Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier Book

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 Read More

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  • Product Description

    Having awakened from its communist slumber, Russia in the roaring nineties is a place where everything and everyone is for sale and fortunes can be made and lost overnight. Into this maelstrom steps rookie Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski. Assigned to make sense of the financial markets, he is instantly plunged into the crazed world of Russian capitalism, where corrupt Moscow bankers and American carpetbaggers preside over the greatest boom and bust in international financial history.

    Brzezinski knows he's in over his head; what he comes to realize is that so is the entire country. The government of Boris Yeltsin is under the thumb of seven powerful men known as "the oligarchs," and a crime boss from Chechnya -- even as his homeland is under siege by Russian troops -- has set himself up as one of Moscow's most powerful warlords. Meanwhile, the gap between haves and have-nots is widening into an abyss. Among Moscow's elite, solid-gold bathroom fixtures are de rigueur, while in Vladivostok, the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railway, local citizens must buy water by the pail from Russian mafia chieftains.

    Brzezinski's irreverent, swashbuckling account captures the greed and desperation of the time. He bribes his way aboard a Russian submarine. He survives a freak radiation spike at Chernobyl and travels four hundred miles on a private plane for lunch with a gorgeous robber baroness. He's set upon by Ukrainian thugs, who leave him tied with electrical cord in a bathtub. Fortified with vodka, he crashes ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's birthday party. And he visits a camp of "Young Pioneers," in which children play an elaborate game to learn the principles of a free market -- with disastrous results that foretell the chaos in store for the Russian economy.

    Just as Liar's Poker shone a torch on investment banking in the eighties, Casino Moscow paints a lurid, hilarious picture of a capitalist market gone haywire and an era marked by boundless hope and despair.

  • 0684869764
  • 9780684869766
  • Matthew Brzezinski
  • 30 July 2001
  • The Free Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 320
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