The collapse of communism was one of the great news stories of the twentieth century. I would also like to thank Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic reporter for the Post and author of The Turn, for making available the transcripts of two Princeton University conferences on the end of the Cold War. Responsibility for any remaining errors rests with me. Other people who made helpful comments on the manuscript were Jeff Frank, now with The New Yorker, my former Moscow colleague Fred Hiatt, and David Brown, a medical reporter for the Post. My agent, Rafe Sagalyn, and my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, played key roles in encouraging me to write this book and shepherding it to completion. I am also indebted to Mark Kramer, of Harvard University, who supplied me with many interesting documents from Soviet and East European archives. Here in Washington, I would like to thank two research associates, Brian Sloyer and Marian Alves, who spent long hours at the Library of Congress on my behalf. In common with other Washington Post reporters in Moscow, I was fortunate to be able to draw on the advice and assistance of Masha Lipman, a talented Russian journalist who has gone on to become managing editor of the news magazine Itogi.

I mention many of these sources in the endnotes, but I would particularly like to thank a few people who assisted directly in my research. While gathering material for this book, I have benefited from the stimulating conversation and hospitality of friends, colleagues, and sources in many different countries. I therefore have them primarily to thank for ushering me into the shadow of Big Brother and getting me to write about the experience.

When I went to work in Yugoslavia and Poland, I was also following in the footsteps of my peripatetic parents. I was to visit Russia, in one capacity or another, under all Russian leaders from Stalin to Yeltsin. I was eight weeks old when I first went to Russia, courtesy of my parents, Joseph and Marie Dobbs, who had met at the British embassy in Moscow in 1948. But my interest in the former Communist world goes back long before that. THIS BOOK IS THE OUTCOME of reporting tours in Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Soviet Union between 19.

Over and over again, filling half a page. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals. And it was no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action.

Shatskikh the flash spawn