The reviews:

“Marisha has written the essential account of what technological collapse actually looks like from the inside — not the fall of institutions, which happens quickly, but the persistence of human capability, which never falls at all. Required reading for anyone who believes that what we build is more fragile than the people who build it.”

— Foreign Affairs

“Devastating and quietly hopeful in equal measure. The scientists and engineers Marisha profiles carry their work the way refugees carry photographs — not because anyone told them to, but because it is the most essential thing they own.”

— The Guardian

“A book about Russia that is really a book about what happens to knowledge when power fails. Which is to say: a book about everywhere, and every time.”

— The New York Review of Books

“Marisha asks the question that no one in the policy world is asking: not what did the Soviet Union lose, but what did it release? The answer is more unsettling than the question.”

— The Economist

“You will finish this book and look differently at every institution you trust.”

— Le Monde