When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

We have the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church talking about how gay marriage is a sign of the apocalypse, or Russian TV talking about how meteorites are coming to punish Russians for homosexuality.

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.

For the first ten years, Vladimir Putin was constructing his power structure, and now he's defending it. He's retrenching, mobilizing a shrinking constituency, constructing an enemy that's really scary. It's war. And when you look at the anti-gay campaign, it's a classic case of war rhetoric: demonstrating an immediate and extreme danger.

Pussy Riot have certainly changed some people's assumptions about the role of political art and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the church. That's a hell of a lot to do in a forty-second performance.

One of the most famous lines in contemporary Russian poetry is Erica makes four copies and that's enough. That's the ethos we're aiming for. This is not to say I don't want lots of people to read my book, I do. I especially want people to read it who will feel better, and safer, or at least understood.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.

There was this very strange moment when the world discovered what was going on for LGBT people in Russia. It was very gratifying: I thought, there is a world out there, a saner world. It had felt sort of desperate and bizarre until that point.

One of the things that I really value about Russian culture is that on the private level it allows for a huge amount of variety and individuality with regards to family structure.

Fact-checking is a terrible way to report on Donald Trump's lying . It's like we enter into a dialogue with him. It's as though, he says A, and we check A, and it gives it no context. Saying that he's misstating is an even worse way of covering it. That's NPR's ridiculous policy of not calling his lies lies. It's really destructive

... fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there-because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don't think it should exist.

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.