The Russians
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Behind the Iron Curtain lay a world hidden from Western eyes — and Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow bureau chief for *The New York Times*, spent years inside it to bring back a portrait that is at once intimate, startling, and unforgettable. The Russians chronicles the daily realities of Soviet life with the precision of a seasoned journalist and the empathy of a keen observer, presenting the contradictions of a superpower whose citizens endured chronic shortages, pervasive surveillance, and rigid ideology, yet possessed a rich cultural pride and fierce private humanity. Smith draws on hundreds of candid conversations — with dissidents and apparatchiks, farmers and factory workers, artists and academics — to construct a ground-level panorama of a society that official propaganda worked hard to conceal. What distinguishes this landmark work is Smith's masterful ability to render abstract geopolitical realities in the texture of everyday human experience, illustrating how the Soviet system shaped — and was quietly subverted by — the men and women living within it. Written with the authority of first-hand testimony and the narrative drive of the finest long-form journalism, the book stands as one of the most significant Western accounts of the USSR ever committed to print. Decades after its initial publication, it remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the civilisation that defined the Cold War era — and the restless human spirit that survived it.
Author: Hedrick Smith
Format: Paperback
Genre: Society & culture
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Behind the Iron Curtain lay a world hidden from Western eyes — and Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow bureau chief for *The New York Times*, spent years inside it to bring back a portrait that is at once intimate, startling, and unforgettable. The Russians chronicles the daily realities of Soviet life with the precision of a seasoned journalist and the empathy of a keen observer, presenting the contradictions of a superpower whose citizens endured chronic shortages, pervasive surveillance, and rigid ideology, yet possessed a rich cultural pride and fierce private humanity. Smith draws on hundreds of candid conversations — with dissidents and apparatchiks, farmers and factory workers, artists and academics — to construct a ground-level panorama of a society that official propaganda worked hard to conceal. What distinguishes this landmark work is Smith's masterful ability to render abstract geopolitical realities in the texture of everyday human experience, illustrating how the Soviet system shaped — and was quietly subverted by — the men and women living within it. Written with the authority of first-hand testimony and the narrative drive of the finest long-form journalism, the book stands as one of the most significant Western accounts of the USSR ever committed to print. Decades after its initial publication, it remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the civilisation that defined the Cold War era — and the restless human spirit that survived it.