All the Clean Ones Are Married: And Other Everyday Calamities in Moscow

In 1991, Lori Cidylo shocked her Ukrainian Polish-born parents when she told them she was leaving her reporter’s job in upstate New York to live and work in the rapidly dissolving Soviet Union. For the next six years she lived on a shoestring budget in Moscow, in tiny, run-down apartments, coping with the daily calamities of life in Russia. Fluent in Russian, she rode public transportation, did her own shopping and cooking, and shared the typical Musovite’s life—unlike most Westerners who w...