Waking the tempests

the long version

Waking the Tempests is about how ordinary Russians are struggling to survive the revolution from Communism to Capitalism in the 1990s. Reporter Eleanor Randolph takes us to Soviet hospitals and new Russian sex clinics, to old communal apartments and new suburbs, to decrepit schools and new private academies. She interviews ballerinas and priests, murderers and ordinary people fighting a tidal wave of crime. She stands with old women peddling plastic toys in the markets and interviews the head of the Bolshoi ballet school. From Moscow to the East, from the Arctic Circle to the southern farmlands, she talks with young men and old women, doctors and conjurers, real estate brokers and newly converted businesswomen - all trying to cope in a world where the rules changed virtually overnight.