Thirty-four years ago, I stood in the Moscow airport with my parents and two suitcases.

Just a few months earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed. The country we were leaving was already disappearing, and the system that had shaped our lives was coming to an end.

We had been granted political asylum in the United States and given permission to leave.

I was seventeen. It was my first time going to America and only the second time I had ever been on an airplane.

Leaving was not simply boarding a plane. Before we departed, we were searched thoroughly, almost stripped of everything but the clothes we wore. It was a final reminder from the system we were leaving behind.

Months earlier, in August 1991, my parents had made the decision that would change the course of our lives.

They would leave and start over in a country they had never seen.

My parents were in their early forties. With two children, they packed what little we could carry, closed the door on the life they had built, and stepped into uncertainty.

I often ask them how they did it.

How they walked through that airport, boarded the plane, and chose the unknown.

Fear must have been enormous.

But hope for their children was greater.

On March 14, we........

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