“Such a fine, full-blooded political portrait of Yeltsin would, by itself, be important -- for even in the best eyewitness surveys of the Soviet unraveling, Yeltsin is an unfinished character. But the more exciting distinction of Aron's book is the context. He understands in his bones the weird operational milieu of Soviet Communism. He understands how it got that way, how it functioned during the few decades when it functioned, how and why it failed and how on its deathbed it produced such anomalous Communists as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.”

— Bill Keller, The New York Times