Autopsy For An Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime

A revered scholar and tireless chronicler of his times, Dmitri Volkogonov raced against time to finish his final book before his death from cancer in 1995. The result is a brillant magnus opus -- a complete protrait of the U.S.S.R. from the bloody 1917 Russian Revolution to the political coup of 1991. In Autopsy of an Empire, Volkogonov presents insightful profiles of the seven leaders who helped shape the history of their nation -- and the world -- for most of the 20th century. His narrative reveals exactly what occurred behind the scenes in the Politburo during all of the major events in Soviet history over the past 80 years, including Lenin's masterminding of the October Revolution, Stalin's ill-conceived strategies in World War II, new details about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kremlin's cavalier attitude toward nuclear war, the true fate of the "black box" from the Korean airliner the Sovies shot down in the 1980s, and how the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was not the first of its kind in the Soviet Union.Much more than a group biography, Autopsy of an Emprire is a sweeping perspective of eight decades of history from a Soviet's point of view -- as well as an indictment of the powerful regime that ruled with an iron fist and cared little for the people it governed.