Volume 39, Number 13 · July 16, 1992
Dons of the Don
By David Remnick
The Soviet Mafia
by Arkady Vaksberg, translated by John Roberts, translated by Elizabeth Roberts
St. Martin's Press, 275 pp., $24.95
Gaidar Aliyev was humiliated. After two decades as the Communist Party boss of Azerbaijan, he had been dumped in 1989 from Gorbachev's Politburo, vilified for corruption in the news columns of Pravda, and reduced to sharing the back seat of a dismal Volga sedan with an American journalist. The pressures of Aliyev's decline wore on him. He had suffered mild heart attacks; his complexion turned the shade of a votive candle. He complained of poverty to all who would listen. But Aliyev was still possessed of a certain unctuous charm, a parody of William Powell's parody of a regal smoothie. 'You should feel quite honored,' he told me as we drove to Moscow from his posh dacha in the village of Uspenskoye. 'It's not often that I give an audience.'
Review, 7913 words
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