When the first edition of this book was published, I was still in grammar school, very busy determining what I was going to do with the rest of my life, which university to pick, what interested me the most.

One of the reasons I started studying Russian, was the growing openness in Russia and Gorbachev being the one that more or less initiated all of it, I had to have / read this book of course.

It is quite a readable book, when you look past the 'I am not as good as I write I am" and the obvious political rhetorics that seem to be omnipresent in books like these. ( )