When I first visited Moscow in 2000, I saw a vibrant city bursting with life and incredible opportunities. It was a city where you could get married on the spot at three in the morning and then go to a sushi restaurant to celebrate (there were very few of them in Central and Western Europe then), or go to a rock club where books that had been banned for seventy years were sold and read. Even the university I visited then was a lively institution full of enthusiastic people. But, at the same time, Moscow was in many ways a wild and dangerous city. It was not advisable to cross the road if a car was in plain sight. Such situations could end in death, as happened to the husband of one of my acquaintances: he was hit by an official's black car in a pedestrian crossing. His widow lost the subsequent court case and Russia lost a poet. But it wasn't just about cars. Especially in the evening, the streets were not safe at all. Violent criminal activity was the norm in Moscow life. The wild 1990s were dawning, a time when the world of ordinary Russians literally collapsed after the fall of the Bolshevik regime and during the five hundred days of transition from socialism to capitalism. Some prominent members of the former regime, and some from organized crime, came to power. For everyone else, times were indeed hard. They faced runaway inflation, the disintegration of the welfare state, and violence on daily basis. Moscow was a city of contradictions. Despite all this, I must confess that for me it was an absolutely enchanting encounter (although, this was perhaps due to my age) that changed the course of my whole life. If it had not been for this trip, I might never have learned Russian, or begun to work on the history of Russian scholarship and imperialism, and, therefore, I would never have written the book you are now holding in your hands.

I returned to Moscow regularly. The more time I spent there, the more I realized the incredible cultural and human potential that lies there. The community of people I befriended were publishing books and working at the institution MEMORIAL (banned just before the military invasion of Ukraine began in 2022).