Author Description

BOOK DESCRIPTION: In The Titov Letters, teenage Nina comes of age in - and in spite of - early 1990s Russia as she and her friends tell about life, privations, successes, attempted coups, abortion and worse, while her father shepherds a colleague's barter enterprise to riches.Four friends transition from secondary school to university or conservatory and then to not always blissful married life and careers. Juxtaposed and linked with their lives is the enterprise and threats of violence from a greedy pseudo-oligarch high in the Kremlin.Rich detail of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, rural Lodeynoe Pole, and long-distance train travel surround the story. The enterprise ships commodities from Russia through the Volga-Baltic waterway to Finland; and dollars find their way to Florida and Cyprus.Boris and Vera Titov of St. Petersburg are professionals at the Institute. Their daughter Nina is a good student in the tenth grade and she develops a special friendship with Vitaly Vlakh.On his way back from summer camp Vitaly travels with his Moscow friend Stas. He stops over in Moscow to visit his uncle Sergei for a week. It is mid-August, 1991, and old-line Communists attempt a coup to force Gorbachev out of power. Vitaly and Stas become close observers of the start of the Yeltsin years.At the same time, Boris is in Kazan, Tatarstan, installing an upgrade to the Optical Facility. He re-acquaints himself with an old seventh grade classmate, Grigory, who is now influential with the Tatarstan government and head of a Kazan banking enterprise.Prospects at the Institute are not good for Boris, and he welcomes part-time computer work from Grigory in St. Petersburg for the Kazan bank.The Bank is the Republic of Tatarstan's agent for barter transactions used to pay taxes. This results in continuous acquisition and export of timber and other commodities to Finland and the West. Moscow bureaucrats set in-country pricing for these commodities well below world market prices. That, along wi