Moscow Book of Promises

By: Paul Weinzweig

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Newly released from the iron grip of the Soviet Empire, Russia, reborn in poverty, seeks to reinvent itself as a capitalist haven to attract American investment.
“Moscow Book of Promises” is a satirical, bittersweet account of the misadventures of a Jewish American businessman chasing the shadows of commercial success in the Moscow of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) during the late 1980s, in the dying days of the Soviet empire.
Armed to the teeth with American PC technology and a bizarre grasp of modern capitalism, Joshua sets sail from Silicon Valley for Moscow and the land of his Jewish forefathers. Moscow will never be the same.
Joshua’s adventure becomes a tragicomedy of contretemps, intrigues, betrayals, friendships, fears, and hostilities, which colour the murky landscape of business life in Moscow, one of the great cities of the world submerged in the confusion of revolutionary changes. It is a tale full of promises of love and hope, told to a cynical father and signifying America's newborn romance with Russia and her aspirations for commercial conquest in the “evil empire” gone awry.
Joshua’s business activities are only temporarily interrupted when he is asked to run for the leadership of the newly formed “Soviet Consumer Party” and subsequently fired by Globaltek, his employer. At this point, his life becomes dominated by his mentor, Dick Raven, an American economist whose purpose in Moscow is unclear and whose counsels and motives may appear egotistical and treacherous to the eyes of the reader, but not to our trusting hero. Through his misguided efforts, Joshua achieves a dubious celebrity that leads him to an affair with a woman who may be something more than the journalist with whom he is infatuated.
Fate’s final thrust comes from Pamyat, the ultra-nationalistic and anti-Semitic Russian society.
Joshua’s false confidence in his business acumen, his naive hopes of selling hi-tech for dollars in an abacus-run, nonconvertible ruble economy, his political ambitions to transfer American commercial ideology onto sacred Russian soil, his artless affection for colleagues, adversaries, and nagging relatives, all combine to create the texture of a character and story reminiscent of a literary soup spiced with Don Quixote, Candide, and Sholom Aleichem.