Down With Big Brother

"Down with Big Brother" by Michael Dobbs is a book about the fall of Communism in the USSR and the empire at its periphery. Anybody who has hung out with me lately will know that I have taken a considerable interest in Russia and its history. You don't, however, need to have a special interest in Russia to make this book worthwhile. Michael Dobbs was a reporter in many of the countries of which he narrates the story, making the story at times very in-depth and personal, or at least as personal as one can make a story about Communist leaders and party-members whose power was traditionally derived from their remoteness from society. The series of ideological, economic, and reformist blows that Communism took that eventually caused it to collapse make for an epic story; so much so that I found it hard to believe that a lot of this took place in my lifetime.

The story starts at the beginning of the end; in 1979, the USSR took it upon itself to invade Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular government in a country with a long tradition of repelling foreign invaders. From there the reader is taken through a chain of events which are remarkable for the very fact that if some of these links did not take place we may still be living in a world with the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries under the yoke of Communism. It makes for an epic story, and indeed Dobbs' style of writing reads at times more like a novel than a historical account. Perhaps this is because Dobbs was a foreign correspondent in many of the scenes taking place in the novel. Perhaps it is because he wanted to imbue the story with the emotion he thought it deserved. Either way, it made the book a damn sight more entertaining than your average historical account, although I did worry at times at the objectivity of what I was reading. He is given to postulating on the thoughts and emotions of the people in the story, and attempting to explain the motivations of everyone involved. No trivial task, to say the least.

The book would have been less if he had not tried to get into the heads of his 'characters' though. Most interesting are Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the last General Secretary of the USSR and the first president of its heir, the Russian Federation. Mikhail Gorbachev is the man who opposed the effects of his own well-meaning reforms, which eventually left him without a state to be the leader of. Boris Yeltsin was, despite his later propensity for dictatorship, the first man to stand up for the Russian constitution, and the man who dissolved the USSR into the still-existing Commonwealth of Independent States, not one country but 11 which are now able to pursue their own national interests.

This piece of history is the most dramatic change in the world order since World War 2. It is a story worth telling, and more importantly worth reading. Dobbs' version is a fine account, given to such such fiction techniques as speculation, metaphor, and narrating, but because of that probably among the most entertaining. Unfortunately, the editions I saw on Amazon were out of print, but if you ever see this book in a used book store, you can pick it up. And, if you live in Saskatoon, I will gladly lend it to you.