Memoirs

First UK edition.

Publisher’s binding in full grey cloth, flat spine, a fine copy complete with the illustrated dust jacket featuring a photographic portrait of the author by Yousuf Karsh.

Illustrated with maps on the endpapers and pastedowns, and 37 photographs.

Extremely rare inscribed copy signed by the last leader of the Soviet Union to a USSR émigré, the journalist Sam Yossman.

The last leader of the USSR, lauded abroad and reviled at home for his policies of glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to set the historical record straight with this much-anticipated volume of memoirs, covering his childhood and rise through the Party ranks, and focusing in particular on his role in the tumultuous events leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

A Jewish émigré journalist and writer, Yossman worked for twenty years for the BBC Russian Service under the name Sam Jones. He published his own memoirs under the title Šaltojo karo samdinys (Mercenary of the Cold War), recounting his childhood marked by poverty and conflict in post-war Vilnius. He is known for introducing Western music and culture to Soviet audiences and notably hosted Paul McCartney in January 1989 on his rock music programme “Babushkin Sunduk” (“Grandmother’s Hope Chest”), “still remembered by millions in the former USSR” (Lithuanian Jewish Community). Yossman is also regarded as the father of the “Russian chanson”, a popular musical genre developed by Soviet émigrés in the United States, which he popularised through his radio programme.

An exceptional inscribed copy of the memoirs of one of the most significant political figures of the late twentieth century.