The Soviet Union, like autocracies since the time of Nero, who burned books and asked that histories be rewritten in his favor, remains a society in which the penalties for the wrong opinions, the wrong words, are often ostracism, torture, imprisonment, exile and execution. Paradoxically, the USSR is a society in which the pen is far mightier than the sword. Leaders rise and fall, achieve the immortality of gods or slip into oblivion, according to the manipulations of an official and venerated state language. Power lurks behind jargon. Slaughter disappears into euphemism. Wickedness skulks behind the vocabulary of a sacred theory of history and economics. Ordinary words assume extraordinary meanings. “Democracy” means “oligarchy.” “Mental hospital” means “prison for political dissenters.” “Freedom” means “conformity.” The authors of this book, themselves ex- Soviet correspondents for Izvestia who were forced to flee their country for expressing “dangerous” opinions, have written a valuable report that amounts to a background intelligence analysis of how the Kremlin actually functions.

From the point of view of Kremlin politics, therefore, their book has real value. Much of what they have to say— about the machinations of members of the Politburo and its Machiavellian inner struggles— will be new to readers in the West, is presently unavailable to their countrymen and was smuggled out as prohibited and secretly gathered information. These chapters thus become a lens through which to look at recent developments, such as glasnost and perestroika, and by which to sight the terrain for appropriate Western responses. Intelligence analysts may wish to take heed.

The facts, as Solovyov and Klepikova present them, are hardly encouraging. Concentrating on the activities of Politburo members from the death of Stalin, in 1953, through the reformist reign of Khrushchev, who was removed from his position as party leader in 1964, through the stupefying dullness of the reign of Brezhnev, who died under questionable circumstances in 1982, and working in detail through the brief tenures of his successors, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev, the authors describe a melancholy incompetent leadership trying vainly to cheer itself up with useless slogans and vapid ideas. The portrait they paint is one of obsolescent rulers drowsing their way to death.