I read this good book, here in Brazil.The book "Down With the Big Brother", by Michael Dobbs is better, than this book and talks about the same subject.I must tell you that this book follows a unlinear way.The Epilogue and afterword are really about late soviet fall.
In fact, the first chapter "The Coup" is about the soviet coup of 1991.The best chapter of this book is the number six "The Economy".The description of a soviet colletive farm makes me remeber, the also calamitous collective farms of MST,here in Brazil.
About Ukraine, there's desciption of apparition of Virgin Mary.
Among the best parts of this book:
a)Page 151:"Recently, there was a program on Soviet television called 'Rural America' that showed conditions on American farms.We saw veterinarians riding out in medical vans to give injections to pigs with disposable syringes.In Novokuznetsk, we don't even have disposable syringes for human beings".
b)Page 188:"To support their private plots, farmers engaged in constant stealing.Adults stole, as did their children.It was possible to stand in a collective farmer's house surrounded by wire, hammer, nails, wheels, machine oil, and lumber, only to realize that not a single item had been purchased."
c)Page 265:"The other pole of unseen world was the psychiatric hospitals where political prisoners were destroied with the help ofdrugs.The most commonly employed drugs were the halopelidol, wich turned off part of the brain; aminazine, wich reduced the victim to a half-stupor; majeptil, wich led to acute psychological distress; and sulfazine, wich , injected intramuscularly, usually in the buttocks, caused a sharp rise in body temperature and excruciating pain."
d)Page 335:"During my first years in the Soviet Union, I often wondered why atheistic communism triumphed in Russia, which was onceregarded as perhaps the most religious country in Europe.But the longer I lived there, the more I became convinced that it was not an irony, but a historical inevitability that a people who had long ceased to value the moral judgment of the individual , would one day throw off its mental bondage to a messianic religion in favor of a messianic ideology."
e)Page 371:"BY THE FALL OF 1990, the power of Communist establishment in Ukraine appeared to be crumbling under the twin blows of glasnost and a worsening economic crisis.On september 14, Lvov became the sixteenth city in Western Ukraine to take down a monument of Lenin,, and throughout the republic, food disappeared from the stores and the lines for gas were half a mile long."
About the Fall of Soviet Union, the book is good, but Michael Dobbs' book is a better choice than this book.