In 1982, the ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan—then still part of Moscow’s empire—for a vast public spectacle. Crowds, stages, and performers awaited the general secretary. But Brezhnev, too sick and weak to climb the steps to the dais, stepped out of his limousine, changed his mind, and left again. The spectacle unfolded anyway. Performers staged their acts, and an orchestra struck up. A sword was presented to no one, in a ceremony without a subject. The event was staged for a leader who was, in effect, already absent.

Mikhail Zygar’s new book on the decline and demise of the Soviet Union, The Dark Side of the Earth, is filled with hundreds of such vignettes drawn from late Soviet cultural and political life. Based on archival research and interviews with key figures, the book depicts a land where the belief in the communist ideal evaporated with such a totality that a superpower collapsed. Out of that implosion in 1991 emerged today’s ruling elite, which believes in nothing but its own hold on power and money.

In 1982, the ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan—then still part of Moscow’s empire—for a vast public spectacle. Crowds, stages, and performers awaited the general secretary. But Brezhnev, too sick and weak to climb the steps to the dais, stepped out of his limousine, changed his mind, and left again. The spectacle unfolded anyway. Performers staged their acts, and an orchestra struck up. A sword was presented to no one, in a ceremony without a subject. The event was staged for a leader who was, in effect, already absent.

The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism, Mikhail Zygar, Scribner, 560 pp., $32.00, November 2025

Mikhail Zygar’s new book on the decline and demise of the Soviet Union, The Dark Side of the Earth, is filled with hundreds of such vignettes drawn from late Soviet cultural and political life. Based on archival research and interviews with key figures, the book depicts a land where the belief in the communist ideal evaporated with such a totality that a superpower collapsed. Out of that implosion in 1991 emerged today’s ruling elite, which believes in nothing but its own hold on power and money.

The Dark Side of the Earth is not just another book about the Soviet collapse. Zygar insists that his work is “about the choices millions of people across the former Soviet empire made in difficult historical circumstances.” The book, he wrote on Substack, is “not about economic models or political systems—it is about people: ‘villains and victims, heroes and bureaucrats, poets and soldiers.’ Zygar suggests, therefore, that what has been missing is the story from the ground up, told through the experiences of ordinary Soviets.

The book’s form reflects this ambition. Zygar layers snippets of dozens of late Soviet lives into a dense composite of individual narratives. His aim is not, at least on the surface, to present a clear, precise judgment, but rather to accumulate testimony until a particular thesis on the nature of political participation emerges.

The result is a striking work. Zygar is heavily influenced by Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose two books about Soviet life in the perestroika era, Zinky Boys and Secondhand Time, excavate the period’s sociocultural collapse through a lengthy series of statements from ordinary people bearing witness.

This kind of people’s history is a familiar format, but that should not detract from Zygar’s achievement. He has created a patchwork showing what happened when everyone, from top to bottom, lost “faith in the ideals of........

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