The Dark Side of the Earth. A Story of How the Soviet People Defeated the Soviet Union

Mikhail Zygar - political journalist, documentarian, writer; former editor-in-chief of the television channel "Dozhd". Author of the books "All of Kremlin's Army", "The Empire Must Die", "All Are Free", "War and Punishment" (the latest published in collaboration with "Meduza"). His new book "The Dark Side of the Earth" is a very personal reconstruction of the last thirty years of the existence of the Soviet Union, a chronicle of its movement from the beginning of the space era, the peak of the development of the Soviet Empire, to stagnation, and then to perestroika, a series of crises, and collapse. It is also a book about the people, contemporaries and participants of those events. Among them are Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vladi, Alla Pugacheva, Alexander and Natalia Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, Boris Grebenshchikov and Viktor Tsoi, Boris Yeltsin and others. Finally, this is a book about the choice that millions of residents of the former Soviet Empire made in difficult historical circumstances. About the fact that no dictatorship is eternal. About the fact that the future always gives us a chance to change something - and therefore it can be looked at not only with apprehension but also with hope.