Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

What did the people know, and when did they know it? Probing these questions, Shane--who from 1988 spent 39 months as the Baltimore Sun 's Russian bureau chief--shows how information technology doomed the Bolshevik experiment. In a system that withheld even local street maps and phone books and distributed material to its apparatchiks only on a need-to-know basis, Gorbachev's loosening of information controls ultimately destroyed the government he set out to reform, stresses the author. Although the events he relates are familiar, Shane's perspective is fresh and instructive. In his discussion of economic reforms, for example, he relates the populace's anger over market-driven prices to the disinformation disseminated about subsidized costs in the former U.S.S.R. But it was the revelations of the extent of the Soviet terror, Shane argues, that returned historical memory to a people who had accepted lies as truth. The populace rejected Gorbachev's cost-benefit contention that collectivization, industrialization and military victory counterbalanced Stalinism. About the current chaos in Russia, Shane simply concludes that information told people of their predicament, but didn't solve it. (May)