Product Description

"One of the great stories of our time . . . a wonderful anecdotal history of a great drama."
--San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

As Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, Warsaw, and Yugoslavia in the final decade of the Soviet empire, Michael Dobbs had a ringside seat to the extraordinary events that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution.  From Tito's funeral to the birth of Solidarity in the Gda´nsk shipyard, from the tragedy of Tiananmen Square to Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in the center of Moscow, Dobbs saw it all.

The fall of communism was one of the great human dramas of our century, as great a drama as the original Bolshevik revolution. Dobbs met almost all of the principal actors, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, and Andrei Sakharov. With a sweeping command of the subject and the passion and verve of an eyewitness, he paints an unforgettable portrait of the decade in which the familiar and seemingly petrified Cold War world--the world of Checkpoint Charlie and Dr. Strangelove--vanished forever.


"Down with Big Brother ranks very high among the plethora of books about the fall of the Soviet Union and the death throes of Communism. It is possibly the most vividly written of the lot."
-- Adam B. Ulam, Washington Post Book World

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1178013 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-12
• Released on: 1998-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Amazon.com
Ever wonder what it would be like to witness a series of historical turning points? Just ask Michael Dobbs--or read his book. As a longtime foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Dobbs personally witnessed many of the great events in the final decade of the Iron Curtain, from the 1980 Warsaw strikes to Boris Yeltsen's heroic defiance of a Communist coup in 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is a dominant figure on these pages, but his role in the Cold War endgame is enigmatic. Dobbs calls him "a strange amalgam of genius and incompetence, idealism and egotism, naive and cunning." The verdict on Dobbs is much clearer: his journalism will instruct future historians.

From Publishers Weekly
Washington Post correspondent Dobbs's firsthand account of the unraveling of the Soviet monolith is a remarkable tour de force, a pulsating human drama that resembles a Russian novel, full of biting ironies, driven personalities, momentous confrontations. The author, Moscow bureau chief from 1988 to 1993, was the first Western journalist admitted to the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk during the 1980 strike led by Lech Walesa; eyewitness to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square massacre, he covered a beat stretching from the brutal hothouse of Kremlin politics to freezing Romanian orphanages to labor camps in the Urals. Drawing on primary Soviet sources, including interviews and declassified archival documents, he unearths phenomena often overlooked by Western journalists, for example, the leaderless drift of the U.S.S.R. between 1974 and 1982 as Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev suffered a series of nervous breakdowns caused by arteriosclerosis of the brain, or how Gorbachev, "a master obfuscator and manipulator," used the state-run television network to establish a power base among the masses. Unfolding as a series of vignettes extending from the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through Chernobyl to the wild scramble for property and riches following the collapse of Soviet communism, his epic chronicle charts the breakdown of a system that sidetracked the nation into decades of self-imposed isolation, waste and ideological conditioning.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Written by an experienced journalist observer of the Soviet collapse, this study naturally invites comparison with two recent works on the same theme: David Pryce-Jones's The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire (LJ 7/95) and Fred Coleman's The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (LJ 5/1/96). Dobbs has been able to draw upon materials perhaps not available to the two others, and he has certainly read and interviewed more extensively. His account is thorough and overwhelming in its sheer mass, as he slowly assembles the giant jigsaw puzzle. Events and personalities great and small follow in relentless profusion: Afghanistan, the Armenian earthquake, Chernobyl, Nancy Reagan's astrologer, Mathias Rust, Sakharov, Walesa, and many, many more. Some details might well have been omitted?Yugoslav events, for example?but the reader must be impressed by Dobbs sheer industry and breadth of research. His final verdict seems ambivalent as to whether "communism defeated itself" or was destroyed by its would-be savior, Gorbachev. As with the two previous accounts, one is struck by how ramshackle the mighty USSR in fact was. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Canada
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.