"In October 1917 we departed the old world and irreversibly rejected it. We are traveling to a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never deviate from this path." Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987

In the winters, Moscow moves in slow motion. The sky is gray and the snow mud-colored. The traffic is barely visible through the fog. Pavements are iced for days. Soft-boned Matushkas slip and fall. But there is always a long queue of people outside a mausoleum at Red Square. There lies the embalmed body of Vladimir Illich Ulyanov,the founder of Soviet Union.

While the suited body is preserved by injecting chemicals, it remains mysterious how the rotting empire managed to stumble from one day to another, long after Lenin’s death. Like the corpse, the socialist fantasy had stopped breathing, its organs had decomposed, and its stink fouled the entire neighborhood. But while his tomb was merely a harmless tourist attraction, the country remained dangerous. It "kept the key to the border gate and ruled every function of public life."

Soviet Union was like a huge tomb with its lid shut. Inside it were trapped living people with destroyed lives. Children were asked to look out for the "enemies of the people" – "even in your own homes!" Fathers were "thrown in labor camps for ten years for no crime at all." Their deaths (or murders) were learned on receiving the telegrams informing "packages are no longer being received." Mothers "wailed like wounded beasts" while waiting outside KGB headquarters to find out what had become of their arrested sons. Poets were asked "Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?" Writing history required a "neutralized nonlanguage" where Uzbeks and Ukranians "could not dare to suggest that their stories were different."

The insane grew so sane that it was normal to watch a "woman on the tenth floor hurl a cat out of her kitchen window."

It was in the backdrop of such crazed times that the author David Remnick came to Moscow in 1989 as The Washington Post's correspondent. Both he and his wife’s Jewish grandparents had tried to escape the anti-Semitism of the Soviet terror. Mrs. Remnick's grandfather was not successful – Rabbi Simon was arrested, deported to the Urals and never heard again.

Mr. Remnick's extremely critical account of the last days of the Soviet era could be traced to these familial links to Stalinist atrocities.  He visited all the “wrong” places. He strolled in the grounds of Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery where "when the purges were at their peak, the furnaces worked all night" and the roofs of the surrounding houses "were covered with ashes." He flew to the far-eastern town of Magadan, the gateway to the dreaded Kolyma labor camps, which he called "the spiritual capital" of Soviet Union, the "administrative center for mass murder" with highways "built on a bed of bones."