Lost and Found in Russia

October 11, 2010
Part travelogue, part contemporary history, Richards's new work explores postcommunist Russia from the point of view of the Russian people directly affected by one of the 20th century's most defining sociopolitical events, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Recounting her travels in Russia from 1992 to 2008, Richards, who wrote the PEN/Time-Life Award–winning Epics of Everyday Life, focuses on the country's forgotten provinces and the lives of her friends—the monastic, poetic journalist Anna; the manic, wandering couple Natasha and Igor; entrepreneurial Misha and his serene beauty of a wife, Tatiana. As a writer Richards wears her heart on her sleeve, and her story is full of empathy, frustration, and admiration as she observes her friends going through the roller-coaster of emotions, from hope to despair. And while glimpses into the lives of Russia's common folk are interesting, the real gems Richards uncovers are about the parts of the Russian society and mindset that remained hidden from Western eyes for nearly a century. Whether she is discovering a town said to be frequented by UFOs, exploring Russia's development of parapsychological weapons, or visiting a lab where "communication with the divine" is studied, Richards is constantly exposing a mystical and religious side of Russia that flies in the face of Western rationalism.

September 15, 2010

The editor of openDemocracy Russia doggedly pursues the question: What does it mean to be Russian, now that communism has collapsed?

During many trips from 1992 to 1998, Richards (Epics of Everyday Life: Encounters in a Changing Russia, 1991) traveled to visit friends in Russia, particularly in the southwestern towns of Saratov and Marx, and at the very time that the dismantling of the Communist Party and President Boris Yeltsin's "shock therapy" plunged Russian society into a tailspin of economic hardship. Ardently hoped-for democratic ideals were not achieved, but rather a reigning bitterness toward government as well as the West and a fear of incipient anarchy. The author, who spoke Russian, aimed to interview some Russian Germans, part of the community deported during World War II and promised another homeland more recently—speciously, it turned out. However, during her travels within a disintegrating Russia accustomed to periods of intense instability, Richards developed "a hunch that the character of its people was forged at such times." She fashions the narrative around the friends she met and lived with closely. Vera, follower of the Vissarion cult, was an inhabitant of Saratov, once called the Athens of the Volga, now a forsaken place closed to foreigners because of its military industry (presently defunct). In Marx, once the nexus of the Russian Germans, Richards stayed with Anna, a tensely coiled journalist—a pravednik, or "truth bearer"—who had been punished for her honest writing; the volatile couple Natasha and Igor, lured to the dead-end town by Gorbachev's promise of a German homeland, now mostly unemployed and alcoholic; and the couple Misha and Tatiana, marooned in Marx after their engineering training, who became thriving entrepreneurs and part of the rising Russian middle class. Among her new friends, Richards became a "connoisseur of silences," gleaning their crushed hopes for change and general despair. Other trips took her through Siberia and the Crimea to view the residues of Russian Orthodoxy, the Old Believers and folksy spiritualism.

A patiently crafted glimpse "through a crack in the wardrobe" of the devastation wrought on Russian society during the turbulent post-Communist '90s.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010

While an array of books investigate Russian politics, economics, and society under Yeltsin and Putin from a more academic standpoint, there is little published on post-Soviet era daily life. Richards, a British journalist who has visited Russia extensively, here picks up where she left off in her award-winning Epics of Everyday Life: Encounters in a Changing Russia almost 20 years ago. She now depicts post-Communist Russia between 1992 and 2008, following the lives of a small group of people who became her friends in a provincial Russia that was far different from Moscow or St. Petersburg. Richards chronicles tales of daily survival during a time when the much-celebrated end of communism did not guarantee a smooth transition to a more liberal, democratic, prosperous system. This book reads like a classic Russian novel, revealing a society in transition where old traditions conflict with new ways and where paganism, cults, and UFOs have surprising appeal. VERDICT Recommended for Russophiles or anyone interested in day-to-day life in post-Soviet Russia.--Leslie Lewis, Duquesne Univ. Lib., Pittsburgh

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2010
What does it mean to be Russian after the fall of communism? This is the essential question Richards pursues in her long-gestating follow-up to Epics of Everyday Life (1990). From 1992 to 2008, Richards made numerous forays into the Russian hinterlands and now provides a fascinating glimpse into provincial towns previously closed to foreigners. Sweeping political and societal change, from the chaos of the Yeltsin years to the autocracy of the Putin regime, are viewed through the eyes of the ordinary Russians Richards befriends in her travels. Theres Anna, the idealistic journalist; restless Igor and mercurial Natasha; Misha, the shrewd entrepreneur, and Tatiana, his beatific wife. While Richards adroitly captures the despair and optimism of a people struggling to define the meaning of freedom, as a guide shes slightly scattershot, losing sight of her primary subjects while flitting from one tangent (faith healers) to another (fringe cults). Shes at her best when chronicling the progress and setbacks of her friends, people once unknowable to Westerners but now shown to share the same ever-present uncertainty about the future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)