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I live a very different life now, with incredible privileges, but looking back I realise that growing up in Russia gave me tools that other people don't necessarily have - such as the will to push that bit further, to make things happen, to succeed.

Before I left Russia in 1999, I was living in a very poor factory town with my family and friends, and nothing was ever going to change.

The thing is, I grew up in L.A., so I had this unique opportunity to live in both communist Russia and see that life, and then move to America as a young girl and experience a completely different life.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

I am a Bolshevik.

I'm eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they've trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

I started like many young Russian people in the beginning of perestroika when it seemed that everything was possible.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.