Remnick, now at the New Yorker magazine, was the Washington Post's Moscow correspondent from the fall of 1987 until the fall of 1991, and though he did not originally bargain for it, ended up witnessing the dissolution of the Soviet Union first-hand.
Remnick is first and foremost a journalist, and the book is written that way - quick pacing, lots of direct quotations, personal observations - but his chief accomplishment is that he does not neglect history. On the contrary, Lenin's Tomb is an excellent primer on Soviet history. Any reader who wants not just the basics but a hefty dose of historical analysis, compellingly written, could do a lot worse than this book. Though his focus is, obviously, on the Gorbachev years, he really leaves no period untouched, especially the Stalin era. In fact, the major conclusion of the book that will still be worth something generations from now is that Gorbachev's first, and greatest, accomplishment, was that he allowed ordinary Russians to regain their history. As George Orwell, among many others, has pointed out a long time ago, any totalitarian regime could survive only as long as it had complete control of the society's historical knowledge. Once people really learned what happened and why, it was all over. So in that sense, as Remnick is keenly aware, Gorbachev was bound to lose control over the transformations he himself had started, which, of course, was exactly what happened.
Another of Remnick's achievements is the attention he pays to the reactionary elements in Soviet sociaety and the Communist Party, first and foremost of which was, of course, the KGB. Many Westerners still think of the KGB as Russia's equivalent of the CIA, but it was far more than that. It was the CIA, the FBI and something that no modern democracy has (a recent blip in Maryland notwithstanding) - honest to goodness secret police, in the sense of internal espionage - rolled into one. I am grateful to Remnick for making that abundantly clear.
Remnick's faults are few. In the introduction, he expresses hope for the continued democratization of Russia, and in that he has been proven wrong already. And though I am tempted to ask how someone with as deep an understanding of the Soviet system and Russian society as he is could do that, I will chalk it up to his inherently American sense of optimism. He does include something darkly prophetic in the book, perhaps without realizing entirely just how significant it is. In the city of Perm, the former site of a large Gulag camp, he interviews the mayor:
"There will be a dictatorship soon," he said with a certain relish in his voice. "It won't be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs - the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline." (p. 276)
My only other complaint, irrelevant to the general reader, is his rendering into English of certain Russian words and phrases. His Russian is obviously fluent, idiomatic even, but I've seen this elsewhere -- perhaps there is an unwritten imperative among scholars of Russia to use the closest cognate when translating certain words where a much more common and sensible English word would not only work, but actually make more sense. Thus, he translates the common salutation "Uvazhayemy" (sorry, I have no good way to quote Cyrillic at the moment) as "Respected," which is literally correct, but wouldn't you use "Esteemed" to address someone? Similarly, and more misleadingly, "rayon" becomes "region" instead of "district." It is true that sometimes the problem is intractable. He renders the extremely evocative, strong and sharp "avanteurist" as "adventurer." Not even close, but my Oxford Concise Russian Dictionary agrees, and I suppose there is no better solution short of resorting to a third language.
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