The Snake in the Vodka Bottle

Twenty years after participating in Lithuania's independence movement as a student, Laima Vince returns on a Fulbright grant to post-soviet Lithuania with her three children. Over the course of four years, while living and teaching and raising her children as a single mother in Vilnius, she conducts interviews with a diverse range of people. In this book she records the life stories of traditional healers, who treat their patients using ancient verbal incantations; trafficked teenage girls and the activist social workers who shelter them; Baltic gay rights activists who fight, and win, the right to hold the first Baltic Pride March in Lithuania; Chechen war refugees and their Ambassador in Exile; a contraband butter smuggler; an unemployed ex-KGB informer; and the forgotten heroes and dissidents of the Cold War. This book illuminates one woman's personal odyssey into the sometimes tumultuous society of post-Soviet Lithuania.