Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

"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

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.