Down with Big Brother
The Fall of the Soviet Empire

As The Washington Post's 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 Gdansk 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 the 20th century.  Dobbs met almost all the principal actors, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. On his watch, playwrights and electricians were magically transformed into presidents, dissidents into prime ministers, Marxists into nationalists, spies into tycoons, and Communist Party apparatchiks into jailbirds. 

Basing his book not only on his presence at seminal events, but also on previously undisclosed documents and hundreds of interviews, Dobbs shows how Gorbachev attempted to breathe new life into the Communist system but ended up triggering its collapse.

Finalist - PEN award  for non-fiction

REVIEWS

"A riveting panoramic narrative...one of the best first drafts of history currently available." Los Angeles Times

"Combines the astonished gaze of an eyewitness with the deeper knowledge of a historian, providing a vivid, insightful account of what happened." New York Times

"Ranks very high among the plethora of books about the fall of the Soviet Union. It is possibly the most vividly written of the lot."   Adam Ulam, Washington Post

"Dobbs does a marvelous job of telling this story in his fast-paced and well-written book...a thrilling panorama of one of the great stories of our time...a wonderful anecdotal history of a great drama."  San Francisco Chronicle.

"No one knows the story better...Combining the energy of a master reporter and the care of a real historian, Dobbs focuses on the crucial moments of imperial collapse. He seems to have been on every scene and in every archive."
David Remnick, author, Lenin's Tomb.