Do you remember the name of the novel or the author, by any chance?
Boy, not any more. They've started keeping alcohol out of big public celebrations like the Victory Day parade in Moscow*, but you can pretty much drink wherever you want. You can buy vodka & OJ or gin & tonic in an aluminum can in a grocery for about 60 cents and drink it on the bench or in the park. Normally my metro station is surrounded by teenagers and people slightly older, lots of them drinking beer. There was a law passed a couple of years ago that places selling alcohol could not be closer than 100 meters from a metro station to cut down on youth drinking (this being where young people with no money hang out).
* The big 60th-anniversary of Victory Day last year had some priceless images of Bush standing beneath enormous Soviet hammer-and-sickle-bestrewn posters. It was great. ;)
-- John Adams: A friend of mine co-translated a very funny novel from the Russian, about playing the horses in Moscow, drinking, and hard currency. One of the drinking scenes involves a couple of people going in on a bottle of vodka, which they take to the park to surreptitiously split and drink. The implication was that you had a difficult time having a drink.
It wasn't a Bukowskiesque novel--the tone was fairly light--I enjoyed it a great deal.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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