At age 50, Michelle Carter, a married mother of two adult children, left her job as editor of a suburban newspaper in the San Francisco Bay area to move to Russia for a year as a United States Information Agency Journalist-in-Residence. There she worked with newspaper editors who struggled to adapt to the new concepts of press freedom and a market economy. She became an on-the-scene witness to the second great Russian revolution. At the same time, she embarked on a personal journey that wrenched her life in a way she could never have anticipated when she accepted her husband's challenge to take the assignment.