Description:
A "Best Non-Fiction to Read This Year" Selection from The New Statesman
A magisterial, revisionist narrative history of the Soviet Union in its post-Stalin heyday, bringing a forgotten society to vivid life and offering a new explanation for how it suddenly collapsed.
Brief description: Mark B. Smith is an associate professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge. His scholarship focuses on Soviet and modern Russian history. He is the author of The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It.
Review Quotes: The most insightful and accurate cultural history of the Soviet Union that I have encountered, and a very good read, to boot.--Jack F. Matlock., Jr., author of Autopsy on an Empire