RESURRECTION David Remnick Random House, $250 The likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky would have been proud. David Remnick has assembled what feels like a cast of thousands in Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia, his portrait of life following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Presenting them one after another with aplomb, they are as colourful, complex and turbulent as any in Russian fiction. Some are the subject of interviews, others are fleshed out, based on talks with third parties.
Predictably, one interviewee is Mikhail Gorbachev, who comes across as the born survivor still under the illusion that the Russian people need him (when apparently they do not). It seems survivor is an apt word - on becoming a former leader of the USSR's 11 republics in 1991, his pension was worth only US$140 a month, we are told.
Then there is the precarious Boris Yeltsin - he who was famously 'too drunk' to get off the plane in Dublin on one widely-reported occasion.
He was also apparently inebriated at the negotiations that formally declared the Soviet Union defunct on December 7, 1991. A source close to the talks said: 'Yeltsin got very drunk . . . so drunk he fell out of his chair.' Intriguingly, as Remnick did not interview Mr Yeltsin, he did not get the chance to ask about it.
My favourite is the radical nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who should take the crown for being Russia's crackpot. In 1991 he had come third from nowhere in the presidential elections, promising, among other things, free vodka. He was later successful in the 1993 parliamentary elections.