The Soviet Union and its satellites fell apart with an apparent suddenness which mystified many intelligent people in the West, though to those who knew the facts from the inside the collapse was largely predictable. The brainwashing of Western opinion carried out (with the best intentions) by people such as the Webbs made it reluctant to face the truth about Stalin's tyranny, while the so-called Thaw was less a genuine liberalisation than the efforts of self-interested party bosses and bureaucrats to keep the system going at all costs - and the costs were indeed high. Gorbachev remains rather an enigma, though the Communist leaders in other states - particularly Kadar in Hungary - are shown to have been amoral and unscrupulous to the point of sheer viciousness. A useful pendant to this volume is The Russian Century, by Brian Moynahan (Pimlico, £10 in UK), which looks over Russian history for the past hundred years and gives an excellent, condensed account of the collapse of Czardom and Lenin's assumption of power.