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.