Workers walk along a railway line into the industrial town of Karabash, in Chelyabinsk Oblast, 2013. (c) Aleksandr Kondratyuk / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.Unhappy the land that needs heroes, as Bertold Brecht’s doomed Galileo famously declared. He might have been describing Russia today. The experience of life in a systemically corrupt and unaccountable regime is such that heroes are needed to protect the vulnerable. And wherever you go in Russia, from arctic Magadan to Makhachkala in the south, you find them — extraordinary women and men who risk everything day after day to do just this.
Over the years, as post-Soviet Russia has felt more embattled, the stories of these insanely brave people have reached the outside world more rarely. So Anne Garrels’ book Putin Country is most welcome. Garrels is no ordinary foreign correspondent. She has been reporting from Russia for almost 40 years and visiting Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the Urals for the last 23. Indeed, it is Garrel’s focus on life in this "unglamorous" city and region over time that makes this book special.
After the fall
Until the fall of communism, Chelyabinsk was closed to foreigners because of its armaments factories, heavy industry and mines. It was also the heartland of the Soviet Union’s notoriously messy nuclear weapons programme.
