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Country on the verge of a nervous breakdown A young Canadian journalist's internship in hell by JULIET WATERS
If only we could teach the Liberals a few of Boris Yeltsin's campaign tricks. Like spending between half a billion and two billion dollars of government money on the campaign trail, mostly by just giving it out along the way. Like promising an unhappy voter that he'll buy her a new apartment in a better neighbourhood, and a new car, and then sealing the promise with a really long kiss. We have no equivalents to psycho-fascist Zhirinovsky, who ends an in-depth interview trying to talk Gould and her Russian translator into group sex with his bodyguards; or dark-horse billionaire Vladimir Bryntsalov, whose young wife refuses to pose with him for a media shoot in his home, yelling up the stairs: "No. I despise you. All you care about is money and power." Think Quebec's language police are bad? How about a trip to the Metechi Palace Hotel in Georgia? Gould arrives just after the hotel has been taken over by the Mkhedroni, a paramilitary police force organized in 1989 to fight for Georgian independence. She narrowly misses meeting a guest who has been flown out to recover after witnessing another guest fleeing his room with one eye gouged out and his body covered in cigarette burns. The pool and sauna have been closed down because of too much blood and murder. An estimated 25 female employees are raped each month. And this is the luxury hotel in town. But with all its terror, her book is also filled with stories of excessive kindness and intelligence. And it's no surprise when Gould ends her memoir with the promise that she'll definitely be going back to the former Soviet Union. Let's just hope she stays away from Chechnya, where kidnapping and ransoming journalists is apparently this year's number one crime. Vodka, Tears and Lenin's Angel by Jennifer Gould, Knopf, hc, 390 pp. $31.95 |
After reading Vodka, Tears and Lenin's Angel, I pity the journalists who were stuck covering the Canadian election. Compared to most of their reports, Toronto journalist Jennifer Gould's coverage of last year's election in Russia reads like a political junkie's wet dream. And that's not just because she's on the campaign trail with penultimate Montreal Gen-Xer Heidi Hollinger (famous for her gruesome photographs of Vladimir Zhirinovsky sprawled on his bed in his underwear). Canadian politics this year was depressingly low in grandiose scandal, humiliating defeats and total absurdity. We can pretend, but deep inside we know that shower caps are not enough.