Baker & Taylor Argues that the Soviet Union was built on state-organized delusion that denied both moral values and reality, and shares the author's firsthand experiences in the Soviet Union
Baker & Taylor Provides a personal, inside look at the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, as seen through the eyes of its ordinary citizens, providing an eye-opening study of its repressive social, political, and economic institutions. 10,000 first printing.
Blackwell North Amer Feared and respected as one of the world's two great superpowers, the Soviet Union throughout the final twenty years of its life was a model of state-organized delusion. As David Satter shows in powerful detail, the leaders of the Kremlin found that when their carefully constricted facade fell apart in the late 1980s, there was nothing to prop up the crumbling ruins. Satter's book demonstrates compellingly how the Soviet people were forced to live a gigantic lie. During nearly two decades of reporting for the Financial Times and Reader's Digest, he interviewed Soviet citizens all across the vast country, not just the dissidents and party apparatchiks in Moscow but ordinary men and women. Traveling with him from coal mines and farms to bureaucratic reception halls to the nightmarish wards of punitive psychiatric hospitals to railroad stations where victims of the Communist system set up camp, the reader witnesses how an entire state was constituted on the basis of a fraudulent version of reality. In the Soviet Union, lying - at the grocery and the factory as well as the government office - was universal and obligatory, and Westerners were seldom able to penetrate the perplexing mosaic of wishful thinking and denial that camouflaged a brutal regime.
Book News A narrative of the author's travels in the Soviet Union, revealing the lies, denial, and wishful thinking that perpetuated a fraudulent version of reality during the last two decades of the communist regime, and offering a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. For general readers. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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