Helen Izbor

Author & Intern

ABOUT

Of Ukrainian and Polish-Romanian heritage but born in Moscow, Russia, Helen Izbor has spent the last five years in New York studying Political Science and Criminal Justice at Hofstra University. Liberated from Putin’s state censorship, Helen has been able to speak the real truth about Russia for the first time in her life. The ideas she has expressed in her essays and GSP blog post would cost her freedom and possibly life back in Russia. Raised in a family imbued with strong anti-communist and anti-imperialist views, her paternal grandparents came from Eastern Poland and Eastern Romania, which the Soviet Union invaded in 1939 and 1940. Having come from a long line of landowners, her grandmother Anastasia was sent into exile to Ural. Her mother’s family lives in Ukraine where Putin’s troops invaded in 2014, annexing Crimea, and in 2022. Indeed, her direct experiences in modern-day Russia reinforce her ancestral memory of state terror. As Putin gets bolder, bloodier and more psychotic, she continues writing Russia’s Post-Imperial Trauma: What Putin Learned from Hitler. Her scholarship is not only enriched by her one experience and that of her family; she is also fluent in Ukrainian, Russian and English.

As an intern at Giant Steps Press, Helen has re-organized the communication protocols at GSP and designed the new GSP logo and website. She works with authors on their manuscripts and their social media campaigns and co-curates “Women in Writing.” She is building her social media skills in order to engage a larger community with her scholarship on Russian history as a cautionary tale in an increasingly binary democratic/autocratic world.