At New Year’s, it’s customary to take stock, to celebrate achievements, to lament failures. And so, 2025, by virtue of its sheer hopelessness, has led me to the following conclusions.

We who have left Russia will never return home. Perhaps our children will when they grow up — but that will be their choice.

It will not be us who build the beautiful (or dreadful) Russia of the future, but some entirely different people whose names we do not yet know.

Thinking about what scoundrels are in power in Russia and how many crimes they have committed is our main occupation. Of course, we won’t give it up, but it has become deadly tiresome.

It may be better to think about ourselves, what we have done and failed to do.

In 1996, I was a very young journalist and did not personally take part in politics. But senior colleagues around me discussed the dishonest methods by which President Boris Yeltsin had stayed in power. They even praised those methods, considered them........

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