Wild Red Yonder: A Year in the Provinces of Soviet Russia

The year is 1977. Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR is a staid and dismal place, hampered by stifling bureaucracy and oppressive officialdom. Fourteen hours’ train ride from Moscow lies the provincial town of Voronezh. It is a drab, grey place, closed to tourists, and lightyears away from the relative comforts of Moscow and Leningrad. A Swedish student of Russian, granted a year’s study at Voronezh University by the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education, arrives on the clanking train. Little does he know what he is in for. His initial enthusiasm is soon muffled by the greyness of the dilapidated town, the officiousness of authorities, the devil-may-care attitude of both teachers and students. Add to this the constant search for decent food products. The saving grace is the motley collection of students who inhabit the four-bunk rooms of the dorm. Quirky, lively, warm, funny, sad Russians with their hearts on their sleeves, and a small contingent of hapless foreign students. In the grip of a biting-cold winter, students are forced to huddle in their shabby rooms, where both fallings-out and love affairs unfold. And so it is for our exchange student, as he helplessly falls in love with an Australian girl. Both become in their turn the love-targets of Russian students eager to get close to foreigners and a slim chance of getting out. This story tells it as it was and gives a clear and extraordinary picture of life in the provinces of Communist Mother Russia before any signs of the great upheavals that were yet to come.