Salon

Alpina Business Books, a small publishing house specializing in business publications (and partially owned by Independent Media, the parent company of The Moscow Times), has decided to publish the Russian edition of Bill Clinton's memoirs, "My Life." The publication was initially planned for January but was later postponed until March.

Clinton's book was a huge hit in the United States, selling over a million copies in the first two weeks. Its Russian edition is unlikely to be a similar hit, for two reasons. First, most Russians are not that interested in foreign dignitaries. They may see America as an evil empire or a land with streets paved of gold, but hearing the story from the horse's mouth is not high on their list of priorities. The second reason lies in the deep suspicion that Russians harbor toward political autobiographies: They suspect them of being fraudulent, manipulative, boring and, of course, ghostwritten.

It is for this reason that the most interesting insights into Russian politics have been, and still are, penned by outsiders. One of the most piercing accounts of 19th-century Russian political life came from a Frenchman, the Marquis de Custine. Although the marquis was anything but a Russophile, he remains the best "Russian" political memoirist of his century, due to poor competition. Americans can understand this better than most, since perhaps the best account of 19th-century U.S. political life also came from a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville.

In Soviet times, Nikita Khrushchev was the first top-level politician to write -- or, rather, dictate -- his memoirs. But this happened after his removal from power, and, despite their historical importance, Khrushchev's memoirs are the words of an embittered, ignorant and confused old man. Leonid Brezhnev gave us several small books, which were actually ghostwritten, about his role in World War II and the postwar reconstruction effort. They appeared in every bookshop and school library, but few people bothered to read them.

Contemporary politicians such as Yury Luzhkov and Boris Yeltsin have written memoirs too. However, their memoirs were far less successful than Alexander Korzhakov's book, titled "Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn till Dusk." Korzhakov, Yeltsin's unpopular chief bodyguard, was fired just before the 1996 election; the book was his revenge, full of nasty details about the president, his family and his friends.

The most successful political nonfiction of recent years has come from former and current Kremlin correspondents -- such as Kommersant's Yelena Tregubova, with her "Kremlin Digger" books, and Andrei Kolesnikov. The tradition of outsiders writing Russia's political history continues.