Red Square Blues

In 1990, when her friends were jetting off to study in Europe, Kim Traill set off for her own youthful adventures in a country renowned for its shortages of consumer goods, miserable weather, KGB spooks and nuclear weapons stockpile: the Soviet Union. A wide-eyed clarinet player obsessed with Russian classical music, she took with her a smattering of local vocabulary and a swag of idealism about The Communist Experiment. 

After a confronting journey - wedged into a broken Aeroflot seat, served inedible Aeroflot food and snarled at by a grim-faced Aeroflot stewardess – she soon finds herself overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of those she meets … beginning what would become a now nearly twenty year love affair with the great Russian Motherland.

Unlike most foreign visitors to the USSR, Kim arrives as the private guest of a Soviet citizen. Her hostess is Olga - a student from Leningrad who had met Kim while visiting Australia with her father, a renowned orchestral conductor. So rather than being herded around by state-appointed tour guides, she is thrown into everyday Soviet life, learning to speak, queue, travel and bend the system like the locals.

Over the next 17 years - first as a traveller, later as a video-journalist for the ABC and SBS's Dateline - Kim discovers a Russia few foreigners see, a country which is both surprising and brutal.  Red Square Blues tells the tales of her diverse group of friends – among them students, pensioners, teachers, soldiers, a glamour photographer, rock band manager and human rights activist - and follows their changing fortunes as Gorbachev's glasnost opens up their once repressive empire.

Kim witnesses the highs and lows of those around her as the nation makes its anarchic transition from a totalitarian state with centrally planned economy  to its version of 'democracy' and 'capitalism' under Boris Yeltsin … and then again as the 'iron-fisted' spymaster Vladimir Putin takes the helm.  On collective farms and on 5 day train journeys, at red carpet parties and in marriage agencies, in provincial villages and refugee camps, she observes the horrific events of war, nuclear accidents, drug and alcohol addiction and ethnic rivalries. And in one eye-opening encounter, she experiences a Soviet hospital first-hand, complete with drunk, unpaid doctors and leg shackles for the patients.

Lively, funny and utterly readable, Red Square Blues is a full-blooded charge through a crumbling empire as it lurches from dark power to open society and back again. It is an eye-opening portrait of an eternally surprising country, leavened with the kind of bone-dry humour only life in a repressive police state can produce.