... in the countryside. We talked as we did 30 years ago, at great length, over vodka, coffee, cucumber, and beetroot. The advisor to every Soviet president from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev remains as lucid as he was when he told me in November, 1978, that if the West pursued its relationship of growing closer...

... spending 15 to 20 percent of their incomes on vodka. Disgusted and determined to eradicate the problem, Gorbachev implemented the only government-sponsored plan that has worked to date. He ordered the state-operated vodka factories to lower production, issued a strictly enforced rationing system, raised...

...) and the Buckeye (garnish with a black olive), but the radical aspect of the Vesper is that there’s a combination of vodka and gin—so, the spirit of England versus the spirit of Russia. There’s a tension there between East and West. For this drink I was trying to imagine deeper intrigue, so I started with gin...

... once had a chance for a fleeting glance inside one of these Zils—paneled in the rarest of lush hardwood, hand-made Persian carpets on the floor, bottled water and vodka at their elbow with the finest crystal to fill and re-fill. Russia has hardly been the exception. In Manila, Bangkok, and a host...

...-Russian population sist on black bread, canned smelts, and threatens to derail a smooth accession vodka, don’t people deserve a strip mall if process. Riga cannot continue to neglect they want one? Though I might find it this constituency, the engine upon which charming that the small town...

... 2013 World Policy Institute Petarm Kazan, Tatarstan—Shelves of vodka line a shop wall in Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan republic. Just opposite, Islamic prayer beads sit in heaps on a rack. In this Russian-ruled region with a Muslim majority, bars and mosques exist side by side...

... know how long you’re going to live. You go to the toilet maybe once a day, [and] the smell is overwhelming.” “you have one hour to think about your answers. otherwise, i’ll be back, and we’ll do this in a very different way.” On March 16, one of the commanders brought bottles of vodka...

... blurts for revolt, following the example of the out what more timid souls only say private­ Ukrainians.30 Liberal politicians believe, or ly after a few glasses of vodka. After a long pretend to believe, in the efficacy of “Com­ period of ostracism by the Moscow estab­ mittee 2008” as well...