John O. (buzzby) -
I read this for the biographies of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, which were pretty lackluster. The writer was an ex-Soviet general and speechwriter, apparently his translation cut the Russian version by 50%. He still had an old Soviet style of repetitiveness and too much detail (but, of course, I'm a 21st century American with a short attention span). He was evenhanded in his look at their personalities (Brezhnev was kind, etc.), but he kept going back to the fact that all were trapped by the philosophy of Leninism, and nothing they could have done would have mattered because they were blinkered by their philosophy. Then why write the biographies, then?
