A memoir from Russia’s bubble of freedom in the pre-Putin era.

Michelle Carter at age fifty, married and the mother of two children in their early twenties, left her job as managing editor of a suburban daily newspaper in the San Francisco Bay area in 1995 to move to Russia for a year as a United States Information Agency Journalist-in-Residence.

There she traveled across the eleven time zones of this complex country, working with newspaper editors who struggled to adapt to the new concepts of press freedom and a market economy. She became an on-the-scene witness to the...