Overview
Waking the Tempests is about how ordinary Russians are struggling to survive the revolution from Communism to Capitalism in the 1990s. Reporter Eleanor Randolph takes us to Soviet hospitals and new Russian sex clinics, to old communal apartments and new suburbs, to decrepit schools and new private academies. She interviews ballerinas and priests, murderers and ordinary people fighting a tidal wave of crime. She stands with old women peddling plastic toys in the markets and interviews the head of the Bolshoi ballet school. From Moscow to the East, from the Arctic Circle to the southern farmlands, she talks with young men and old women, doctors and conjurers, real estate brokers and newly converted businesswomen - all trying to cope in a world where the rules changed virtually overnight.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
An enthralling portrait of how Russians are coping with new freedoms and perils, this report by Los Angeles Times national correspondent Randolph is based on her extensive travels in the former Soviet Union as Washington Post correspondent (1991-1993) and as an independent observer through 1995. Randolph toured unsanitary, under-equipped hospitals, visited a sex clinic and a privately run day-care center, attended a murder trial and interviewed struggling couples, gay activists, Russian Orthodox Christians and young people indifferent to the risks of AIDS and venereal disease. She depicts a schizoid society rapidly polarizing into rich and poor, where outmoded communal values are being replaced by opportunistic individualism. Women face increasing physical abuse at home, and in the workplace they endure pay discrimination and open hostility. Abysmally high numbers of Russian women die in childbirth, and get secret abortions-often without anesthetic. Medical care for the average person is haphazard. The former Soviet Union, in Randolph's affective mosaic, is a heavily polluted land roiling with crime, homelessness, corruption; rife with sexual ignorance and violent homophobic hatred; where a small entrepreneurial class of old communist bureaucrats, young go-getters and mafia thugs vie for control of an anarchic free market. (June)Library Journal
Randolph, on assignment for the Washington Post, arrived in Moscow in early 1991 (before the August coup and the disintegration of the USSR) to stay several years. She witnessed four years of revolutionary change personally and through her Russian friends, augmenting her own experiences by traveling extensively and interviewing citizens from many walks of life. This account of her sojourn ranges from the lives of women to pollution, healthcare, and the emerging justice system through the lens of economic change. Randolph gives scant attention to those who have been severely harmed by the changes: pensioners, victims of fraud, and the formerly elite not yet able to adapt to the new economic jungle. Her optimistic and upbeat tone throughout contrasts sharply with the insider's despair of Galna Dutkina's recent Moscow Days (LJ 1/96). For larger international affairs collections.-Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New YorkKirkus Reviews
This harrowing and engrossing account of the chaos of Russia in the '90s leaves the reader as stunned as the Russians currently struggling for their very survival.Reports about life in postSoviet Russia saturate the media, leading the American audience to think it may have heard all there is to know. But seasoned journalist Randolph offers a model of reliable journalism and inspired prose, a fortunate alliance that lends freshness to some familiar subjects: Russia's new entrepreneurs and mafia; its traditional and alternative health care; the efforts of its artists, its women, and its youth to find some better way of life. Randolph, who reported from Russia for the Washington Post from 1991 to 1993, describes her time there as "like watching an explosion in slow motion." Life is wild, unpredictable, violent, the police inept or invisible, crime of all kinds flourishing, the government at a standstill. Most Russians have little choice but to live in some ways outside the law. The name of the game is survival; the word appears repeatedly in Randolph's profiles, bringing cohesion and analytical depth to her portraits of farmers and would-be entrepreneurs, ballerinas and hustlers, gay activists and faith healers, making vividly comprehensible the uncertainty, danger, and excitement felt by Russians compelled to live on the frontier of capitalism. Her depiction of how various Russians cope with their uncertainties gains vigor from the extended interviews she conducted during her stay in Moscow and on follow-up visits. The dynamic and complex picture that results is bolstered by Randolph's witty style, which allows readers to share some of the shocks inflicted by her encounters—as with the bioenergy pathologist who massaged her head for sinus trouble, his hands grease-blackened from fixing his car.
It is Randolph's game willingness to enter into the wild world of the new Russia that keeps the reader turning the pages. Ordinary life, in Randolph's hands, is truly extraordinary.