Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
David Remnick
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
Award History
3 wins · 4 total
| Award | Year | Result | Category / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pulitzer Prize in General NonfictionMajor | 1994 | Winner | Secondary source |
| Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism | 1994 | Winner | Secondary source |
| George Polk Awards: Book Award | 1993 | Winner | Official source |
| National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionMajor | 1993 | Finalist | Secondary source |
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies
This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.
01 Central figures
None extracted with sufficient confidence.
These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.
- Gorbachev62%
- Yeltsin60%
- Sakharov42%
02 Central places
None extracted with sufficient confidence.
03 Suggested argument
No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.
04 Reading orientation
35 / 100 academicSerious trade
An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.
Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 48%.