Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

by Scott Shane

By the 1980s the Soviet Union had matched the United States in military might and far surpassed it in the production of steel, timber, concrete, and oil. But the electronic whirlwind that was transforming the global economy had been locked out by communist leaders. Heirs to an old Russian tradition of censorship, they had banned photocopiers, prohibited accurate maps, and controlled word-for-word even the scripts of stand-up comedians. In this compellingly readable firsthand account, filled with memorable characters, revealing vignettes, and striking statistics, Scott Shane tells the story of Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to "renew socialism" by easing information controls. As newspapers, television, books, films, and videotapes flooded the country with information about the Stalinist past, the communist present, and life in the rest of the world, the Soviet system was driven to ruin. Shane's unique perspective also places one of the century's momentous events in larger context: the universal struggle of governments to keep information from the people, and the irresistible power of technology over history.

Genres: History, Russia, Nonfiction

335 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he covers national security. His new book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone , will be published by Crown/Tim Duggan Books on Sept. 15, 2015. It examines the life and death of the late American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011 at the orders of President Obama. In addition to the debate over terrorism and targeted killing, he has written on the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden's leaked documents; WikiLeaks and confidential State Department cables; and the Obama’s administration’s prosecution of leaks of classified information, including a lengthy profile of John Kiriakou, the first C.I.A. officer to be imprisoned for leaking. During the Bush administration, he wrote widely on the debate over torture, and his 2007 articles on interrogation, written with several colleagues, were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written on the anthrax investigation, the evolving terrorist threat, the government’s secret effort to reclassify historical documents and the explosion in federal contracting.
From 1983 to 2004, he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, covering a range of beats from courts to medicine and writing series of articles on brain surgery, schizophrenia, a drug corner, guns and crime and other topics. He was The Sun's Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991 and wrote a book on the Soviet collapse, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union , which the Los Angeles Times described as "one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union." In 1995, he co-wrote a six-part explanatory series of articles on the National Security Agency, the first major investigation of NSA since James Bamford's 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. His series on a public health project in Nepal won the nation's top science-writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001.
He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Francie Weeks, who teaches English to foreign students. They have three children.

Reviews

[Philip Norman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing, partially first person account of the fall of the USSR, informed by anecdotes from the 1917 Revolution onward. While intriguing, occasionally laughable, occasionally staggering it is an in-depth assessment. The conclusion of this 1995 publication offers a different, less rosy, assessment of information technology’s potential to liberate or blind both new (re)born nations as well as entrenched capitalist countries, different from the standard superpower view that permeates in many assessments after the Wall fell.

[Rob Trump · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting details about state suppression of information and the relaxation of that suppression that led to the USSR's dissolution.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd recommend this for anyone who has a pedestrian interest in Communist governments, information control, and the psyche of people living under those regimes.