ABSTRACT
This book emerged from my own ambiguous freedom of movement in post-Soviet Russia. As a doctoral student in the early 2000s, I belonged to the first generation of Western social scientists to travel to and around Russia in relative freedom. To me this seemed quite normal. Listening to senior colleagues describing their own student visits to the Soviet Union, it was difficult to relate to their war stories of travel restrictions. What they recalled—rigid bureaucratic procedures they had to navigate just to get to the USSR, and once they got there, the limitations on travel outside Moscow, shortages of basic goods in shops, smuggled Western literature for dissidents, KGB surveillance, and diffident Soviet citizens who were intrigued by foreigners, yet afraid to talk to them—all seemed drawn from a remote Cold War past. The Russia I encountered seemed wide open. You could buy whatever you wanted, as long as you had money. And you could get on a train in Moscow and go anywhere in the country, without asking anyone’s permission, chatting with Russian passengers who had no hesitation about speaking their minds to a new foreign acquaintance. I took advantage of this openness, crossing Russia’s expanses on its impressive rail network, and even exploring some former “closed cities” that had been off-limits to foreigners ten years earlier, such as Nizhny Novogorod on the Volga, with its military industries; and Arkhangelsk near the Arctic coast, with its submarine bases. And no one tried to stop me.
