Digging Out - How Russia Liberated Itself from the Soviet Union (Hardcover)

"We cannot do away with the past by hiding behind lies. The dead will catch up with the living sooner or later, and will harshly demand moral repentance. ..." With these words Alexander Yakovlev begins his epic work Diging Out: How Russia Liberated Itself from the Soviet Union. Named head of propaganda for the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Yakovlev put in motion the process that became known as perestroika and eventually brought an end to communism. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev--celebrated by some as "the father of glasnost" and hated by others as "Gorbachev's demon"--has served as chairman of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Using documents never before seen in the West, he sifts through the ashes of the USSR to try to understand how the horror of what he calls "Leninism-Stalinism" could have evolved. For Yakovlev, who began his own career as a Soviet apparatchik, looking backward is a profound and deeply personal experience. "When you descend step by step into a dungeon," he writes, "down a bloody staircase seventy years in length, then all of your belief in the communists' universal happiness vanishes like smoke in the wind." Writing in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn and other great Russian authors, Alexander Yakovlev tells two stories at once in Digging Out: how the Soviet Union became a terror state, and how a small band of reformers associated with Gorbachev and Yeltsin brought an end to the long "socialist experiment." This monumental work succeeds brilliantly as history and also as a personal testament.