Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire | Michael Dobbs

Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire | Michael Dobbs | A Vivid and Compelling Narrative

books:

Down with Big Brot...

	Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire Michael Dobbs Vintage, 1998 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

"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

for more information click here

Burial deferred

"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" - Nikita Khrushchev, November 17, 1956

In DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, author Michael Dobbs begins his narrative on December 26, 1979 as members of the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo gather to lay before Communist Party General Secretary Brezhnev the final plans for the invasion of Afghanistan. Dobbs ends his narrative at 7:00 PM on December 25, 1991, when General Secretary Gorbachev, in a television address broadcast worldwide, formally dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It would, perhaps, be too much to expect that the author record all the facts of that 12-year period that related to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire; the resulting book would be huge. Rather, in 451 pages, Dobbs does a splendid job touching on the salient events in chronological order to yield an immensely readable and instructive work of popular history: the Soviet occupation of Kabul (12/79), Solidarity's strike in Gdansk's Lenin Shipyard (8/80), the suppression of Solidarity (12/81), Brezhnev's death (11/82), the shoot down of KAL 007 (9/83), Gorbachev's accesion as General Secretary (3/85), the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva (11/85), Chernobyl (4/86), the first use of Stinger missiles against Soviet aircraft by Afghan mujahedin (9/86), Mathias Rust's farcical penetration of Soviet airspace (5/87), the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (2/89), the Tbilisi riots (4/89), the resurrection of Solidarity (6/89), the fall of Berlin Wall and the revolt in Prague (11/89), the downfall of Romania's Ceausescu (12/89), Yeltsin's elevation to power (5/90), the Soviet invasion of Vilnius, Lithuania (1/91), and the abortive KGB coup against Gorbachev (8/91). And, of course, thumbnail bios of the personalities who played crucial roles, including Walesa, Jaruzelski, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. All this against the background of a Soviet society and economy, enfeebled by decades of centralized planning and consumer deprivation, which were unable to absorb the shock of Gorbachev's perestroika and vision of a revitalized socialism.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER includes 18 pages of Notes, and a 5-page Bibliography; Dobbs did his homework.

This most excellent work is likely to be most appreciated by those post-WWII Baby Boomer's like myself, who grew up under the threat of a Soviet missile strike. (Those under 20 will probably yawn.) We remember the duck-and-cover drills in elementary school, the periodic tests of the town air raid siren, Khrushchev's shoe at the U.N., the Cuban Missile Crisis, bomb shelters, "better dead than red", the Domino Theory, "we will bury you", the Red Menace, the Evil Empire, the hammer and sickle on a blood red flag. Watching on TV the collapse of the Berlin Wall was, for me, the end of an era and a catharsis. My God, we'd "won".

Nowadays, those that would destroy skyscrapers, embassies, troop convoys, bus stops, and underground trains are anonymous and stateless. Peculiarly, I miss the relative stability of the Bad Old Days. At least then we could give the Enemy a face.

for more information click here

A Vivid and Compelling Narrative

This is a compelling and vivid description of the events that led to the toatal disintegration of the Soviet Empire, from the collapse of its East European satellite states to the impolosion of the USSR itself. Dobbs was an eyewitness to many events described in the book, and he writes accurately and convincingly. The beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire is traced to the final years of Brezhnev's rule, with its stagnation, over the hill, senile politicians, and the tragic decision to invade Afghanistan.

Because this is a very rich journalistic account, the reder should be prepared to deal with a myriad of Eastern European proper names that occur throughout the book. Still, this is a very sophisticated, historically-informed journalism, and if you want to know about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

for more information click here

Great read. Compels you to turn the page.

This is a terrific book. It makes history come alive through the people, big and small, who caused Communism to collapse from within the Spviet Union. It is easy to feel you are there as the pages replay the key events during the 80's and early 90's. I was most impressed by the author's ability to craft this epic into a gripping, moving story. Well done!!

Pretty good, but missed a few points

A very readable book; made some excellent points. One thing Dobbs ignores completely, though, was the actual breaking down of the Berlin Wall by people wielding hammers and other instruments. The Wall had already been opened, yes, but the sight of people demolishing it, flashed around the world on TV, was of immense symbolic significance and it accordingly accelerated the downfall of Communism. Also, here's some food for thought: Andropov wasn't picked to lead the USSR as a "caretaker"; his death was untimely. Everyone had expected him to live for decades. Likewise, John Paul I died an untimely death after only two weeks as Pope. How might the history Dobbs describes have unfolded differently with Andropov in the Kremlin and an Italian Pope in the Vatican throughout the 1980's? Without John Paul II's protective influence, could Solidarity have survived to lead Poland into the 1990s? Maybe not....

for more information click here

Good work about this subject.

I read this book, translated to portuguese, here in Brazil.It's a good book about this subject.It describes the soviet fall.There's failures in this book?Yes.It has no enough details about soviet fall.Even so, thid book is good and fun to read.

reviews: page 1, 2

products you might be interested in

recommendations

Selections on Soviet Russia