"Mr. Aron is a distinguished scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a skillful polemicist. He brings this history of Russian journalism to life with a fine attention to detail and a bold narrative sweep. He and his researchers have read a colossal amount of newspapers and magazines from those years, and filleted them for the most telling phrases, anecdotes and arguments."

-Edward Lucas, The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2012

"It is hard to think of any other volume that provides as much information and insight into the nature of the Soviet system and its collapse as this book. Focusing on glasnost, (the opening up of public discourse by Mikhail Gorbachev about the failings and past history of the Soviet Union), Leon Aron presents a richly documented and riveting portrait of every aspect of the Soviet system based exclusively on Soviet-Russian sources, most of them probably unfamiliar even to American experts on Soviet affairs who read Russian. (Listing the source materials takes 159 pages.) There is certainly no comparable Western study of glasnost, let alone one that makes so clear why the Soviet system was profoundly flawed and strikingly different from its legitimating myths, some of them swallowed by Western public opinion and numerous Western intellectuals."

-Paul Hollander, The Washington Times, August 1, 2012

"Leon Aron's book, a genuine tour de force, is a fascinating chronicle of the main ideas that caused and inspired the revolutionary upheaval in the USSR."

-Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland (College Park), International Affairs, Spring 2012

"Aron's masterful work may also contain a prophetic warning. Russia repudiated the materialist ideas that eroded the barriers against the tyranny while the nations of the West are embracing them. If Russia’s history proves moral renewal breaks the shackles of darkness, then our moral corruption may be blinding us to an enslavement coming our way."

-Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse, Acton Institute "Religion & Liberty", Spring 2012

"At last Leon Aron's magisterial, beautifully-written study fills that space, not just describing, but contextualizing and connecting the myriad individual stories of the Gorbachev era, not as a top-down political text but a bottom-up story of a people struggling for redemption."

-Mark Galeotti, Center for Global Affairs, New York University, Spring 2012

"It might seem oxymoronic to speak of shining moments during the waning years of the Soviet Union, but Aron more than justifies the description with a stunning portrait of the intellectual and moral revolution that burst forth between 1987 and 1991."

-Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2012