Anne Garrels

Long before the meteor strike, the longtime NPR correspondent Anne Garrels had Chelyabinsk in her sights. More than ten years ago, she began visiting the city in order to understand what life was really like in post-Soviet Russia, beyond the confines of the glitzy Moscow metropolis. In Chelyabinsk she discovered a populace for whom the new democratic freedoms were as traumatic as they were delightful. A closed nuclear city throughout the Cold War,...

"Portrait of the mid-size city of Chelyabinsk and how it is faring in the new Russia"-- "A revealing look into the lives of ordinary Russians. More than twenty years ago, the longtime NPR correspondent Anne GMore than twenty years ago, the longtime NPR correspondent Anne Garrels began to visit the region of Chelyabinsk, an aging military-industrial center a thousand miles east of Moscow that is home to the Russian nuclear program. Her goal was to...