The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire by Dmitri Volkogonov (HarperCollins, £12.99 in UK)

Personalities rank as high as events or dates in this chronicle, and there is an imposing succession of them - Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev. The last-named faced what was probably an insoluble dilemma: how to retain the positive achievements of his predecessors while getting rid of the evil or negative weight of their misdeeds and blunders. As the book makes plain, the legacy of Stalin is too heavy and monstrous a weight for any "liberalising" regime to carry. In the end, Dmitri Volkogonov attributes what good was achieved under Communism to the Russian people rather than to their leaders.