Vodka, Tears, and Lenin's Angel: My Adventures in the Wild and Woolly Former Soviet Union

by Jennifer Gould

Release Date: June, 1997

Edition: Hardcover

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A Young Journalist's View of The Former Soviet Republic

This is the true story of this journalist's experience in the former Soviet Union between 1992 and 1995. At that time she was just 24 years old and a recent graduate of Columbia school of Journalism. A Canadian citizen, she didn't know how to speak Russian and had no job waiting for her.

She did get work though, writing for some English editions of Russian papers and freelancing for The Village Voice. the San Francisco Chronicle and the Toronto Star, and even did a prestigious Playboy interview with Vladimer Zhironovsky who was campaigning against Boris Yeltzen at the time.

We see Russia through the eyes of this young woman, feel its corruption, contradictions and dangers. We travel with her in private cars and taxicabs to gangster nightclubs and private parties. We move with her into a succession of apartments, taste the vodka, meet the men who want to date her, and share the adventure of a young woman in the wild and wooly wilderness of the new Russia. We sail down the Volga, visit Siberia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Chechnya. We feel the danger and the eat the foods, and meet a wide variety of people.

Ms. Gould is at her best when describing her own experiences. However, when she goes into Russian history and tries to analyze some of the politics, she seems out of her league. I found it hard to follow these parts and could not absorb it all. However, my intention was not to learn everything about Russia in one sitting. Instead, I enjoyed the experience of joining her on her own personal adventures, which, admittedly were from a young pretty Western woman's point of view. Her observations were good but were not quite dynamic enough and even though I enjoyed the book I don't know how much I really learned about Russia.

I'd recommend this book for someone like me, with little or no knowledge of this vast and complicated land. It's like dipping your toes into an ocean and just beginning to feel the water.

An extended tabloib column

This is not a profound book. Though at times comical and endearing it reads a bit like an extended tabloid column. There is a tendency at trivializing the events in the former soyuz (the union) with the aim of offering us a pastiche of civil society there, but there is little effort to go beyond the events. The post-modern title is very telling in that sense.