LIFE AMONG THE RUINS

By Bruce W. Nelan

When the last chief of the Soviet Union's KGB published his memoirs last year, David Remnick went to see him in Moscow. He found that while Vladimir Kryuchkov had turned pallid and squinty, he was still a man with ambitions. "I think I have real potential," the spymaster said, urging Remnick to give his book a plug in print. Now there's a tidy tombstone for the cold war: the former jailer of the old "evil empire" scrounging for free publicity in the West.

Michael Dobbs saw the death of the Soviet system foretold in the bloated face of President Leonid Brezhnev one day in 1980. Brezhnev was having trouble focusing on what was going on, Dobbs writes, and "clung to Andrei Gromyko, his indispensable Foreign Minister, like a child clings to his nanny." The Kremlin's world, Dobbs thought, was beginning to crumble.

These two distinguished journalists, former colleagues and Moscow hands at the Washington Post (Remnick is now at the New Yorker), have taken dozens of such scenes from their notebooks to produce two very different but complementary books. They depict Russia's course as it stumbled and slid from a moribund Brezhnev to a self-promoting Kryuchkov--and possibly a moribund Boris Yeltsin. Dobbs' report, Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Knopf; 502 pages; $30), carries the still astonishing story of the fall of communism, from the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Remnick's book, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (Random House; 398 pages; $25.95), picks up the tale in 1991 and brings it through Yeltsin's white-knuckle re-election last year.

Dobbs has written a straight-ahead narrative that makes good use of the documents coming out of newly opened East bloc archives. He reveals, for example, that in spite of their threats and military maneuvers, Brezhnev and Co. never intended to invade Poland, short of an anticommunist rebellion. Dobbs is always clear and persuasive, but he tries so hard to be everywhere--Poland, Yugoslavia, China, Russia--and to explain everything, that his survey ends up feeling disappointingly two-dimensional.

While Dobbs tells you where he has been, Remnick takes you with him. He asks, What is going on over there? And then he answers in a series of brilliantly etched close-ups that when read together have a cumulative, pointillist impact. Remnick shows readers Yeltsin's civil war with the Russian parliament, the populated rubble of Chechnya, the return of the unhonored prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the offices of the new business czars, and the salons of Moscow's intelligentsia. He likes to put you in a room where important people carry on thought-provoking discussions. In one intense conversation, satirical novelist Vladimir Voinovich laments that the party big shots and KGB bosses quickly betrayed the ideology they had imposed on hundreds of millions of people, while democrats, including Yeltsin, still walk, talk and "act like the old Soviet leaders."

Another night, human-rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov compares the development of democracy with a nuclear reaction: "We have to wait for a critical mass to accumulate of people with democratic principles." But several Russian intellectuals, mourning the decline of the literary life, argue that so many of the country's best and brightest were executed that the critical mass may not accumulate very soon.

So whither Russia? Remnick doesn't duck. He says power in the country "is adrift, unpredictable and corrupt." But even so, he sees "no reason that Russia cannot make a break with its absolutist past much in the way that Germany and Japan did after the war." Remnick argues further that Russia's literacy and resources place it ahead of China in the race to become the next superpower.

Dobbs' book offers his readers a comprehensive understanding of how the Soviet empire fell apart, but it will not surprise them much. Remnick's is full of things we don't know, that we don't see on television or in the newspapers. The West, Remnick says, is making a serious mistake by being so indifferent to Russia's struggle to reconstruct. He argues that we have a large stake in whether the effort turns out well or badly, and should pay more attention to it. Judging by the evidence in his book, it will be fascinating to watch.