Vodka

For Mills

V
odka
was a very personal labor of love, and yet I couldn’t have written it without being helped by scores of people, all of whom have my gratitude and affection.

My publishers and agents were endlessly patient as deadline after deadline vanished into the ether, and infinitely wise in their judgment on the drafts that did finally appear; my thanks to Julia Wisdom, Nick Sayers, Anne O’Brien, Brian Tart, Caradoc King and Nick Harris, and to Kelly Edgson-Wright for marketing services beyond the call of duty.

My family—David and Judy Starling, and Mike and Belinda Trim—were, as ever, my most trenchant critics, most ardent supporters, and finest chefs. Richard Fenning first fired my interest in Russia; Samantha de Bendern, Guy Dunn and David Lewis fanned the flames. Mark Burnell, Godwin Busuttil, Charles Cumming, Juliette Dominguez, Fiona Kirkpatrick, Fiona McDougall, Rory Unsworth and Iain Wakefield all spent more time than they could spare to read a gargantuan first draft and give me their thoughts. Ben Aris took me under his wing in Moscow; the Apple workshop in Granada performed miracles with a sick iMac; and the Fell-Clark family rented me their tower by the sea, the most magical place to write.

I read more books than I care to remember during research, many of them by authors who clearly share my passion for Russia. It is for me the most fascinating and inspiring country on earth, and I hope that in
Vodka
I’ve done some small measure of justice to an extraordinary nation and a unique people.

Boris Starling

All Russians have three names: their given name (what Westerners would call their Christian or first name), their patronymic (a derivative of their father’s name) and their family name (surname). To show respect, formality or distance, Russians use both the given name and the patronymic. Friends and family use only the given name or a nickname derived from it (e.g. Kolya for Nikolai).

Wednesday, August 21, 1991

M
oscow at dusk, the great city hanging suspended in all its contradictions: halfway between day and night, past and future, east and west, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid, good and evil.

The coup was over. For the first time since it had begun, the night was dry and moonlit. The troops had that afternoon started to withdraw from around the White House, the Russian parliament building. They were retreating from Moscow as Napoleon and Hitler had done before them, but they were doing so with pleasure, relieved that they’d not had to massacre their countrymen, and pursued by the grateful cheers of demonstrators who threw sweets, cakes and coins in through the hatches of their armored vehicles. Four tanks were left empty on the grounds of the White House, garlanded with flowers and Russian tricolors; the rest snaked away in long columns of belching gasoline and churned asphalt, and the parliamentary defenders had never smelled anything sweeter.

They’d been there since the very start, three days and a lifetime before, flimsy lines facing down the Soviet army and the world’s press, and this was their moment. They picked their way through rocks and crushed machinery, sidestepped the armfuls of flowers laid on the street to cover dried bloodstains and grinned in joyful disbelief that the building—that Russia itself—was safe.

And among all these Russians, there was not a bottle of vodka in sight; not one.

Inside the White House, Lev—parliamentary deputy, distillery director, criminal godfather, champion weight lifter, his shoulders as wide as two men’s, the crown of his head seven feet above the floor—walked the corridors and surfed waves of intelligence and rumor. Gorbachev was on his way back from the Crimea. The coup leadership had disbanded and flown out of Moscow. The three ugly sisters—the Party, the KGB and the Ministry of Defense—were in disarray. Between them, they hadn’t even managed to produce a decent coup.

Lev felt a hand on his elbow. It was Nikolai Arkin, the brightest of the young reformers and, if parliamentary gossip had any credence, hot favorite to be the new prime minister. He grinned at Lev with teeth white enough to suggest German dentistry, and steered him toward the nearest balcony. Out on the Moscow River, bobbing tugboats let off flares and called themselves the Russian navy. The crowd was singing now. “We’ve won! Victory is ours!”

Arkin waved a papal arm over the throng. “Is there a greater nation in the world?” he said. “They’ve been repeatedly beaten to their knees, but they’ve never forgotten how to stand up. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” A breeze caught his dark forelock and lifted it from his brow. “You know what that is?” Arkin asked, the euphoria making him ever more melodramatic. “It’s the wind of change.”

Lev looked at Arkin with the weary indulgence a parent grants an excitable child. “Change?” he growled.
“Change?
Aren’t things bad enough as they are?”