Let’s start from the title. At a glance it evokes a Russian woman and if we consider that Stewart wrote this song in 1983 what we might expect is a little (only a two-minute track on Synchronicity) portrait of a police state.
The song seems to be about forbidden love in a totalitarian regime. It is written in first person narrative: the protagonist is probably a man of power (maybe Stalin himself! It’s hardly surprising, considering that ten years later Stewart scored Stalin’s Sultry Serenade…) who is forbidden from expressing freely his own feelings in a society where everything is controlled. The song, in fact, begins with a negative sentence, followed by the adversative connector “but” which introduces a contrasting idea: the protagonist is worried both about himself and about his woman but he’s boxed in the do’s and don’ts of the System. The connector “but” is repeated in the following verse and once again introduces the contrasting feelings of the protagonist who apologizes to the woman for his cowardice: he didn’t mean to rock Miss Gradenko’s boat, in other words to do or say something that caused her trouble, but he was forced to do that because of the woman’s imprudent behavior, the “dangerous note” she sent, probably read by someone who was not supposed to.
The embarrassing situation arises “at a policy meeting”; Stewart’s choice of the verb “cheating” as a rhyme for “meeting” is a sign of obtrusiveness, but I think the ironic opinion he gives in this line is not on Communism in particular but on any political system. It’s no coincidence that the protagonist himself keeps his distance from the other participants in the meeting changing the involving personal pronoun We (were at a policy meeting) for the self-excluding They (were planning new ways of cheating). Another sign of Stewart’s discreet obtrusiveness (forgive me for the oxymoron!) is his comment (made, of course, through the protagonist’s voice) on Miss Gradenko’s uniform, in all probability a military uniform which doesn’t fit her, not because it’s not the right size (Stewart loves puns…) but due to the lack of humanity usually invoked by military clothes and which contrasts with the woman’s personality.
A sense of impotence comes out from the quasi-obsessive repetition of the refrain. It is made of two questions (Are you safe Miss Gradenko? / Is anybody alive in here?) and an answer, or rather, no answer (Nobody but us). Once again the man shows his worry about the woman’s destiny and once again he feels boxed in by the cast-iron rules of a dictatorship whose victim can be the dictator himself.

Have you all out there other considerations to do?
Please, don’t hesitate to contact us and your opinion will be upload for other fans to read!