The author
The woman who chose Moscow
Readers who like a memoir usually want to know who is speaking before they want to know the plot. Francesca de Bardin is a San Francisco-born American, a French citizen by marriage and by years, and a resident of Moscow by a decision she is still glad to explain.
A life in four cities
San Francisco
Born to Italian immigrant parents and educated in Catholic schools, in a middle-class home. She calls her values traditional and her nature independent and adventurous. Long before Moscow, she was already a world traveler: the greatest museums, the great places of worship, ancient sites from the Yucatán to Luxor to Machu Picchu. She is an explorer who also likes a well-set table.
New York City
She moved east for marketing and stayed as an entrepreneur, founding and leading three businesses. She knows American commercial life from the inside. In the 1990s she began to notice the deterioration of standards taking place across all spheres of life. That watching sits quietly under the later choice. She is not a visitor who drifted into an opinion.
Paris, and the south of France
In Paris she met Claude de Bardin. Their conservative philosophies agreed, and they divided twenty years between Paris and New York: food, art, opera and travel. After his death in 2014 she remained in France, in a small southern town of about thirty thousand, beautiful and, in time, too quiet for the cultural life she still wanted.
Moscow, from January 2022
With an American passport and a French one, she could have lived almost anywhere. She chose the Russian capital, arrived on a snowy fifth of January, and began again, knowing only two words of the language. Russian friends remarked how brave she was. She has a short answer for them, and a long one. The long one became Moscow Diary.
Why a reader might trust her
She has changed countries more than once, and she has done it as an adult with a formed character, not as a student collecting impressions. New York taught her enterprise. France enhanced her appreciation of aesthetics and high standards. Moscow asked her to become a beginner again. Mature adults will recognize that particular courage: the decision to start, again, without an audience.
She was also a writer already. In 2016 she published Fighting Global Tyranny, a book about power as she had come to see it. Moscow Diary is a different book, closer to the hand and the street. The same woman is speaking: direct, unwilling to borrow an opinion, fond of concrete details.
What she hopes you will feel
She wrote the book because the portrait of Russia available in the West was contrary to her daily experience. She wanted a record that could entertain, inform, and move, and that might leave the two cultures a little more willing to look at each other with more objectivity and respect.
In 2023 she was invited to speak in Moscow, as a newcomer, about choosing a country. She spoke in English, with translation, and took questions afterward. The only question she said was off limits was her age. Everything else, she has said, can bear the light. The diary is that light, held at the level of an ordinary life.
The motto she follows
The de Bardin family motto in French is: Faire Face. Meet the challenge. She treats it as a working instruction, not a decoration. It is a useful thing to know about her before you open the book. She does not write as a victim of history, or as its judge. She writes as a woman who intends to face what is in front of her, and then tell you, plainly, what she found.