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

This book is a collection of relatively short articles organized as chapters. Remnick goes to the USSR and his chapters follow him as he travels around the country in 1987 and 1988, talking to people as varied as poet activists, Jews, coal miners and tried and true Communists. It is a very difficult read. In Chernobyl, he is told with a straight face that nothing untoward happened there. He...more

This book is a collection of relatively short articles organized as chapters. Remnick goes to the USSR and his chapters follow him as he travels around the country in 1987 and 1988, talking to people as varied as poet activists, Jews, coal miners and tried and true Communists. It is a very difficult read. In Chernobyl, he is told with a straight face that nothing untoward happened there. He speaks with coal miners who protested because they had no soap. Even after the protests, they still have no soap. The writing is lovely and crisp, as expected from a seasoned journalist, and it is difficult to say that this book suffers from a need to condescend to sentimentality as most of the situations on which he reports are so extreme as to stand on their own without embellishment. Two decades out from this book, I believe that it will still hold up as first class writing, and a must read.   hide