Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union [Paperback]

Accessible and absorbing.Well documented...a readable account.Convincing and powerful.Shane's book is reportage at its best?an insightful blend of anecdote, observation, biographical sketch, statistics, and history. This is a vivid, first-class eyewitness description and analysis of the sudden demise of Soviet communism.A critical book to understanding the era...Scott Shane tells the story of the way the modern information age helped destroy the last pillars of communism, and he tells it with grace, sympathy, and intelligence.A brilliant and original account of how Gorbachevs easing of information controls destroyed the illusions of communism and drove the Soviet system to ruin. Shane writes with such bracing authority, such startling insight, that Dismantling Utopia must be regarded as one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union. Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times.By the 1980s the Soviet Union had matched the United States in military might and far surpassed it in the production of steel, timber, concrete, and oil. But the electronic whirlwind that was transforming the global economy had been locked out by communist leaders. Heirs to an old Russian tradition of censorship, they had banned photocopiers, prohibited accurate maps, and controlled word-for-word even the scripts of stand-up comedians. In this compellingly readable firsthand account, filled with memorable characters, revealing vignettes, and striking statistics, Scott Shane tells the story of Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to renew socialism by easing information controls. As newspapers, television, books, films, and videotapes flooded the country with information about the Stalinist past, the communist present, and life in the rest of the world, the Soviet system was driven to ruin. Shane's unique perspective also places one of the century's momentous events in larger context: the universal struggle of governments to keep information from the people, and the irresistible power of technol3%