What Remnick is after is arguably more ambitious and interesting: he's trying to chart the changing of attitudes that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991. I had it in my head that it would be a traditional top-down story about perestroika, glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union, a fly-on-the-wall story in the corridors of power.

He complains about the state of his apartment building, but his complaints are met only by the Party officials' own complaints about their terrible plight of long workdays, no weekend breaks, and constant complaints from their constituents. It also may be true that the supporters of the putsch were in general cowardly and pathetic, but again, I’d rather have been allowed to draw this conclusion myself. I found this book in a shop in Columbus a few days later and snatched it on the spot. The ensuing fallout of the USSR's collapse meant nothing to me, a young teenager. It deserved the prize. This is history told with verve. I don't have any deep interest in Soviet/Russian history, but Remnick's writing is mesmerizing.

Remnick was prescient in that you can see in the narrative the roots of the dysfunctional Russia of today. Refresh and try again. Some years ago, I traveled to Tallinn with a then-colleague. We are presented with several differing viewpoints on the collapse of the Soviet regime and its splintering, in these truly tumultuous years. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Lenin's Tomb. A collection of science fiction stories mostly set in India. Often cited as an example of New Journalism, it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1994.[1][2][3][4][5][6]. For example, in the chapter on the 1991 coup attempt, Remnick describes one of the Party leaders on the side of the putschists (whom Remnick pretty clearly doesn’t like) who’s yelled at by the liberal mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak (whom Remnick pretty clearly likes), as spending the rest of the meeting (which Remnick doesn’t seem to have been present for), after being yelled at by Sobchak, “whimpering in his chair, a beaten dog.” In another chapter, Remnick describes a tour group at the Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad: “The tourists did not care, and Kira (the tour guide) cared less. He was born during the terror famines of 1931-32, when more than 30,000 people in the region starved to death. Chapter 10 Summary. In addition to officials and public figures, current and former—one chapter in part recounts Remnick's attempts to interview Lazar Kaganovich, of Joseph Stalin's inner circle—he takes advantage of a wide variety of "everyman"-type sources. From watching them on the U.S. news I thought Yeltsin was just kind of a drunk and a boob, and Gorbachev, a noble man. We are there as it happens with interviews of participants from striking coal miners and political prisoners to top officials and leading dissidents. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. After years of blind obedience and misery, the Soviet people seem to awaken from a miserable dream in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Miners and other groups of workers went on strike to protest their squalid work and living situations. New Yorker editor Remnick was Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post during the time Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were in power. You find how people live under that regime; how Gorbachev set out to transform the union through perestroika and glasnost but did so with decidedly ambivalent attitudes; how the end of the soviet unit came rather swiftly; and how things go after the fall of the iron curtain.