Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia

If you are headed to Russia, you couldn't have a better guide than Anne Garrels; Garrels knows the stories in Russia and she can tell them better than anyone else. Russian stories are bleak, with corruption and graft and greed, with alcoholism and despair and desperation in every tale. Russia is stories of repression of free speech, stories of hazing in the military, stories of people exposed to nuclear waste, stories of thwarted hope. Garrels listens to them all and shares them with us, coolly, dispassionately, an eye always there seeking a bit of hopeful news amid the dark.