Ten Years That Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as Witnessed by His Chief of Staff

The first thing to be noted about Boldin is that he disapproved of his boss fervently and that he was among the August '91 coup plotters. And although he reveals nothing about the conspiracy, only weaving his self-pitying prison meditations into his narrative, Boldin is today free and, Adam Ulam predicts in his introduction, is unlikely ever to be tried. A Pravda journalist who was assigned to work for Gorbachev in 1981 and rose in the heirarchy with him, Boldin here bears witness to Kremlin chaos. He shows the nomenklatura floundering without a coherent theoretical framework for perestroika , the president turning increasingly indecisive, the citizenry losing faith. Boldin argues that Gorbachev jettisoned his advisers too readily, was suspicious of their loyalty and treated them like personal slaves; that Gorbachev's waffling was indicative of his character, which was spineless, cocky and concerned primarily with popularity ratings. The author baldly maintains that the party was faithful to Gorbachev, who betrayed it and set ``the country back several decades.'' For a more analytically critical depiction of these events, readers are better instructed by Yegor Ligachev's Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin . (Feb.)