Between the cold-blooded planners of Soviet strategy, on the one hand, and those who adamantly refused to participate in the Soviet enterprise, on the other, there has always been enough crawl space to accommodate people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a Russian poet and court dissident during the Krushchev and Brezhnev years. His first novel [Don't Die before You're Dead] depicts the ups and downs of Gorbachev's perestroika and its aftermath, the Yeltsin years. It is written in a style reminiscent of John Dos Passos, and its "newsreel" chapters are replete with flash-blacks and split personalities. Borrowings from Russian writers likewise abound. The plot unfolds over a period of three days, recalling a similar schedule in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The author's effort to portray representatives of all social classes recalls Doctor Zhivago's chaotic panorama of Russian life. Gorbachev's internal monologue imitates the musings of Stalin in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle. In a characteristic detail showing Yevtushenko's proclivity to edit history, Gorbachev is no-where called "First Secretary" but rather "Mr. President." This is reminiscent of the Soviet habit of removing from history books inconvenient facts and faces. The book piles up bits of dialogue and internal monologue, usually too articulate for the character in question, like a huge salad of questionable freshness.

Chapter One of Don't Die Before You're Dead begins with the adventures of a certain Palchikov who is so devoted to his KGB tasks that his wife, complaining of neglect, leaves him. They are happily reunited in the end. A raucous Moscow youth vomits all over his aunt's apartment but eventually becomes a famous soccer player. His youthful love, a girl from Siberia nicknamed Boat, a mountain climber by profession, meets her death while climbing a chimney during the 1991 putsch. Her goal is to save Gorbachev, and her beloved Lyza (the soccer player) joins her in that effort. Yevtushenko himself is present, piping over his good fortune and pointing out that he has often brushed shoulders with the almighty, indeed has almost become Gorbachev's personal friend.

Assorted generals, artists, prime ministers and leaders also make their appearance. Hardly anyone among the Russians is depicted as evil; at worst, they are just confused. In a remarkable passage, Yevtushenko assures us that Russian generals "are not evil men … and they do not intend to kill anyone." (Tell that to the Chechens.)

The Russian political players of recent years are not mentioned by name but by nicknames assigned to them by the author. In addition to the generals and other party members, some of whom evolved into democrats, there appear Rostropovich ("the Human Cello"), Solzhenitsyn ("the Great Camp Inmate"), and Shevardnadze ("the Global Georgian"). But Yevtushenko's portrayal of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who was elected President of Georgia in 1991, is objectionable. Gamsakhurdia (referred to in the novel as "son of a writer") declared his country independent and then had to flee Russian-inspired insurgents. Significantly, though a Christian, he found shelter among the Muslim Chechens who have likewise been victims of Russian colonialism. Yevtushenko maligns this man by suggesting that "nationalism," "hatred of Russia" and personal vanity were the motivating forces in Gamsakhurdia's rise. Gamsakhurdia died in unexplained circumstances, a pawn in the conflicts so skillfully stirred up by Russians in the Caucasus region to implement the divide et impera rule of colonial empires. To speak ill of this victim of Russian Real-politik is grossly tactless.

The colonialist aspect of the Russian enterprise escapes Yevtushenko's attention. The drafting of Tadjik men to settle Russia's internal disputes and forcing them to serve under Russian generals (I am referring to historical events mentioned in the novel) are bits of colonial lore that Yevtushenko seems unable to comprehend. It is in episodes like these, rather than in the sophomoric plot or the tired witticisms with which the author sprinkles his narrative, that the book becomes engaging as a document of the latest jingoist stage of Russian nationalist consciousness. In an unselfconscious manner, the author portrays characters from Central Asia and the Caucasus as marginal appendices to Russian history; he speaks of the lands of the Russian Federation as Russian property, even though they include such ethically and territorially distinct entities as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha, Tuva and Chechnya.

Thus Yevtushenko's descriptions of historical characters are reminiscent of Stalin's prose style in works such as Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950), where Stalin's clumsy phrases conveyed to the faithful the absolute knowledge of how language should be understood. Similarly, Yevtushenko's pronouncements—each sentence a separate paragraph—ponderously declare what people are or are not, how they feel and how they behave.

But it is hard to make a drama out of a palace coup. Yevtushenko fails to show that the changes in Russian politics amounted to little more than a reshuffle at the top. While there have been a few genuine attempts to remake Russia into a normal nation-state, very little in recent history indicates that they have borne fruit. Yevtushenko himself remarks that the crowd surrounding the building of the Supreme Soviet in 1991 was exceedingly small, and that the people "remained speechless," to borrow a phrase from Pushkin's Boris Godunov. The bitter truth is that in a city of 10 million, only a few thousand showed up to support Yeltsin and his then-democratic program. In view of that, Palchikov's transformation into a democrat and Lyza Zalyzin's and Boat's heroics on behalf of the parliamentary system sound rather exceptional. Unlike the Central Europeans, the Russians did not demonstrate that they craved freedom and were willing to offer freedom to their minorities. Yevtushenko is at pains to obscure that fact.

The narrative reflects the author's belief that Russian belching and sneezing are of interest to Americans just because they are Russian. He may be right. If this tome had been written by a Bulgarian, no American publisher would have touched it. The exaggerated appetite for things Russian that developed during the cold war still allows many Russians to make careers in this country for no good reason.