Red Square Blues: A Beginner's Guide to the Decline & Fall of the Soviet Union

(Paperback)

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In 1990, when her friends were jetting off to Europe and Asia, Kim Traill set off on her own youthful adventures in a country renowned for its bad food, dreadful weather and surly service: the Soviet Union. She took with her a smattering of local vocabulary, and a swag of idealism about The Great Communist Experiment. It would take some years for the scales to fall from her eyes. Along the way she would discover a Russia few tourists see, a country which is both surprising and brutal. She would travel, live, eat and play as ordinary Russians - and some unusual ones - do, navigate the maddening bureaucracy, observe the absurd politics, try to make herself into a 'good Russian woman', and, in one eye-opening encounter, she would experience a Soviet hospital, complete with drunk, unpaid doctors and leg shackles for the patients. In visits to the country over 17 years, she made many friends whose lives changed as the country opened under glasnost, and then changed again under the rule of the sinister Vladimir Putin. And she would stumble upon Russia's darker side when she travelled to one of the most polluted spots on earth, the scene of a terrible nuclear accident. Lively, funny and utterly readable, Red Square Blues is a memorable portrait of a crumbling but still mighty empire.

Author Bio

Freelance film-maker Kim Traill got her start in documentary making with Race Around the World, where she was runner-up. She has worked for SBSs Dateline and ABCs Foreign Correspondent where she specialised in stories about the Soviet Union - and was part of the team on the trip Paris to Peking. Kim has spent much of the past 16 years travelling through Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and the US. She lives in Petersham, Sydney with her son, Nik.