His new book, ‘The Dark Side of the Earth,’ is a deeply personal reconstruction of the last thirty years of the Soviet Union, chronicling its journey from the dawn of the space age, the peak of the Soviet empire, to stagnation, and then to perestroika, a series of crises, and collapse. It's also a book about the people, contemporaries, and participants in those events. Among them are Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vlady, Alla Pugacheva, Alexander and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, Boris Grebenshchikov and Viktor Tsoi, Boris Yeltsin, and others. Finally, it's a book about the choices millions of residents of the former Soviet empire made in difficult historical circumstances. It's about how no dictatorship lasts forever. It's about how the future always offers us the chance to change something—and therefore we can look to it not only with apprehension, but also with hope.