Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in the Post-Soviet Landscape

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Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland Pub. Date: 12/28/2010 Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company

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Overview

After the fall of communism, Russia was in a state of shock. The sudden and dramatic change left many people adrift and uncertain—but also full of a tentative but tenacious hope. Returning again and again to the provincial hinterlands of this rapidly evolving country from 1992 to 2008, Susan Richards struck up some extraordinary friendships with people in the middle of this historical drama. Anna, a questing journalist, struggles to express her passionate spirituality within the rules of the new society. Natasha, a restless spirit, has relocated from Siberia in a bid to escape the demands of her upper-class family and her own mysterious demons. Tatiana and Misha, whose business empire has blossomed from the ashes of the Soviet Union, seem, despite their luxury, uneasy in this new world. Richards watches them grow and change, their fortunes rise and fall, their hopes soar and crash.
Through their stories and her own experiences, Susan Richards demonstrates how in Russia, the past and the present cannot be separated. She meets scientists convinced of the existence of UFOs and mind-control warfare. She visits a cult based on working the land and a tiny civilization founded on the practices of traditional Russian Orthodoxy. Gangsters, dreamers, artists, healers, all are wondering in their own ways, “Who are we now if we’re not communist? What does it mean to be Russian?” This remarkable history of contemporary Russia holds a mirror up to a forgotten people. Lost and Found in Russia is a magical and unforgettable portrait of a society in transition.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

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. (Dec.)

Library Journal

Os 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

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Kirkus Reviews

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—apravednik, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781590513484
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Publication date: 12/7/2010
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 535,923
Product dimensions: 8.46 (w) x 11.70 (h) x 1.08 (d)

Meet the Author

Susan Richards

Susan Richards is the author of Epics of Everyday Life, which won the PEN/Time Life Award for Non-Fiction and the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. She edits open Democracy Russia, part of open-Democracy, the Web site about global affairs, which she cofounded. After earning a doctorate on Alexander Solzhenitsyn from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, she initiated the program of talks, conferences, and debates at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and worked as a film producer. With her husband, the television producer Roger Graef, she started Bookaid, a charity that sent a million English-language books to public libraries throughout the Soviet Union.

Read an Excerpt

On my last day in Saratov I had met a young woman who had a flat in Marx. She had invited me to stay there, “in the unlikely event that you ever come back.” Anna was a local journalist and she had championed the cause of a homeland for Russia’s Germans. We met briefly, in the offices of the city’s only liberal newspaper, where she worked. A tall, gangling young woman, she moved awkwardly, as if her clothes were lined with prickles. Her lively, boyish face was framed by a tonsure of dark hair. She appraised me guardedly from a pair of large brown eyes whose whites were tinged with blue. They sparkled with intelligence. Over meatballs in the paper’s canteen—which poisoned me for a week—she said something intriguing: “I should warn you—do you remember what happened when Gerald Durrell freed the animals in his zoo? He opened their cages and they wouldn’t leave—just sat there and howled. They refused to go back to the jungle and start hunting for food again. Well, that’s us—that’s what we’re like in Marx.” I laughed. But she was not smiling.

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