1994 - Moscow Armed with an excellent education, naïve optimism, and raw enthusiasm, a young woman takes her first steps from studying the theory of economic reform in the former Soviet Union to the reality of attempting to shape it. From the back cover: Every generation of university graduates believes they are going to change the world. My classmates and I took things one step further and really tried. The Soviet Union had collapsed in late 1991. The future was not yet written. There were no correct answers. Anything could happen. On this raw new frontier, anyone in academia or politics or business who tried to posture as an "expert" was really just guessing as best as they could. My classmates and I who studied Russian language and economics found ourselves graduating at the precise moment in history when these skills were highly valued. I leaped into the thick of the post-Soviet era, delirious with naïve optimism, a thirst for adventure, and a mission to make a difference. Vodka Diplomacy is my story of what happened next.