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vodka, tears, and lenin's angel ___A YOUNG JOURNALIST DISCOVERS THE FORMER SOVIET UNION BY JENNIFER GOULD ST. MARTIN'S PRESS 600 PAGES NONFICTION BY MICHAEL BOXALL every so often history lurches forward and throws nations off balance like riders on a crowded bus. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West assumed a fully fledged democracy would pop up from nowhere and step confidently into communism's empty shoes. It did not, and by every measure, life in Russia has gotten worse. Arriving in Moscow in February 1992, Jennifer Gould thought she might stick around for six months. She ended up staying four years. "Once bitten, it's hard to leave," she writes. Besides, what journalist would give up a ringside seat at an empire's collapse? And what a story she has to report. Socialist ideology is swept away by a tidal wave of greed, both Russian and imported. Like flies to rotting meat, advisors, consultants and MBAs descend from the West in search of easy money. They are not disappointed. They come, they prosper, they rent MIG fighters for amusement and hang out in clubs with naked women in cages. Compared to the local talent, though, their excesses are modest. "The serious and the power-crazed don't drink," Gould notes. Neither do they wear coats, a signal that they are powerful enough to be driven everywhere and not have to rub cashmered shoulders on the street with Moscow's 100,000 homeless. They throw away thousands of dollars a minute in tedious gambling. But they are more interested in making money than spending it. Their lives, nasty, brutish and liable to be made shorter by a burst of gunfire, are dedicated to business. While most of Russia sinks into ever more abject poverty, the ruthless still make really big money. There's a nation's worth of real estate to be bought -- or snatched -- and sold. There's a superpower's nuclear arsenal to be marketed, and no shortage of customers. There are republics like Mongolia, so unhip to the cruel ways of the outside world that its central bank, whose key executives were teenagers fresh out of school, tried to play the international stock market with a single telex machine and Mongolian operator-assisted phone calls. It lost, with breathtaking speed. Everything. Gould quickly develops contacts at all levels, from politicians and hustlers to malodorous landladies and artists. Her account of the country and her life in it is wonderfully vivid and hard-edged. She has a filmmaker's eye for detail and movement, and senses the deep cold currents swirling beneath the surface. Russia, she says, is like Dostoevsky interpreted by Fellini, a place paralyzed by fear and captivated by greed. "Vodka, Tears, and Lenin's Angel" brings it alive in all its grimy splendor. You can almost smell it. July 11, 1997 Michael Boxall lives in Vancouver, B.C., and writes for many North American and international publications. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html