Digging Out: How Russia Liberated Itself from the Soviet Union

by Alexander N. Yakovlev

Writing in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn and other great Russian authors, Alexander Yakovlev tells two stories at once in Digging how the Soviet Union became a terror state, and how a small band of reformers associated with Gorbachev and Yeltsin brought an end to the long socialist experiment. This monumental work succeeds brilliantly as history and also as a personal testament.

375 pages, Hardcover

Published April 25, 2007

About the author

Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Я́ковлев; 1923–2005) was a Soviet and Russian politician, diplomat, and historian. A member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s, he was termed the "godfather of glasnost", and was the intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programme of glasnost and perestroika.

Ses also: Александр Николаевич Яковлев