Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

New York Times

Well documented...a readable account.

The Historian

Accessible and absorbing.

The New York Times

Well documented...a readable account.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

What did the people know, and when did they know it? Probing these questions, Shane--who from 1988 spent 39 months as the Baltimore Sun 's Russian bureau chief--shows how information technology doomed the Bolshevik experiment. In a system that withheld even local street maps and phone books and distributed material to its apparatchiks only on a need-to-know basis, Gorbachev's loosening of information controls ultimately destroyed the government he set out to reform, stresses the author. Although the events he relates are familiar, Shane's perspective is fresh and instructive. In his discussion of economic reforms, for example, he relates the populace's anger over market-driven prices to the disinformation disseminated about subsidized costs in the former U.S.S.R. But it was the revelations of the extent of the Soviet terror, Shane argues, that returned historical memory to a people who had accepted lies as truth. The populace rejected Gorbachev's cost-benefit contention that collectivization, industrialization and military victory counterbalanced Stalinism. About the current chaos in Russia, Shane simply concludes that information told people of their predicament, but didn't solve it. (May)

Library Journal

The former Moscow correspondent of the Baltimore Sun looks at the role of information in bringing down the Soviet regime and finds that loosened restrictions on the press and the worldwide revolution in information technology probably had more to do with communism's downfall than the personalities of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Rich in human interest details, his analysis shows how information control in the form of phony prices and statistics had so endangered the Soviet economy as to make even the KGB a proponent of glasnost--that is, until liberalization of the press led to an information explosion and fatally undermined the Communist myth. Shane covers the process in Soviet literature, film, music, TV, and even stand-up comedy, as well as journalism. Some key events, like Chernobyl, are missing, but otherwise this highly readable volume is exemplary for putting the story into a historical framework while skillfully conveying the drama of its unfolding. For Soviet studies and larger public international affairs collections.-- Robert Decker, Palo Alto, Cal.

Gilbert Taylor

This account of the withering away of the censorship state begins with an everyman hero, unrenowned dissident Andrei Mirinov, who endured KGB surveillance and a prison term. Upon his release, his story and dozens more like it came to the attention of "Baltimore Sun" reporter Shane thanks to the newly freed Russian press of the late 1980s. In a self-accelerating cycle, that press printed ever more shocking revelations of Stalin-era crimes. Compared with what journalists were fed before glasnost, the publishing and media events of Gorbachev's roller-coaster reign were a feast for correspondents, and Shane here writes of the increasing gumption of TV programs, periodicals, and book publishers as Glavlit (the censorship agency) fell into irrelevance. Covering the same ground, essentially, as did fellow reporter David Remnick in "Lenin's Tomb" , Shane accents the Soviet Union's death throes with personal stories of travail and liberation.