Lenin's Tomb

"To understand the collapse of communism at first hand, the unrivalled account is the Pulitzer-prize winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick. The former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post (and now the editor of the New Yorker), Remnick exemplifies the virtues of American journalism: meticulous accuracy, a mosaic of gripping anecdotes and detail, and a powerful, evocative analytical framework. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"Yes – that’s why it’s on my list. While Soviet Workers is one of those books that probably needs to be recommended by someone in the field, Remnick’s book is a paperback you might otherwise pick up at an airport for a holiday read. It is a brilliantly written book about life at the end of the Soviet Union by someone who was there. If you want to know what the Soviet Union was like and why it was in crisis, this book will tell you. It’s a page-turner too, written as a journalist writes, doing interviews, going to meet people; it’s about riots, racism and the struggles people were going through at that time. If you’re not that interested in the intricacies of Soviet law but just want to know what it was like, this is what it was like. You read it and think: “Yup. That’s what it was like. Grim!” The other thing here is that he captures the optimism of 1991, the end of the Soviet Union and Boris stepping forward as the liberator from the evil empire – but that’s where the book ends. And yet we know what happened next. But ultimately you can’t get away from law, as Remnick reminds us in his final sentence: “In 1991, the Constitutional Court of Russia then ruled that the national Communist party was illegal. The Soviet era ended in a court of law.” Not a shot fired. Nobody killed. After that, you just thought – anything can happen in this world."