Reading Nagorski, it is easy to develop an unseemly sympathy for the poor souls charged with keeping the lid on the naturally gregarious spirit of the Russian peopleit is precisely Nagorskis sense of justice that drove him to move so far off the beaten track, and that enables him to dig up the stories he did. At bottom, he is a moralist, and his memoir attests to the peculiar function that a passionate correspondent from abroad can fulfill in the U.S.S.R.In the end, he pushed beyond the limits of Soviet tolerance, but left us a timely memoir of the Russian scene during a difficult period of U.S.-Soviet relations and a thoughtful meditation on the tasks of a free press in covering a closed society.-
Without doubt, Nagorski is one of the most perceptive chroniclers of the moral dilemmas of the intellectuals in post-communist societiesNagorskis book vibrantly captures both the heroic and the prosaic components of these strange times of both hope and frustration, exhilaration and confusion.
