“The last generation of foreign journalists in the USSR was more fortunate than their predecessors,” writes David Remnick in the book “Lenin’s Grave” (1993). “We have witnessed triumphant events in a century full of tragedies. Moreover, we could describe these events, talk with their participants, famous and ordinary, with almost no fear of inadvertently ruining someone’s life.” This is how Remnick remembers his time in the Soviet Union and Russia from 1988-1991. as Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. In a book dedicated to the collapse of a huge empire and replete with a variety of documentary evidence, he first of all peers into people and creates living portraits of participants in critical events - conservatives, defenders of the regime and fighters against it, dissidents, liberals, democratic activists.