'Wind of Change' by Kenneth Maher
They called it the “Wild East,” those newly freed nations behind the just-toppled Iron Curtain. In the early ‘90s an unarmed army of Westerners descended on the fallen Soviet Union and its former satellites, some with agendas from important institutions and others with nothing but a backpack and a sense of adventure.
Kenneth Maher fell in between those two poles. A recent graduate in Russian studies, fluent in the language but with few prospects, Maher landed a job with a Chicago firm prospecting for real estate opportunities in Siberia, especially a golf course-casino-resort in the birch-forested land of the gulags. He recounts his stint in Wind of Change.
Maher’s Russian handler—ex-KGB—struck an ominous chord when he described the prospective location for the resort as a “compound.” Solzhenitsyn and Ginzburg flashed to Maher’s mind, and he wasn’t wrong. The area had housed a camp for political prisoners. Through much of his sojourn, Maher recalls, he sought to “seize the opportunity to contribute to building a better future between Russia and America.” He wasn’t alone. Maher’s account represents one small piece in a mosaic of cross-purposes and naivete from the ‘90s—in the West a post-Cold War idyll and in Russia a time of poorly managed economic “reforms.”
