Keith Gessen

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.