The Fire Escape Is Locked for Your Safety: On the Road in the Former Soviet Union

A decade ago, communism lost its iron grip. As Vladimir Putin stepped onto the world stage, average citizens and petty bureaucrats in the former Soviet Union carried on with the long-running sideshow of their everyday lives.

Richly painted with local color, this is a journey across two continents from the beaches of the Black Sea to the rusty Baltic and Arctic ports, through the arid sagebrush plains of the southern Volga, and across the frigid Siberian steppes. It is also a journey through the hearts and minds of ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tatars and Buryats as they scratch out a meager living, help one another through difficulties, and openly share their optimism and pessimism about the future.

Kafkaesque, hilarious, heartwarming and sometimes bloodcurdling, the events recounted here are real, seen through the eyes of an American lawyer who has studied the former Soviet Union and knows how the game of life is played there.