Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's David Remnick Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0679423761 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
David Remnick was Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post between 1988 and 1991 and later a staffer at the New Yorker. While with The Post he covered events the emergence of perestroika, the taking of power by democrats, the failed Communist counter-coup of August 1991 and beyond. His gripping personal account of that historic period is filled with vivid sketches of people. He writes with passion of the twofold nature of the crimes of Stalinist communism--"murder and the unending assault against memory." His powerful literary style is suggested in the title, the mausoleum holding Lenin's body being a central image in his book for the construction and maintenance of the dead culture of communism. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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- Hardcover: 576 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (May 25, 1993)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679423761
- ISBN-13: 978-0679423768
- Product Dimensions: 1.8 x 6.5 x 9.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
The book is a compilation of short stories (each chapter a dozen pages or so) about the author's first-hand experiences in the Gorbachev's Soviet Union. From Baltic to Sakhalin and from coal miners to Gorbachev himself, from Stalin to Yeltsin and from Solzhenitsyn to Sakharov, the book paints the picture of the monolith's fall. This colorful collage describing the critical period in Russian history, combined with keen commentary, creates for the reader the distinct flavor of the time.
For Russia, it was the age of confusion and disillusionment. Gorbachev's half-hearted reforms (the interest in truth ended where the Party interests were concerned, the pursuit of democracy gave way to the pursuit of the runaway republics etc.) were matched by the half-hearted '91 coup (no real plan, no propaganda with the military, Lenin wouldn't have approved).
For generations, Russian people did not know much of the sad history of their country and less still about the life in the West. The blissful ignorance was one thing that helped them in their miserable existence. Their various degrees of belief in the grand ideals were the other. With glasnost, Gorbachev aimed at opening the gates of truth while preserving the faith. In all honesty, it was impossible: the foundation for the faith was thoroughly rotten and relaxing the state control of mass media could only reveal it. All of a sudden, millions of people had to face hard evidence showing that the glorious history of their country never was. That the Bolshevik revolution was but a ruthless coup followed by a bloody terror. That many national heroes, all the way to Lenin, were privilege- and power-hungry maniacs.
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