Amazon.com Review
If Michael Lewis (
The New New Thing,
Liar's Poker) or P.J. O'Rourke (
Holidays in Hell,
Parliament of Whores) had spent the 1990s in Moscow, they might have produced a book like
Casino Moscow--a dizzying first-person account of the wild east and its shotgun wedding with capitalism. It begins with Matthew Brzezinski as a rookie reporter getting beaten and nearly killed by a pair of Ukrainian thugs; the rest of the book is a white-knuckle tour through a place where the line separating entrepreneurs and criminals is often impossible to discern. Brzezinski worked in the Moscow bureau of the
Wall Street Journal. If his name sounds familiar, that's because he's the nephew of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor. He is an ideal guide: sometimes it takes a fish-out-of-water foreigner to see the things a jaded native cannot. (Comparing the author to Alexis de Tocqueville or Gunnar Myrdal is a stretch, but it's the same idea.) Brzezinski also writes with great humor and amazing panache. Describing the parking lot of a high-class bank, he writes that it "resembled a well-stocked Mercedes dealership that specialized only in armored, navy blue 600-series sedans, or
shestotki, as the top-of-the-line models were affectionately known--as in 'My
shestotka's just been blown up, can I borrow yours?'" Gangsters, prostitutes, and Western investors fill these pages, all of them coming to life courtesy of Brzezinski's narrative skill.
Despite the title, Casino Moscow isn't just about Moscow--some of the best sections cover other parts of Russia: "It was heartbreaking that St. Petersburg had been so mistreated. Yet even in its state of decay, I still preferred its shabby elegance to Moscow's new-money makeover. In St. Petersburg you lived for the past; Moscow lived only for the day." At the edge of Siberia, on the Pacific coast, is Vladivostok--"five time zones ahead of the Russian capital, but a decade behind." The book is a fast-paced adventure story--and a must for readers interested in Russia as well as fans of modern-day gonzo journalism. Brzezinski is a writer to watch. --John Miller
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A staff writer for the Wall Street Journal in Kiev and Moscow from 1996 to 1998, Brzezinski had a front-row seat at the turbulent privatization of Russia's post-Communist industrial base. Modernization and efficiency along Western lines may have been the official goals of the campaign, but Brzezinski argues that, in the end, it resulted in large-scale robbery in which Russia's elite spirited an estimated $150 billion to $300 billion out of the country, stowing it in Swiss bank accounts and other offshore hideaways. The book is filled with hair-raising details: before setting up a company in Russia, a Canadian businessman has to interview several gangs to decide who will cover his back; families wanting to earn a living wage have chosen to live and work near Chernobyl, emphatically denying its well-known health hazards. But although he regards Russia's failure to modernize during this period a tragedy, Brzezinski offers an irreverent account of greed and corruption in this rollicking page-turner. In the face of rampant cronyism, corruption and fraud, Brzezinski (whose uncle Zbigniew was the national security adviser to the Carter administration) can still laugh at striving Moscow's claims to be the New York of the East (when expats like himself preferred to call it the Big Cucumber). Righteous indignation at the betrayal of a country and of the international organizations that tried to lend assistance, however, resonates in his assertion, "What passed for capitalism in Russia was a grotesque perversion of the American variety." (July) Forecast: The author's Wall Street Journal credentials and the cachet of his uncle's political connections should help call attention to this smart, firsthand report on a particularly volatile historical event.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
