Moscow, December 25, 1991

Conor O'Clery

The implosion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a gripping game played out between two men who intensely disliked each other and had different concepts for the future. Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking "bulldozer," wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt by hardline communists shook Gorbachev's authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin. But it took four months of intrigue and double-dealing before Yeltsin could hustle Gorbachev out of the Kremlin. Conor O'Clery has written a truly suspenseful thriller of the Cold War's final act: the internal power plays, the shifting alliances, the betrayals, the mysterious three colonels carrying the briefcase with the nuclear codes, and the jockeying to exploit the future....