The Day The World Changed: December 25, 1991

Over the holidays, I caught, on After Word on Book TV on C-Span-2, an interview with the author, Conor O’Clery, an Irish journalist who was posted in Moscow during the fall of the USSR. I got his recent book, Moscow: December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union and it is a wonderfully literate and entertaining read – basically a day in the life of Moscow and the main players on the day the USSR fell..the portraits of Yeltsin and Gorbachev are fascinating…– to me, one of those books I don’t want to end, so well written and fact filled, from history to biography to the telling anecdote...


For example -- “Yeltsin was a provincial from the hardscrabble region of the Urals and his preferred method of driving his comrades to distraction was playing “Kalinka” with the wooden spoons, sometimes bouncing them playfully off the heads of aides, who learned to move away prudently when the spoons came out.”

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (right) looks at Russian

President Boris Yeltsin during the press conference following

the signing ceremony on Oct. 18, 1991 in recognition of the

Union Treaty with eight Soviet republics in Moscow.

(Alain-Pierre Hovasse/AFP/Getty Images

There are some excerpts from the book posted on the GlobalPost website, for which the author writes, here 
Also, excerpt from the Book TV interview here

--Anthony Napoli - Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn