Monica Attard’s Russia: Which Way Paradise? is a first-hand account of Russia in the years immediately after the Soviet collapse. 

Attard was the ABC’s Moscow correspondent from 1990 to 1994, which gives this book its real value. She covers the period when old certainties had fallen apart, capitalism had arrived like a drunk locksmith, and nobody quite knew whether the new world was liberation, looting, theatre, or all three at once. It is not a tidy retrospective written from safe historical distance, but a reporter’s account from within.

She covers Gorbachev’s final years, the 1991 coup, the collapse of the Communist Party, Yeltsin’s rise, and the social confusion that followed — politics, poverty, nationalism, black markets, private grief, public spectacle. A very good one for readers interested in post-Soviet history, political transition, journalism, and the horror of watching a nation improvise itself in real time.

Doubleday hardback, 1997. First published in hardback in Australia and New Zealand in 1997; full number line present. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. Good second-hand condition, with visible cover and edge wear, light rubbing/marking, and general age toning.