Twentieth-century Russia continues to exert a fascination on English-language writers. Russians are, in so many ways, modern Europeans, yet what they have endured in the past three or four generations is beyond the imaginings of anyone with a British passport. To read about the bloodshed, social engineering and state collapse that Russians have lived through is to experience a kind of alternative reality that constantly challenges us, “What would I have done?”

The bestselling historians of the Stalin era — Antony Beevor, Orlando Figes, Simon Sebag-Montefiore —have done good jobs, but a lot of the writing on the more recent past has been, by comparison, thin and disappointing. One of the few exceptions was Susan Richards’s Epics of Everyday Life (1990). It conveyed brilliantly the exhilarating but frightening experience of living in the Soviet Union as it opened up and then collapsed under its own contradictions. Richards let the Russians tell their own stories, bringing out the darker side of all the painful revelations of glasnost, but enjoying the glorious hilarities of Russian life — her farewell party at the end of the book turns into a surreal night-time dash through Moscow in a borrowed limousine that used to belong to one of Stalin’s henchmen.

It has taken Richards 19 years to come up with a sequel. Lost and Found in Russia covers a much longer period, as the country veers from one false dawn to the next, and it is even more resistant to big generalisations than its predecessor. Richards is no parachuting journalist. She strikes off on her own into some of the most unglamorous parts of Russia on stuffy overnight trains. She journeys to a tiny village of “Old Believers” (Orthodox sectarians) deep in Siberia. She sleeps on narrow sofas and floors in godforsaken towns and travels to the middle of the Uzbek desert on a forged passport.

A small group of Russians and their up-and-down lives again shape the narrative. There is Anna, an awkward but brilliant campaigning journalist whose convictions make her stay in the provinces and not move to Moscow; Misha and Tatyana, who tentatively climb up the ladder of the new business elite; Igor and N­atasha, a peripatetic couple who run away to Siberia and the Crimea, as she tries to escape the demons of her high-caste parents and their tragic story.

Several of the group come from the town of Marx, a provincial city near the Volga, which was the result of a typically ambitious and typically disastrous Bolshevik experiment to create a new homeland for Russia’s Volga Germans. The area was ravaged by famine when the authorities tried a misconceived mass irrigation scheme that ended up ruining the soil. In 1941, after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the region was abolished and its German inhabitants deported en masse. Marx was turned into a closed city for the military-industrial sector, even disappearing from the national telephone directory. “There’s no such place as Marx,” a telephone operator tells Richards in a wonderfully surreal moment. “But I can put you through to Engels instead.”

This is the traumatised town with no functioning economy or services that Richards discovers in 1992. One of her friends compares the newly re-opened Marx — or Russia as a whole — to a zoo whose cages have been unlocked but whose animals don’t know what to do with the freedom on offer.

Another paradox is that the Soviet Union, the most materialist state on earth, has turned into a society transfixed by preachers, cults and UFOs. Richards is sceptical, of course, but all her assumptions are turned upside down by some of her encounters. She is lost for words about an out-of-body sensation after she agrees to climb into a “shamanic cylinder” constructed by an eccentric scientist; and she has a thrilling but ­inexplicable sensation in a Siberian forest, when she — but nobody else accompanying her — is rocked by a deep earthly music from out of nowhere, “a sustained chord that appeared to come from an immense choir hidden in the trees”. Then she travels to meet a pagan healer, who reads the ailments and anxieties of all her visitors with seemingly telepathic perceptiveness. The healer, Nina Stepanovna, identifies Richards as a western doubter, invites her to a bizarre all-night drinking session, then lands her with a curse that keeps her bedridden and immobile for three days.

Lost and Found in Russia is intense reading. It is so bursting with good material that it doesn’t quite hang together, and the decision to splice the narrative with chronological summaries of political events was a mistake, as it detracts from the book’s intimate novelistic character. But for a rich portrait of the new Russia, grab this off the shelf and skip all those biographies of Vladimir Putin.

IB Tauris £17.99 pp320

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