The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: A Russian Adventure

A Daily Express Book of the Year ‘Engrossing … grips you and doesn’t let go.’ The Spectator ‘Waterdrinker’s gift for savage comedy and his war correspondent’s eye have few contemporary equivalents.’ The Times A thrilling escapade through the Soviet Union of the ’90s and early 2000s by a tour guide turned smuggler turned novelist, that tells the unputdownable story of modern Russia. One day, in 1988, a priest knocks on Pieter Waterdrinker’s door with an unusual request: will he smuggle seven thousand bibles into the Soviet Union? Pieter agrees, and soon finds himself living in the midst of one of the biggest social and cultural revolutions of our time, working as a tour operator ... with a sideline in contraband. During the next thirty years, he witnesses, and is sometimes part of, the seismic changes that transform Russia into the modern state we know it as today. This riveting blend of memoir and history provides startling insight into the emergence of one of the world’s most powerful and dangerous countries, as well as telling a nail-biting, laugh-out-loud adventure story that will leave you on the edge of your seat.

In 1988, at the age of 26, Pieter Waterdrinker was at home in the Netherlands one day when a man knocked on his door and asked him to smuggle a shipment of bibles into the USSR. The resulting adventure would lead to a lifelong journey into Russia and its history. Waterdrinker would eventually find himself living in Saint Petersburg, with his Russian wife and three cats, on a street which a hundred years earlier had been the epicentre of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street he tells its story, from the fall of the Tsar to the collapse of the USSR, blending history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature and love.“Words by Waterdrinker are as amazing as a superior circus.”—Elsevier“How evocatively Waterdrinker can write! A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, he makes this violent period of history shine once again.”—Zin