David Hoffman’s years as head of the Moscow bureau of the Washington Post have been a valuable experience. He is better informed about the realities of Russian life in the 1990s and early 2000s not only by his American compatriots, but also by most Russians.
David Hoffman’s years as head of the Moscow bureau of the Washington Post have been a valuable experience. He is better informed about the realities of Russian life in the 1990s and early 2000s not only by his American compatriots, but also by most Russians. What was fully proved by his first book “Oligarchs. Wealth and power in the new Russia” (KoLibri, 2007). Hoffman’s new work is dedicated to the end of the Cold War, the period of the collapse of the USSR and the fate of weapons of mass destruction in the almost ownerless Soviet arsenals. The book is written in the genre of a documentary thriller and fully complies with all the canons of this genre. True, the author’s awareness sometimes looks simply amazing: he describes not only the actions and words, but even the thoughts of the US President and the Secretary General of the USSR, diplomats and politicians, employees of closed research institutes and officers of the rocket and space forces. However, this did not bother the members of the Pulitzer Commission at all. In 2010, the book won the Best Non-Fiction Award.
ASTREL, CORPUS, 768 p.