Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire - Hardcover

Remnick, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679423761 ISBN 13: 9780679423768

Publisher: Random House, 1993

Synopsis

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. "A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all."--Wall Street Journal.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Reviews

An outstanding piece of reportage informed by interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Andrei Sakharov and others, this is an account of the unraveling of the Soviet empire. It shuttles temporally across the disastrous 75-year rule of the Communist Party, and geographically from Siberian mines to Riga, Latvia, where Remnick, a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, uncovered KGB subterfuge aimed at the Baltic independence movements. His dramatic reconstruction of the botched August 1991 putsch underscores Gorbachev's misjudgment in light of top-level fears that a right-wing coup was an imminent threat. Now a New Yorker staff writer, Remnick met farmers, Eskimos, diehard Stalinists, democratic activists, Party hacks, anti-Semites, homeless men and women, Chernobyl evacuees. He tracked down Gorbachev's high school girlfriend and a CIA agent who defected to the KGB. He portrays Yeltsin as a "theatrical populist" precariously leading an "infinitely fragile" regime. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It's hard to imagine any book on the last years of Communism in the Soviet Union surpassing this one by Remnick, who covered the events for The Washington Post. Remnick's story is about far more than simply the economic failure of Communism. For 70 years, he emphasizes, history in the Soviet Union had been the instrument of the Communist Party--and ``history, when it returned, was unforgiving.'' From his own travels, and from conversations with former Soviets at every level of society, Remnick conveys unforgettably the impact of that history. There's the testimony of General Volkogonov, who as a historical researcher and loyal Party member found that on just one day, December 12, 1938, Stalin, after signing the death sentences of about five thousand people--including many the Soviet dictator knew personally--went to his personal theater and watched two movies, including Happy Guys. There's the story of the man Remnick met in Magadan, that ``gulag boomtown,'' who as a young boy lived in a house close to the port, from which long lines of prisoners marched toward the camps scattered for hundred of miles throughout Kolyma. The author spoke to people of every kind--from Politburo leaders to bums in the street; from Gorbachev's first girlfriend to simple people still passionately dedicated to the memory of Stalin- -and he has an almost poetic ability to convey character and scenes economically and vividly: One ideologist, he says, ``looked like a teacher who specialized in handwriting and never gave an A.'' Commenting on his findings, Remnick notes that, today, ``the fate of Russia hinges, once more, on the skills, inclinations, and heartbeat of one man. This time it is Boris Yeltsin...No one knows what would happen should Yeltsin fall from power...The institutions of this new society are embryonic, infinitely fragile.'' Brilliant, evocative, riveting. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In January 1988, Remnick began a tour as a reporter at the Moscow bureau of the Washington Post just in time for a front row seat to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Communist Party. Assignments brought him into contact with everyone from elite, old-guard communists and neo-Stalinists to liberal democrats and leaders of the reform movement. Remnick recounts the particulars of these interactions in this intimate and personal account of one of the century's climactic events. His chronicle includes interesting vignettes, and his depiction of the abortive 1991 attempt to overthrow Gorbachev is compelling. Nevertheless, perspective and a sense of the monumental are hidden in ponderous, sometimes redundant detail. Of passing interest, this is suitable for popular collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/92.
- James R. Kuhlman, Univ. of Alabama Lib., Tuscaloosa
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679423761
• ISBN 13: 9780679423768
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576