Author Description

When in 1988 Jo Durden-Smith undertook to write an article about Leningrad for an American travel magazine, the Soviet Union loomed like "a black hole on the edge of Europe... impenetrable and incomprehensible," yielding faint traces of meaning only "against the odds of the local gravity." From the moment he stepped off the airplane, Durden-Smith found himself as an unchaperoned (and unusually tall) Westerner in the early months of glasnost, to be a genuine curiosity, both on the street and at the gatherings of Russian intelligentsia to which he was graciously admitted.