Russia Up Close And Personal

An ordinary girl in America by chance majors in Russian in college. When graduating from college, she learns for the first time that one of her uncles helped Russian aristocrats find a new home abroad after the revolution in 1917. Later she gets a job in the Soviet Union, "the Evil Empire", and finds herself between two countries in a cold war. In Moscow she experiences what it is like to live behind the iron curtain in a country with a "planned economy". She is there all through the period when Russia is going over to a market economy, feeling "shock therapy" on her own skin. In spite of this she doesn't leave Russia but decides to live on there.