The dissolution of the Soviet Union, which completed the collapse of communism across Europe, was one of the defining events of the 20th century – on a par with the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Great Depression. So it is perhaps surprising that it has not already given rise to shelves full of books, reporting, analysing and drawing conclusions from what happened.
There were ‘instant’ books at the time – notably David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb – and there have been thematic studies and biographies of the main players since, but The Invention of Russia by Arkady Ostrovsky is one of the few to consider the 30 years from Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika to Putin’s third presidential term as a continuum.
