Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union.

• Author: Keller, Bill

Jack F. Matlock Random House, $35

You start this book, by the American ambassador to Moscow during the Gorbachev years, thinking, "Uh, oh." There is the 16-page photo gallery of the author in Zelig mode, posed awkwardly with Soviet luminaries. In early moments, the bellows of self-importance wheeze distractingly."While I considered reform of the Soviet system essential, I recognized that it would be a mistake to state this aim openly," he muses, contemplating America's role in the demolition of communism. You wonder at first if this book is going to become "How Gorbachev and I Brought Down the Evil Empire."

Fortunately, it does not. What it becomes is diplomatic history of the highest order--enriched by regular access to the main players, wise and fair in its insights, crisply written, wonderfully free of ideological fiddles and bureaucratic score-settling. His judgments of the characters--including the operatic heroes, Gorbachev and Yeltsin--are subtle, sympathetic, and almost unerring. Jack Matlock may have been the most qualified man America ever sent to Moscow as ambassador. He had translated Russian poetry and taught Russian history, had read Marx (and understood him!) , and had served three tours in the Moscow embassy during the dark days. As the chief Soviet hand on the National Security Council, he had played the role of Gorbachev in Reagan's summit rehearsals.

In a cruel irony, he arrived in Moscow shortly after a security scandal in which Marine guards had taken a KGB floozy on a nighttime tour of the embassy's secrets. Just as Soviet society was laying itself bare to outside inspection, Matlock was obliged to batten down Fortress America, curtailing the social contacts of all but the most enterprising of his embassy staff.

What this book most sorely lacks is the texture of the society in which these changes are taking place. But that is probably expecting too much of a diplomat. This is an insider's account, by a keenly observant insider, of the men who initiated and lost control of the effort to modernize Communism. It is primarily the story of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, two leaders who often have been caricatured but rarely captured in their full, tragic complexity. Matlock's analytical portraits, though they lack the novelistic power of, say, David...