SOURCE: Kagarlitsky, Boris. “The Truth about Perestroika.” Nation 248, no. 22 (5 June 1989): 765-67.

In the following review, Kagarlitsky compares Ali's Revolution from Above to Anthony Barnett's Soviet Freedom.

The Soviet Union is too important to be left to Sovietologists. This precept is central to Revolution from Above, by Tariq Ali, but it could just as easily be applied to Soviet Freedom, by Anthony Barnett, which was published in London six months earlier. The two books almost beg for comparison. Both authors are radicals; neither had studied Soviet society before. Tariq Ali had edited a very interesting collection of materials on Stalinism, but as a British socialist he was interested in the overall theoretical and international aspects of the problem. Meanwhile, in these books both Ali and Barnett are mainly concerned with nothing less than the everyday political life of my country.

Who in the West could have imagined something like...