"Most histories of economic life explore how markets are built. This book looks instead at how they have been dismantled. Soon after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they began the process of transforming the economy, and indeed all of society, in accordance with communist ideology....

"My goal is to show the reader that the Soviet political and economic system was unstable by its very nature. It was just a question of when and how it would collapse. . . ."?From the Introduction to Collapse of an EmpireThe Soviet Union was an empire in many senses of the word?a vast mix of...