The Intimate Diary of a Russian Woman

With the advent of glasnost, the opportunities for new freedoms have been opened to the people of the former Soviet Union, but the economic crisis of their country has curbed access to a new life by placing strict limitations of its own. In The Intimate Diary of a Russian Woman, educated, middle-class Elena Romine exposes, through the details of her daily life, the problems, frustrations, and hopes of the everyday that wear down the Russian people, morally and physically. The year is 1988 and Elena writes candidly of her achievements and failures, her family, her lost sense of purpose, her joys, her love life, her work, her travels, and her friends. She struggles between the promise of a life in the West, which she experienced on a trip to Munich, and her deep nationalism and sense of family, which bind her to her homeland. Written with pain and a soft, bitter humor, Elena gives tribute to her generation of Russians and their emotional struggles in a time that may now seem only to have changed for the worse.