‘The Dark Side of the Earth’ by Mikhail Zygar on Soviet Collapse

In 1982, the ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan—then still part of Moscow’s empire—for a vast public spectacle. Crowds, stages, and performers awaited the general secretary. But Brezhnev, too sick and weak to climb the steps to the dais, stepped out of his limousine, changed his mind, and left again. The spectacle unfolded anyway. Performers staged their acts, and an orchestra struck up. A sword was presented to no one, in a ceremony without a subject. The event was staged for a leader who was, in effect, already absent.

Mikhail Zygar’s new book on the decline and demise of the Soviet Union, The Dark Side of the Earth, is filled with hundreds of such vignettes drawn from late Soviet cultural and political life. Based on archival research and interviews with key figures, the book depicts a land where the belief in the communist ideal evaporated with such a totality that a superpower collapsed. Out of that implosion in 1991 emerged today’s ruling elite, which believes in nothing but its own hold on power and money.

Mikhail Zygar’s new book on the decline and demise of the Soviet Union, The Dark Side of the Earth, is filled with hundreds of such vignettes drawn from late Soviet cultural and political life. Based on archival research and interviews with key figures, the book depicts a land where the belief in the communist ideal evaporated with such a totality that a superpower collapsed. Out of that implosion in 1991 emerged today’s ruling elite, which believes in nothing but its own hold on power and money.

The Dark Side of the Earth is not just another book about the Soviet collapse. Zygar insists that his work is “about the choices millions of people across the former Soviet empire made in difficult historical circumstances.” The book, he wrote on Substack, is “not about economic models or political systems—it is about people: ‘villains and victims, heroes and bureaucrats, poets and soldiers.’ Zygar suggests, therefore, that what has been missing is the story from the ground up, told through the experiences of ordinary Soviets.

The book’s form reflects this ambition. Zygar layers snippets of dozens of late Soviet lives into a dense composite of individual narratives. His aim is not, at least on the surface, to present a clear, precise judgment, but rather to accumulate testimony until a particular thesis on the nature of political participation emerges.

The result is a striking work. Zygar is heavily influenced by Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose two books about Soviet life in the perestroika era, Zinky Boys and Secondhand Time, excavate the period’s sociocultural collapse through a lengthy series of statements from ordinary people bearing witness.

This kind of people’s history is a familiar format, but that should not detract from Zygar’s achievement. He has created a patchwork showing what happened when everyone, from top to bottom, lost “faith in the ideals of communism.” Even specialist readers will be captivated by the intertwining of the cultural and political lives of Joanna Stingray, a Californian rocker who washed up in Leningrad in the mid-1980s; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning nationalist writer; and the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Children in a Soviet kitchen in 1991.Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Zygar, who was a child during the perestroika years, puts himself at the center of this web of narratives. In brief interludes, he maps vast socioeconomic changes against his own, childlike disorientation: “I was a Soviet child. The USSR, with its culture and mythology, was my entire universe. I was four years old when perestroika began and ten when the Soviet Union fell apart.” When that universe began to dissolve, the result was not so much liberation as fragmentation. After decades of living for the state, Zygar writes, “people wanted to live for the present, to enjoy the moment, to experience happiness.” Zygar thus pinpoints a turn away from the collective and the political toward pure selfishness—into the childish space where the generation that would become today’s rich and powerful cared nothing for their neighbors and had no qualms about violence, whether witnessing or committing it.

Zygar’s collapse of belief in the system leaves few heroes standing. Figures beloved in the West are subjected to a forensic demystification under Zygar’s narrative microscope. Solzhenitsyn, for example, is not portrayed as a moral prophet or Nobel-worthy author, as he was in much of the West at the time; indeed, Zygar derides his affected, faux-arcane Russian prose. Instead, Solzhenitsyn is depicted as a narrow-minded ideologue who is increasingly committed to an Orthodox nationalist vision of Russia’s future. Zygar homes in on Solzhenitsyn’s insistence that freedom of religion and literature does not imply freedom of political organization, and on his conviction that the Soviet Union should abandon communism to become an Orthodox state. As Zygar makes clear, this language sounds strikingly familiar today, as Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters stake their claims to a spiritual and territorial Greater Russia that incorporates territory across the former Soviet space.

Gorbachev, meanwhile, is portrayed as a tragic but deeply limited figure overwhelmed by events, committed to control, and yet fatally indecisive toward (and sometimes even welcoming of) escalating violence on the Soviet periphery. Boris Yeltsin fares even worse. The future Russian president’s role during the 1991 coup to unseat Gorbachev, when Yeltsin’s allies thwarted a nationalist-communist plot to reverse liberalizing reforms, is depicted with dramatic precision. However, Yeltsin comes across as an empty political vessel, driven by ambition rather than principle—and always embarrassingly drunk. Moral decay accelerates institutional decay in a terrible vicious circle.

Only a few figures break this pattern. Liberal opposition activists Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner notably stand out. Zygar notes that Bonner warned in 1991 of Yeltsin’s drift toward “new totalitarian structures.” Meanwhile, Soviet pop megastar Alla Pugacheva emerges as a genuine moral actor. Most of the era’s other musical heroes are interested only in rock superstardom and success in the United States to further their own ambitions. In contrast, Pugacheva staged a Live Aid-style concert for Chernobyl victims and later became one of the few Russian mega-celebrities to speak openly against the war in Ukraine. Such exceptions matter precisely because they are so rare in Zygar’s bleak world.

