Word: vodka
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...Perhaps we should offer you a vodka," city councilor Raymond Chapin quips to a reporter. In the next breath he grows serious, recalling how, when he first joined the party two decades ago, it sent its members to visit the Soviet Union, "telling us it was a workers' paradise. Today," he acknowledges, "that would make people laugh." Outside city hall, activist Gerard Kourland is selling L'Humanite, the party organ, and patiently explaining the difference between the Russian and French parties: "We officially gave up on the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976. And even before then...
Mikhail Gorbachev drinks alcohol only on rare ceremonial occasions. When he toasts friends and dignitaries, it is nearly always with fruit juice. After he came to power, he curtailed vodka production to save his country from alcoholism. Ironically, that may have been the vice that saved...
...Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...
...Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been the nation's most abstemious leader. Stalin was a hard drinker, and Khrushchev was known for making hasty decisions under the influence of alcohol. Brezhnev and his entourage loved nothing better than raising glasses and toasting "Na zdorovye ((to your health))." As vodka once fueled communist rule, so it has hastened its downfall. The American poet John Ciardi, who died in 1986, wrote prophetically about vodka...
...flight attendants who actually attend. Dinner on the flight to Perm included caviar on eggs, fresh salads, half a chicken and unlimited Pepsi, tea and coffee. Yeltsin's bodyguards, Makarov pistols dangling in shoulder holsters, bantered with officials and reporters in the aisles. The Soviet reporters passed around the vodka and caught up on sleep. The phone system is so bad that Russian reporters working domestically don't bother to write on laptop computers; they can't transmit stories back to their editors anyway. One writer in Yeltsin's press corps was reduced to dictating his story over the radiophone...