Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia

Short-listed for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize
From the award-winning author of Naked in Baghdad comes Anne Garrels's revealing look into the lives of ordinary Russians, Putin Country.

More than twenty years ago, the NPR correspondent Anne Garrels first visited Chelyabinsk, a gritty military-industrial center a thousand miles east of Moscow. The longtime home of the Soviet nuclear program, the Chelyabinsk region contained beautiful lakes, shuttered factories, mysterious closed cities,...