Russia

When in 1988 Jo Durden-Smith undertook to write an article about Leningrad for an American travel magazine, the Soviet Union loomed like "a black hole on the edge of Europe . . . impenetrable and incomprehensible," yielding faint traces of meaning only "against the odds of the local gravity." From the moment he stepped off the airplane, Durden-Smith found himself as an unchaperoned (and unusually tall) Westerner in the early months of glasnost, to be a genuine curiosity, both on the street and at the gatherings of Russian intelligentsia to which he was graciously admitted.