- The Russian Debutante"s Handbook takes us from New York City"s Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava—the Eastern European Paris of the "90s—whose grand and glorious beauty is marred only by the shadow of the looming statue of Stalin"s foot. There, with the encouragement of the Groundhog, a murderous (but fun-loving) Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the American ex-pat community with the hope of defrauding his young middle-class compatriots by launching a pyramid scheme that"s as stupid as it is brilliant. Things go swimmingly at first, but nothing is quite as it seems in Prava, and Vladimir learns that in order to reinvent himself, he must first discover who he really is.