Chatting Up A Storm - Claudia Cragg

The news cycle rarely passes these days without negative news of Russia and, sadly for the people of that region, Ukraine. What about the people?  Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with Caroline Walton (@carolineski) who,  during three decades of visiting Russia and Ukraine, met some exceptional women and men, people who had known famine, war and nuclear disaster. Each of them underwent a process of transformation, and in so doing they transcended their circumstances in ways that were little short of miraculous. “Where there was the 'holodomor'," she says, "there was my grandfather-in-law, Petro, who forgave everything. Where there was the Gulag, there were people such as de Beausobre who made it her personal Calvary. And where there was the most terrible siege in human history, there were people who sang Ode to Joy to their Nazi besiegers.” From a village wise-woman to survivors of the siege of Leningrad and the Chernobyl disaster, to the family she married into, they helped Caroline transform her own