From Under the Russian Snow

Michele A. Carter will talk about her second book to grow out of thirty years of traveling and writing about the former Soviet Union. "From Under the Russian Snow" is the title of her memoir about her most remarkable and difficult year of her life.

At the age of 50, married and the mother of two children in their early 20s, she left her job as managing editor of a suburban daily newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995 to move to Russia for a year as United States Information Agency Journalist-in-Residence. She was to serve as midwife to the birth of a free press in the post Soviet, pre Putin bubble of freedom.

She would travel across the eleven time zones of this enormous country, working with newspaper editors who were struggling to adapt to the new concepts of press freedom and a market economy. She would become an on the scene witness to the second great Russian revolution. She would view Russia from her flat on the embankment of the Moscow River and from her sometimes humorous shoulder to shoulder participation in the life of the largest country in the world.

At the same time, she would be embarking on a personal journey that would wrench her life in a way never anticipated.

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