A CRATE OF VODKA

An Insider View on the 20 Years That Shaped Modern Russia
http://www.bookexpocast.com/authors-studio/2009/06/11/a-crate-of-vodka/
by Alfred Kokh and Igor Svinarenko

ISBN#978-1-929631-89-6 • Trade Cloth

$ 28.00

JUST PUBLISHED!
First time in English!

A New Exciting Book From Enigma

These are just some of the names that appear in this book: Yuri Andropov, Lavrenty Beria, Leonid Brezhnev, Iosif Brodsky, Konstantin Chernenko, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Vladimir Nabokov, Augusto Pinochet, Yevgeny Primakov, Vladimir Putin, Valentin Rasputin, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Andrei Sakharov, Eduard Shevardnadze, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Soros, Joseph Stalin, Leo Tolstoy, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Zhirinovsky …among many others

The English translation of the Russian bestseller, A Crate of Vodka will be launched at the Book Expo America trade show at the Javits Center in New York on May 29, 2009. The authors are both protagonists of the last 20 years of events and transformations that have rocked both the West and Russia since the Soviet Union was dissolved and recast into a dynamic new State that the world must acknowledge.

“Brezhnev died in 1982, and in 2001 terrorists bombed New York and Washington. In between, in 1991, a great empire collapsed. All those events fit into our slice of time, exactly twenty years, like vodka bottles in a crate.

In a series of conversations the authors revisit the last twenty years of Russia’s history since the end of communism. From the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 to 9/11/2001 Russia lived through monumental changes: economic transformation, where Alfred Kokh was in charge of privatization and Igor Svinarenko covered the scandal as a journalist; Kokh went to Chechnya as a diplomat to negotiate peace while Svinarenko was covering the war and placing his life at risk; Kokh was hired to take over the NTV television station owned by Gasprom while Svinarenko obtained the Soros Foundation award as “Reporter of the Year.” These are some of the issues covered in this lively overview of Russia’s recent history that reads at times like My Dinner with André. While these are informal conversations between two great friends who lived through and came out of the storms of the last few years, they also carry the great weight of memory and history in the making. This book, which is divided by year from 1982 to 2001, constitutes the itinerary of two very different young men that begins with the final years of the U.S.S.R. and ends with 9/11/2001 and the birth and development of today’s Russia.

The authors began those 20 years as Soviet citizens, party members and students holding various odd jobs who were not too sure of what their future would look like. Svinarenko, a Ukrainian from Donbass, studied journalism and went on to become a successful magazine editor in Moscow. His best friend, Alfred Kokh, who has a doctorate in economics from the St. Petersburg Mathematics and Economics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had a dramatic career change when he was appointed head of privatization and then Deputy Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin. An ally of Anatoly Chubais, he became one of Russia’s top entrepreneurs in many different fields: his is a modern success story that we cannot help noting, feels somewhat more American than European.

As the drama of a tidal wave of change swept the Russian Federation, these two friends lived a transition that is rarely witnessed in history, except during the catastrophes of wars or revolutions. Their thoughts and reactions cover the whole spectrum of what they experienced at the critical time of their coming of age. Now, a few years into middle age, they look back together and compare notes.

Just a few examples: privatization and the loans-for-shares scandal—Igor, the writer, covered the stories, and his heart bled for the marginalized poor; Alfred, the economist, was in charge of privatization and was in the middle of the scandal. Or war-torn Chechnya—Alfred, the politician-diplomat, traveled there as part of a peace negotiating team; Igor, the intrepid journalist, was there to cover the war.

And freedom of speech—Alfred was hired by Gazprom Media to take over NTV, which oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky had pledged as collateral on his loans, which he did not pay; Igor received the Soros Foundation’s award for Reporter of the Year.

Between them, Alfred and Igor provide a never-before-available eyewitness account of the life of a nation that made the difficult transition from Soviet stagnation to Russian dynamism.

There is a great deal of cultural discovery that comes as a wonderful surprise to the Western reader as it becomes clear that, while cultured Russian intellectuals are very much aware of the Western cultural canon, English-language readers can measure how little they know about what constitutes the Russian literary and cultural tradition. There are moments when our ignorance becomes humbling considering that this vast land existed as a state for many centuries before America declared its independence. We learn all this just as quickly as the writers had to learn a new way of life. They and we, fully enjoy the experience.