"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,
Vá clav 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"
