Lisa Dickey's Blog, page 2

The book

“BEARS is impossible to put down. Fueled by a deep curiosity and with the skilled eye of a world class journalist, Dickey peels back superficial stereotypes and shares her discoveries and her surprises. ”

– New York Times best selling author Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” book series

“Lisa Dickey’s sharply realized memoir is a meditation on time, friendship and the boundaries we create as well as those we cross. In thoughtful, often-hilarious, and always page-turning prose, she brings us with her across Russia over the course of twenty years. At a moment where the incurious lead political conversations, Dickey’s simple act of engagement is a radical one.”  

― Sarah Wildman, journalist and author of Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind

“Dickey weaves a lively, heartfelt, and engrossing account spanning a dramatic period of Russian history.  Her tales from Vladivostok to Moscow remind us of the human element so often obscured by geopolitics – an important contribution at a critical moment for Russia and the world.”

– Ambassador William J. Burns, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Click here for more information about Bears in the Streets, or here to purchase.

The things we carried

When Gary Matoso and I went on that first trip across Russia, in 1995, we brought along enough cords, adapters, floppy disks, rolls of film and batteries to open our own pop-up Best Buy. At that time, it would have been virtually impossible to replace anything that got lost or broken on the road, so we made sure we had at least two of everything.

In 2015, with Apple products available across Russia, I could pack just one of everything I needed — and the items I packed were smaller, lighter and less numerous. Here, for comparison, is a shot of our gear for the 2015 trip:

 

40 years ago

In the summer of 1976, when I was nine, my mother decided she’d like to visit the Soviet Union. My father was a US Navy pilot, the Cold War was in full swing, and Russians, as far as I knew, were our sworn enemies. What in the world was my mother thinking, going there on vacation?

The whole time she was away, I was convinced I’d never see her again. When she came home after her two-week tour to Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, I expected her to regale us with stories of how terrible it was there. Instead, she showed my brother and me pictures of onion-domed churches under sunny blue skies and told us the Russian people were wonderful.

Now I was more confused than ever. How could the Russians be my dad’s enemies, but my mom’s friends? And that was all it took to plant the seed of my obsession with Russia. From that moment on, I knew I had to get there myself, to see what it was really like.

 

Way back in 1995…

… the photographer Gary Matoso and I decided to take a three-month trip across Russia. He had a prototype digital camera, a giant Kodak DCS 420, and the crazy notion that we could post stories and photos in real time to a website as we traveled. This, at a time when just 14% of Americans had ever been on the Internet.

Through the miracle of Sprint telecom nodes, super-shrunk photos (25 KB each!), inhuman patience and perhaps a pact with Satan, we were able to send data to two guys in San Francisco, Tripp Mikich and Chuck Gathard, who posted them to our website, The Russian Chronicles. Here’s our glorious home page, hosted by Focal Point f8:

 

The original journey

Back in 1995, when digital cameras hadn’t become a thing and just 14% of Americans had ever been online, Gary Matoso came up with the radical and slightly insane idea to create a real-time Web travelogue across Russia.

I couldn’t figure out how he thought he could accomplish this, given the sorry state of Russian phone lines and the difficulty — even in the best of circumstances — of uploading photos to the brand new World Wide Web. But Gary was convinced he could pull it off. And with the help of Tripp Mikich and Chuck Gathard, his San Francisco-based partners in the project, he did. Gary and I traveled across Russia for three months, posting updates to a site we dubbed The Russian Chronicles every few days.

Here’s a link to the original Russian Chronicles website — best viewed, as the homepage still states, “in Netscape 1.1 or higher.”

Welcome

Welcome to my new and improved website, complete with my oddly huge headshot on this page!

I’m thrilled to announce that on January 31, 2017, St. Martin’s Press will publish my first non-collaborative book, Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia. The book chronicles my 20 years’ worth of interviews with ordinary Russians, from research scientists on Lake Baikal, to the Jewish community of Birobidzhan, to a group of gay friends in Novosibirsk, to a maverick farmer in Buryatia.

Please join me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and in real life for a coffee sometime. Also, you can pre-order Bears here, here, here or here.