The choices we have here in America are different from the choices people have in Russia. We can vote. That is the most important right that has not been taken away. In Putin’s Russia, elections have not been free for decades. Opposition candidates are barred from running, and even then the results are manipulated to deliver Putin a staggering victory. So this is what I can tell my American listeners: vote.

– Svetlana Satchkova

Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She covers culture and politics, with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, the Independent, and others. Currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn. Svetlana has published three novels in Russian; The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, is her English-language debut.