Down with Big Brother

the long version

In The Final Decade of the soviet empire, Michael Dobbs was an eyewitness to the extraordinary episodes that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution. Covering the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the Washington Post, Dobbs saw it all: Tito's funeral, the jubilation at the Gdansk shipyard where Solidarity was born, the euphoria and despair of Tiananmen Square, Boris Yeltsin facing down a coup. Down with Big Brother is filled with dramatic scenes and remarkable characters - heroes and villains, idealists and cynics, the tragic and the comic. On Michael Dobbs's watch, playwrights and electricians were magically transformed into presidents, while Communist Party leaders became jailbirds or newly minted tycoons. . Basing his book not only on his presence at seminal events but also on hundreds of interviews, Dobbs identifies the seeds of the destruction and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular, was the unwitting inspiration for the upheaval of the empire, while he thought he could save the Communist Party by reforming it. Michael Dobbs concludes by saying that though Big Brother may be dead, his dark legacy is still alive, as we can see in the turbulence in Russia, Romania, Bosnia, and the other countries that once made up the most brutal empire of the twentieth century.