The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (Paperback)

'Incisive... [Plokhy's] vibrant, fast-paced narrative style captures the story superbly' - Sunday Times 

'Fascinating and readable... the cast is terrific... Beautifully written' - Sunday Telegraph

'A riveting thriller' - Mail on Sunday 

'Fine-grained, closely reported [and] highly readable' - FT 

'Almost a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the actions and reactions of the main figures... Very relevant to today's Ukrainian crisis... The dramatic events of the second half of 1991 are very well recounted' - Literary Review 

'Serhii Plokhy's great achievement in this wonderfully well-written account is to show that much of the triumphalist transatlantic view of the Soviet collapse is historiographical manure... The author explains as no one in English has until now, just how central Ukraine was to the viability of any sort of Soviet bloc... it's bracing and timely... well worth reading' - The Times 

'A superb work of scholarship, vividly written, that challenges tired old assumptions with fresh material from East and West, as well as revealing interviews with many major players... masterly' - Spectator 

'Indispensable. At last, a definitive account of the breakup of the USSR: for the first time, Serhii Plokhy tells the story not just from the point of view of Moscow, and not from Washington, but also from Ukraine and the other republics where many of the most important decisions were actually made. If you don't understand what really happened in 1991, then you'll find it impossible to understand the politics of the region today.' - Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History

'Written like a good thriller, The Last Empire recounts how chance events and quirky personalities led within a few months in 1991 to the disintegration of the empire built and maintained by generations of Russian tsars and Soviet apparatchiks'. - Guardian