Norfolk-based Journalist Embarks on a New Venture

By Wiley Wood

On a muggy day in early September, Anne Garrels is checking the weather in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city on the edge of Siberia. Already, temperatures there are in the low 40s at night. Garrels, a former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, is researching a book on Russia and plans to spend the next three months in Chelyabinsk, a city she knows well. “Layers,” she says, “I’m taking lots of layers.” By mid-December, daily temperatures east of the Urals hover in the single digits.

When Garrels began visiting Chelyabinsk (pronounced Chel-YAH-binsk) in the mid-1990s, the city was in the depths of an economic depression. “I was looking for a place where I could watch real developments in Russia,” says Garrels, who found Moscow atypical of the country generally and heavily defended against journalists. The chaos of the Yeltsin era was clearly on view in the provincial capital, where the factories were shut down and the local economy had ground to a halt. “The city was in such deep trouble,” says Garrels, “it seemed it could never dig itself out.”

But it was also a time when Russians were eager to talk to foreigners, especially in Chelyabinsk, a center for nuclear research and arms manufacturing that had been closed to foreigners for decades. “You could hardly stop Russians from talking to you in those days. They were terrified about their economy and humiliated by Russia’s loss of standing on the international scene,” says Garrels, who made friendships and developed contacts back then that she hopes to put to good use in researching her upcoming book.

Garrels will profile a doctor who runs a clinic for women and follow the fortunes of a family she has known since the mid-1990s as a way of tracking developments in education, health care, politics, and religion. “Nowadays it’s much harder to get Russians to talk to you openly. People are nervous,” says Garrels, who will have to register with the police on arrival. The stability and economic growth fostered by the Putin government since 2000 have come at the price of political repression. “There’s a solid middle class in Chelyabinsk now, and people are basically grateful to Putin. But they’re starting to chafe at his paternalistic rule,” says Garrels.

Traveling on a three-month visa, Garrels will spend the fall in Russia, return briefly to Norfolk, then log another stint in Chelyabinsk this winter. She has rented a small apartment in the downtown area as a base. Her husband, Vint Lawrence, will not accompany her. “No,” she says, “Chelyabinsk is fascinating but not a resort of choice. If I can ever pry Vint away from Norfolk, it will be to visit somewhere like Southern Italy.” In preparation for the months ahead, the two are learning to communicate by video over the Internet, Skyping each other from one part of the house to the other. “We’re practicing frantically,” says Garrels.

The book was commissioned by Jonathan Galassi of Farrar Strauss and Giroux, who also edited Garrels’s 2003 book, “Naked in Baghdad.” Its publication is planned to coincide with the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia in February 2014. With delivery of the manuscript scheduled for early summer 2013, Garrels has less than ten months to write it. “But my main fear,” says Garrels, “is that I’ll get thrown out of the country before I finish my research.”

Photo by Wiley Wood. Journalist Anne Garrels skypes with her husband Vint Lawrence from Chelyabinsk, Russia.