John Simpson, as Foreign Affairs editor of the BBC, was in a unique position to observe the events that unfolded between late 1989 and the winter of 1991: Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution, the violent overthrow of Ceausescu, the dissolution of communism and the election of Lech Walesa in Poland, the breaching of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the elections in Hungary and Bulgaria. Simpson has followed the twists and turns of this story: to the Balkans, where the heirs of Tito are sunk in a vicious civil war, to Albania, where a rump Communist regime clings to power, and to Moscow, for the final act of the drama begun in 1917 and the coup that resulted in the power of the CPSU dissolving overnight.