How long does it take to read The State Within a State?
Evgenii͡a Alʹbat͡s
The State Within a State by Evgenii͡a Alʹbat͡s takes about 7 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 21 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1994. 401 pages, about 110,275 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 15 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 21 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 36 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In this riveting and immensely readable investigation, Yevgenia Albats, one of Russia's leading journalists, explodes the myth that the KGB died - or even faded away - when the Soviet empire broke apart. Albats makes the shocking claim that the same group which proudly traces its lineage to Stalin's brutally repressive secret police actually engineered the policy of perestroika, subtly and effectively controlling the overhaul of Soviet society in order to reposition itself at the top. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished documents from the KGB's secret files and on rare interviews with victims as well as interrogators, Albats chronicles the KGB's evolution into the world's largest secret police force. She shows how it infiltrated every structure of civil society and every aspect of daily life; how it choreographed the "unsuccessful" coup of August 1991; and how, despite its official dissolution in the new democratic Russia, the KGB is stronger than ever, having transformed itself from an instrument of state power to a state power in its own right.
Subjects: History, Politics and government, Russia (Federation), Soviet Union
