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List of contents
Table of Contenets Prologue
1 To Moscow
2 Baggage
3 Renaissance
4 Wedded to Reform
5 Russian Roulette
6 The Eleven Billion Dollar Woman and Her Friend the Prime Minister
7 The Big Cucumber
8 Big Lies and Black Gold
9 You Can't Act Like Americans Here
10 Gena and the Game
11 Bear Market
12 Back in the USSR
13 Death and Taxes
Epilogue
About the author
Matthew Brzezinski was a staff writer for
The Wall Street Journal in Kiev and Moscow from 1996 through 1998, having previously reported from Poland and other Eastern European countries for
The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian (London), and
The Globe and Mail (Toronto). He is currently a freelance writer and a frequent contributor to
The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Summary
After awakening from its long communist slumber, Russia in the 1990s was a place where everything and everyone was for sale, and fortunes could be made and lost overnight. Into this free-market maelstrom stepped rookie Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski, who was immediately pulled into the mad world of Russian capitalism -- where corrupt bankers and fast-talking American carpetbaggers presided over the biggest boom and bust in financial history.
Brzezinski's adventures take him from the solid-gold bathroom fixtures of Moscow's elite, to the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railway, where poverty-stricken citizens must buy water by the pail from the local crime lord, and back to civilization, to stumble into a drunken birthday bash for an ultra-nationalist politico. It's an irreverent, lurid, and hilarious account of one man's tumultuous trek through a capitalist market gone haywire -- and a nation whose uncertain future is marked by boundless hope and foreboding despair.
Additional text
Kirkus Reviews (starred) Captivating reading, hiply told...Brzezinski tells it with appealing dash and indispensable black humor.
