"Russia Through a Shot Glass is as fine a memoir as I have read."
--Top 500 Amazon reviewer H. F Corbin
"Petrov's story is painful -- so painful that you have to laugh at times -- but it doesn't seem that he's trying to impress the reader. He simply wants to tell you his story of everyday cruelty and sorrow. His voice is so sharp that you down it, neat."
--Quiet Bubble
"Ivan Petrov is a potent brew -- part roaring, Rabelaisian tale and part social case study, with a dash of existential rebellion. This book shows, as few others have, that one of the great failings of the late Soviet system was the stifling of individual initiative and the resulting sense of unbearable boredom that pervaded all social levels."
--Dr. William Brumfield, author of Lost Russia
"C.S. Walton, in Ivan Petrov, holds a mirror to the 'lower depths' of what was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It's not a pretty sight, but its truth is worth knowing."
--Frank Bourgholtzer, former NBC Moscow Bureau Chief
"Recommended for all libraries."
--Library Journal
The story of Ivan Petrov is a true story. C.S. Walton met Ivan Petrov in a city in the West in 1996. Over the course of two years he told Walton his life story.
"People ask me: 'What was it like?' Well I'll tell them what it was like. Where I grew up -- a provincial Russian town in the middle years of this century -- it made no difference which side of the barbed wire you lived on. Prisoners in camps, collective farmers, factory workers -- one man's life was as bleak as another's.
"Some people accepted things as they were and tried to carve out careers for themselves as informers or bureaucrats; others sought a way out.
"I chose to become a drunk, not an ordinary, drink-up-your-wage-packet drunk, but a vagabond and a beggar who became intimate with forests, garbage dumps and railway stations all over our great country. I am Ivan Pyatii-Pyanets Proklatii: Ivan the Fifth -- Damned Drunkard.
"And what of it? As a man I once knew who happened to be a cannibal remarked: 'You'd have done the same in my place!'"
--From the Prologue of Ivan Petrov by C.S. Walton
"When historians of the Soviet Union begin to study the post-Stalin period in earnest, Petrov's memoirs will probably become a valuable document of social and cultural decay....one way or another, scholars and policy-makers will have to grapple with the legacy of despair described so vividly by Petrov."
--W. Arthur McKee
