Vodka, Tears, and Lenin's Angel

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

In 1992, Torontonian Jennifer Gould left for Moscow in search of
freelance newspaper work and a front-row seat for history in the making.
Four years later, after adventures trivial and harrowing, a few
career-boosting scoops (e.g., the big Playboy interview with
Zhirinovsky), and an impressive tally of places been and faces seen, she
sifted through her Moscow Times, Saturday Night, and Village Voice
stories and came up with this book.

It’s certainly not the “first comprehensive account of Russia’s
post-Communist generation” promised by the back-cover blurb
(wide-ranging isn’t the same as comprehensive), but it’s a good,
chatty read. Alternating tableaux of human interest and political
intrigue are tied together as much by Gould’s autobiographical asides
(the apartments, the parties from hell, the friendships) as by any
overarching sense of post-Soviet social evolution.

In historical terms, the temporal boundaries of the author’s
narrative are fairly arbitrary. In order to be captivated by it, we have
to have had a reasonable sense of what went on before. More crucially,
we can’t have lost our curiosity about what is still to come. The
Kremlinologists of 10 years back could never have suspected how fast a
jaded Western public would lose interest in Russia once communism was
gone: free-enterprise mafiosi and spies with shaky career prospects just
can’t compete with the villains of yesteryear.

But don’t try telling this to Gould. Her boundless enthusiasm for the
country goes far beyond the merely sensational (although she is by no
means shy about the sex, violence, and power games). In fact, the real
plot interest in Vodka, Tears and Lenin’s Angel is whence this
obsession? Is it ambivalent socialist nostalgia (Gould turns out to be
the “Lenin’s Angel” of the title) or the sepia-toned memory of her
Jewish-Russian grandmother? The author hints at a more profound journey
of discovery and self-discovery than is actually represented in these
pages, to which one is occasionally tempted to apply Gould’s own
complaint about her experiences monitoring the Teletype machine: “...
there’s too much out there and not enough synthesis.”

Considering her apparent lack of formal academic preparation in Russian
language and culture, Gould’s vignettes sound impressively authentic.
Teenage millionaires, rock stars, neofascist politicians, CIA men,
Chechen rebels, Moscow street people—all of these ring true. But read
it now for best effect. This is, after all, history in the making, not
history once the dust has settled; and these journalistic memoirs, with
their vivid contemporary flavor, can’t help but date rapidly.