans. There were no extracurriculars offered. Aside from dipping into my parents’ modest library, we had scant intellectual or aesthetic nourishment. For hours each day, we wandered our neighborhood, or others like it, lined with identical apartment blocks, the occasional park with broken rides, and stores with empty shelves, hoping, in vain, for something remotely interesting to occur. Throughout it all, we lamented our limited, painfully dull lives, wondering if anything would ever change.
From American films that reached us through illegal or semi-legal video salons, where VHS tapes were shown to paying audiences, we learned what our peers’ lives in the U.S. looked like. They went to malls and restaurants, attended parties and football games, ate pizza, and drank Coca-Cola. How we longed for all of it, along with Levi’s jeans and graphic T‑shirts! It seemed so unjust that others were living life to the fullest while we were stuck in a cyclical, monotonous routine. I never imagined that I would witness it with my own eyes.
Yet after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, I moved to New York with my family. I tried to compensate for everything I’d missed by embracing every imaginable experience. I enrolled in—and audited as many NYU courses as I could—partied hard, shopped, attended exhibitions, film screenings, and concerts, and took up painting and dancing. Although New York proved as exhilarating as I had imagined, and a place where I felt entirely at home, I found myself missing Moscow, painfully, for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Between terms, I returned there for short visits, and on one such trip I fell in love with a man in a rock band and secretly married him.
When I learned I was pregnant, it became clear that I would return, because I wanted my child to grow up in a Russian-speaking environment. Or perhaps that was just a pretext, because by then I’d already realized that I loved Moscow so deeply I was willing to give up an entirely different life in America to be reunited with it.
I love New York; it’s my home now. But Moscow was the city I loved first. I may never be able to go there again.
And so I arrived in Moscow, a twenty-one-year-old with a philosophy degree and a newborn. It was 1997, and the decade known as the Wild Nineties—marked by economic hardship and upheaval—was drawing to a close. The city felt vibrant and full of possibility, especially as Russia appeared to be progressing toward a democratic future. I began writing and published a novel, which eventually earned me a job writing features for a women’s magazine. My marriage didn’t endure, and before long I was a single mother supporting myself and my son through freelance reporting.
In 1999, Vladimir Putin became prime minister of Russia, selected by President Yeltsin as his successor. Watching Putin on television for the first time, I somehow intuited the terrible things that would follow, and they arrived far sooner than I could have imagined. A sequence of apartment bombings struck several Russian cities, Moscow included, killing hundreds. Night after night, I found myself glued to the news, terrified that my building could be next. The thought of dying, or being trapped under rubble with my two-year-old son crying for help, was unbearable.
The attacks were blamed on Chechen terrorists, but it soon became clear to anyone with eyes that the FSB, which Putin had just led, was the real perpetrator. He needed a pretext for another war in Chechnya, and that conflict became his route to the presidency. As events unfolded, more terrorist assaults and hostage crises followed, each more devastating than the last, and he used every one of them to consolidate his power and to curb freedom of speech.
Yet despite all this, I loved living in Moscow. How can one explain it? I was young. Life felt meaningful and exhilarating. Moscow was a vast city, brimming with energy and a character all its own. Simply walking from the subway to my destination downtown was enough to make me happy. There were beautiful boulevards, sweeping bridges over the Moskva River, broad Stalin-era avenues lined with imposing granite buildings, and quiet nineteenth-century neighborhoods of pastel-colored mansions. There were museums and theatres, clubs, and the sense that the city never slept. And then there was the subway. Many of its stations look as if they were built for the tsars, clad in marble and mosaics, with crystal chandeliers, sculptures, and gilded moldings. Trains arrived every three minutes, and the stations were so clean you could eat off the floor.
Even as the country’s leadership grew more corrupt and repressive, Moscow kept becoming more dazzling. In the early and mid-2000s, Russia benefited from rising oil prices, and much of that wealth flowed into the capital. The city transformed. New parks, public spaces, museums, and cultural venues opened, along with shops and restaurants that could rival those of any European capital. When Russians discovered karaoke, thousands of venues sprang up, from budget sushi joints to opulent establishments where an orchestra and backup singers accompanied anyone who dared to step onto the stage and, for a few minutes, feel like a star. The service industry reached a level of convenience that still feels almost utopian. You could order nearly anything at any hour, get a haircut at three in the morning or even an MRI in the middle of the night—whatever you needed, as long as you could pay for it.
By ghouls, I meant anyone tied to the state apparatus, like the police or the secret services, whose main job was to identify those opposed to the regime and neutralize them.
By then, I was forging a career in glossy magazines, quickly rising to senior editorial roles. For many people I knew and worked with, the city’s seductions made it easy to ignore the larger picture. Those with good jobs enjoyed their comfortable lifestyles, traveled the world, and muted their awareness of unlawful court rulings, the torture of dissenters, and the president’s demotion of the constitution, which allowed him to rule for life. They learned to tune out a whole dimension of reality. When I occasionally voiced concerns to friends, they would say, “What are you talking about? Life here is great.” Many attributed the country’s stability and prosperity to Putin, who, in truth, had little to do with either. Like everyone else, he benefited from oil revenues, only he and his cronies benefited far more because they stole billions.
The regime’s logic was insatiable. It grew greedier and more violent, gnawing away at its citizens’ rights. I started to feel increasingly unsafe, as though I no longer belonged in Moscow. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and a fresh wave of oppressive laws followed, I made the hard decision to leave.
I couldn’t depart right away. My partner at the time and I had to marry so we could apply for a U.S. visa for him. For the next two years, I lingered in limbo, knowing I would leave—this time for good. I would walk through my favorite Moscow neighborhoods with a heart-wrenching ache, not knowing whether I would ever see them again.
Before finally leaving in 2016, I spoke with my best friend, once more trying to justify my decision. I said the city had been seized by ghouls. By ghouls I meant anyone connected to the state apparatus—the police or the security services—whose job was to locate those who opposed the regime and neutralize them, but also all those men in expensive suits stepping out of costly cars with expressions that suggested they owned the place: the oligarchs and corrupt officials. And they did. Moscow belonged to them now, not to people like me.
From that conversation grew my novel The Undead, which, in many ways, functions as a parting love letter to Moscow. The title signals not only the horror-film plot my protagonist, Maya, is trying to create, but also the city’s new masters and those living in a zombie-like state of willful ignorance. Maya, modeled on that very friend, belongs to the latter group. She enjoys her life and pays little attention to politics—until politics comes for her.
Readers often tell me Moscow feels like a character within my book. When they ask whether I still love it, I honestly don’t know how to answer. I love New York; it’s my home now. But Moscow was the city I loved first. I may never be able to return. Under present laws, returning could entail years behind bars for what I’ve published about Putin and the war in Ukraine. I’ve learned to live with it.
