cover image Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope: Moscow, August 1991

Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope: Moscow, August 1991

James H. Billington. Free Press, $22.95 (202pp) ISBN 978-0-02-903515-3

Billington was in Moscow last August during the failed Communist coup and the democratic counter-coup that swept Boris Yeltsin into power. The Librarian of Congress and one of the foremosts expert on Russian history, Billington ( The Icon and the Axe ) views these events as a decisive turning point that transformed the Russian people psychologically, forcing them to accept responsibility for moral choices. In a stirring, perceptive eyewitness account of the coup and its aftermath, he witheringly portrays Gorbachev as a pure child of the Leninist party machine, intent only on limited reform-from-above. Traveling from Arctic Archangel to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Billington met ordinary citizens, politicians, democratic activists and peasants as he undertook his quest for the sources of a post-Communist Russian identity. He is cautiously optimistic about the long-term prospects for democracy, placing his hope in an educated postwar, post-Stalinist generation influenced by contact with the West. (Aug.)