Contrary to the widespread Western impression of a relatively bloodless revolution, Zygar’s account of the Soviet collapse is relentlessly violent. Perestroika is not presented as a smooth transition from repression to freedom, but rather as an implosion dominated by nationalist forces—especially the far-right Russian group Pamyat (Memory)—that unleash widespread violence. Much of that violence is either permitted or ordered by Gorbachev’s state and tacitly, and even openly, encouraged by official propaganda. Even Yeltsin appears oddly sympathetic to Pamyat, dismissing criticism of the group with a shrug: “There’s a lot of speculation around you; many people criticize you unfairly.”

Azeri civilians stand behind a destroyed car following clashes in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Jan. 21, 1990. AFP via Getty Images

Zygar recounts the regime’s Bloody Sunday in Lithuania, pogroms in Armenia and Azerbaijan, and brutal crackdowns in Georgia. In Baku in January 1990, civilians were burned, beaten, and thrown off balconies in anti-Armenian pogroms. Dozens were killed; the exact number remains unknown, as Zygar notes. Meanwhile, in Moscow, plotters and coup leaders around the Kremlin, haunted by the memories of Stalinist terror, became perpetually worried that they will be hanged for their actions. Systemic violence, Zygar suggests, did not disappear in 1991. Rather, it receded, only to burst forth in a torrent first directed by Yeltsin against Chechnya and later by Putin against Ukraine. Zagar thus places the roots of today’s conflict firmly in the events surrounding the Soviet collapse.

Zygar is not the first to suggest that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not entirely purge authoritarianism from the Russian body politic. Scholars such as John Dunlop, Stephen Shenfield, and Taras Kuzio have long pointed out many of the same things that Zygar notes. Yet he deftly combines this material with Peter Pomerantsev’s notion of today’s Russia as a postmodern spectacle. The language is usually elegant but sometimes dense and repetitive; parts of it could have used firmer editing. Nevertheless, the method works: The narrative’s very messiness mirrors the twisting, Gogolian chaos of the Russia that Zygar describes.

The book’s epilogue distills this messiness into a pointed, novel, and profoundly relevant conclusion. Zygar revisits his own childhood memories of the Soviet collapse, dwells on the disillusionment of the “idealists of the Sixties” who believed that communist reform was possible, and emphasizes the chaos of the 1990s, when liberal reformers miscalculated, leaving many citizens feeling crushed and disoriented. Belief, life, faith—all are “annihilated.” What appeared to be a democratic triumph turned out to be, in his words, “one fleeting, joyful moment” before cynicism returned in full force. Zygar describes not just the end of an era of so-called “thick” ideologies—the totalizing belief systems that thrived in the 20th century—but also a mass turn away from the communal toward interiority. Put simply, without any commitment to a belief, individuals cannot commit to action beyond asserting their own power.

While this conclusion is not explicitly stated—Zygar’s accretive method leaves us to pick up the pieces—it suggests that 1991 was not the end of an era, let alone Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Rather, it was the beginning of an age of inwardness extending well beyond Russia’s borders, eventually amplified and accelerated by social media. Perhaps today’s United States and Europe feel more like late Soviet Russia than is comfortable to imagine.

Zygar explicitly invites such a comparison to the present by labeling Nina Andreeva’s 1988 Stalinist letter to the newspaper Soviet Russia—in which she furiously denounced the reforms sweeping the USSR—as a “Make the Soviet Union Great Again” manifesto. The provocation is deliberate. The crises Zygar describes—meaninglessness, media saturation, performative politics, and exhausted belief systems—are no longer confined to post-Soviet space. In both the West and the East, it seems that we are living in an era when leaders and citizens alike show little commitment to anything beyond themselves.

Here, however, Zygar falters. He underestimates the resilient nature of belief—selfish, egotistical, flawed, and even nihilistic as it may be. By insisting that “most Soviet citizens didn’t believe in anything anymore” in the 1980s, he risks reproducing a mistake that distorts our understanding of contemporary politics. Even in the late USSR, disbelief in communism coexisted with belief in other things: an imagined United States, glimpsed through bootleg films and Western jeans; a restored vision of imperial greatness rooted in Stalinist nostalgia; and often, both at once. Indeed, the language—antisemitic, conspiratorial, and mystical—of groups such as Pamyat is eerily familiar to that of the Orthodox patriarch, who has preached messianic sacrifice from the pulpit.

Young people on Arbat Street in Moscow in 1991.Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Zygar traces how, for some, the political religion of Marxism gradually gave way to a nationalist mysticism that prioritizes “national-state necessity” over individual rights. This is a worldview in which totalitarianism is not a dirty word; instead, “the submission of personal will to the national-state necessity” becomes a duty. These ideas were articulated openly in the 1970s and 1980s; today, they weave their way through Russian patriotic discourse. Today’s Russians may piece together their beliefs from a hodgepodge of state ideology, internet influencers, and ideas from the West, but that does not mean they believe in nothing.

The same is true across the West. Populist and far-right movements such as MAGA, the National Rally in France, Reform in Britain, and the Alternative for Germany are not driven by nihilism alone. Their adherents are seemingly committed to egotistical ideals and wrapped in post-truth bubbles, but they still believe in something: nation, hierarchy, identity, and redemption. Zygar describes today’s Putinists as products of “psychological traumas” who have arrived at nothing but “cynical disbelief.” But it is difficult, when observing Western far-right activists brandishing their ideological swords and fantasizing about Russia as a civilizational alternative, to conclude that they believe in nothing at all.

What’s most relevant to our own time is that Zygar shows us what happens when individuals turn inward in a political system that is already decaying from within: an accelerated collapse amid a parade of comic absurdity. Marking an important turn in Zygar’s career, The Dark Side of the Earth signals his shift from chronicler of political life to a thinker about cultural politics. The book’s deeper warning is that the fragmented afterlife of political belief can be far more dangerous than that belief’s apparent disappearance. Zygar reminds us that Russia is not some mysterious enigma, but rather a violent, nihilistic mirror of what other polities might equally become.