There are few bars in my native city of St. Petersburg, and none at all, as far as I can tell, in Brighton Beach, the Russian enclave of Brooklyn to which I return whenever the memory of stuffed cabbage, dumplings and accordion music begins to beckon.
Not that sobriety has too much traction in either: When I returned to St. Petersburg in 2003 for the first time in 20 years, it was much more common to find open beers in the morning crowd than cups of coffee.
And in the extravagant cabarets of Brighton Beach? Those gilded mafiya haunts now frequented by well-heeled families from Montclair and Stamford? Each dinner table is marked by an endless cavalcade of Smirnoff and Courvoisier.
The notion that Russians love to drink is true, but somewhat misses the point. Russians love abundance, and alcohol - especially vodka - has been one of the few steady pleasures in a nation historically steeped in war, poverty and unrest.
During the Soviet era, vodka promised a sanctuary from Marxism-Leninism: Ideology does not exist at the bottom of a shot glass. Mikhail Gorbachev must have forgotten that when he launched his misguided anti-alcohol campaign during the bleak mid-80s as the Soviet dream was on the verge of unraveling.
My family left for the United States around this time, and I mostly grew up in Connecticut, in a household where alcohol was less common than Sprite. I learned to drink like an average American because becoming American was something every Russian immigrant aspired to, even if it meant aping a culture that we hardly understood.
Several of us "new Americans" went to college together and joined fraternities, and suddenly we were drinking Milwaukee's Best from plastic cups instead of discussing Solzhenitsyn in some cramped kitchen where vodka and political unrest flowed freely.
That changed when I graduated from college and moved to New York and started working on a novel about the organized crime that thrived in Brighton Beach when many of the Soviet Union's finest criminal minds made their way to America's golden shores.
Writing requires research, and research in Brighton Beach requires drinking.
These days I have many willing "research assistants" in the form of American friends for whom neighborhoods like Brighton remain a largely foreboding but tantalizing ethnic hinterland.
Like Virgil leading Dante through the netherworld, I guide them through the maze of caviar hawkers and overflowing fruit stands, past the overpriced restaurants on the Riegelmann Boardwalk to Café Gina, a wonderfully inauspicious restaurant that is perhaps the neighborhood's best paean to those twin loves - food and drink - of the elusive Russian soul.
Here we eat only as Politburo fat-cats could have back in the day, while the rest of the country stood in line for meager provisions: meat-stuffed cabbage leaves swimming in tomato sauce; steaming Ukrainian borscht with dollops of sour cream; meat dumplings also covered in sour cream; and, of course, pumpernickel bread stacked with pickled herring and onion slivers, chased with a shot of vodka.
There are no bars for us to visit in Brighton because they are anathema to the Russian manner of drinking. No less than the Italians or French, Russians treat drinking as part of a complete gastronomic experience, and divorcing the two would be unthinkable for anyone with a modicum of taste.
Today, the memory of the Soviet Union has faded for many, and the crème de la crème of Russian society is no longer the Marxist ideologue but the oil-rich oligarch who favors, among countless other indulgences, the Swiss resort Verbier where, according to Britain's Daily Mail, "the cheapest champagne costs more than £100 a bottle [and] the most expensive is nearly £11,000," while a measly mojito runs £50.
Such is today's Russia - flashy, bombastic, aggressive - and there are sure to be legions of students, as there were during the Cold War, eager to once again understand a nation Churchill famously branded "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
My suggestion is a plate of dumplings under the shadow of the elevated subway tracks, washed down by a Baltika beer. Don't forget the sour cream.
