What is Reddit's opinion of The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Friend, if you're interested in that period of time, I highly recommend "The Last Empire" by Serhii Plokhy. It focuses heavily on the final months of the USSR, and details the dynamic forces of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, The George H.W. Bush administration, and the Ukrainian independence movements that eventually lead to the dissolution of the Union. It's written by a Ukrainian, which as an American, I found refreshing from the normal American narrative of the Cold War. Here's the Amazon link if interested.

In fact there's evidence that reveal the H.W. Bush wanted to prolong the life of the USSR for reason such as his fears of the newly independent Russia having access to the former Soviet arsenal. He had already made good and treaties with Gorbachev (USSR), but dealing with Yeltsin (Independent Russian Federation) would mean starting from scratch.

>"Is there a gap historical academia for topics like the rise of the Internet or Putinist Russia?"

For the latter, frankly I would say yes! 20 years might be arbitrary, but then again looking at the events of 1991 in the Soviet Union, we only really got an academic historian analyzing those events using declassified archival documentation in 2014, so it's really not that far off the mark. Honestly, academic histories for Russia and the former Soviet Union are really digging into the Stalin era, as new documentation is becoming available, and so histories tackling the post-1953 USSR are still relatively less common.

Even after 20 years, when you look at events like the 1999 apartment bombings, as was discussed here, you'll see that the available documentary evidence is pretty thin, and while we can give a shot at tackling such controversial questions, a lot of that thread boiled down to "which journalist and/or possibly biased source or unreliable narrator do you believe?". Which admittedly is a lot of what the historic profession actually does (this is pretty much the question for any ancient or medieval source which is our sole documentary evidence for a given event, as I understand it).

Anywho, regarding Putin and Putinist Russia, I would say that very much of it is still in the realm of journalism, maybe political science, but not really academic history. Steven Lee Myers' The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin is probably one of the best books published out there on the topic, but noticeably Myers is a journalist, and also his available source material thins quite a bit after 2000.

I highly recommend this book. https://www.amazon.com/Last-Empire-Final-Soviet-Union/dp/0465046711