The Lives and Times of Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev Rósa Magnúsdóttir Susanne Schattenberg, Leonid Breschnew: Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie (Leonid Brezhnev: Statesman and Actor in Stalin's Shadow. A Biography). 661 pp. Cologne: Böhlau, 2017. ISBN-13 978-3412502096. €39.00. William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times. 852 pp. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018. ISBN-13 978-0393647013. $39.95. The biographical turn has finally hit the Soviet field full force. Certainly, Soviet historians started writing political biographies early on—with subjects such as Lenin and Stalin, who can blame them for taking on the task? Even without access to primary sources, books about the first Soviet leaders have always attracted large audiences, and, admittedly, the classical political biographies provided a timeline and an overview of main themes and topics that helped outline the state of the field. It was only in the 1990s, when research on diaries and letters, mostly driven by the subjectivity school, allowed for a different approach to evaluating individual lives in the Soviet Union. After decades of autobiographies, émigré memoirs, and journalistic accounts, to name a few typical Cold War genres, historians of the Soviet Union have now started producing academic biographies with analytical and comparative aspects, applying the possibilities of life-writing to Soviet lives.1 One could [End Page 207] even argue that the biographical turn is especially vibrant in the case of Soviet history because of the subjectivity school and its innovative research based on diaries and letters.2 One of the consequences of the increased archival access in the early 1990s was a new wave of biographies about Soviet leaders.3 The new biographies were still predominantly focused on Iosif Stalin (and Vladimir Lenin) but Nikita Khrushchev soon received biographical attention as well.4 With increased (but not limitless) access to primary sources, scholarly awareness of the value of biography (and the broader field of life-writing) for history in general, and the subjectivity school in the Soviet field in particular, have all added a new analytical depth to these "life-and-times" biographies.5 It is no exaggeration to claim that in the past decade or so, the field has been looking forward to academic accounts on the life and times of Leonid I. Brezhnev, and in 2017, Susanne Schattenberg's much anticipated biography Leonid Breschnew: Staatsmann und Schauspieler in Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie came out.6 It is also no overstatement to say that after William Taubman's successful and much appraised 2003 Khrushchev biography, his tome on Gorbachev: His Life and Times was already creating a lot of generous buzz long before it even hit the shelves in 2018.7 Both Schattenberg and Taubman align their subjects' life stories with the familiar narrative of Soviet progress, aims, and victories. Both go into as much detail as is deemed possible about the early lives of their subjects in an attempt [End Page 208] to show how family life, experiences in school, and other interests influenced their characters, ambitions, and general world outlook.8 Both Brezhnev and Gorbachev liked acting in school, so drama and performance came rather naturally to them. Both Schattenberg and Taubman utilize these theatrical tendencies in their narratives, combining political and social history with a focus on experiences and emotions. This is more directly done in Schattenberg's account, where Brezhnev appears as an actor (Schauspieler) in the subtitle of the book, but in Taubman's treatment, Gorbachev's celebrity status and his performances as a statesman (especially internationally) in the 1980s play a major role in the way things turn out. Even if they grew up at different times, both Brezhnev (born in 1906) and Gorbachev (born in 1931) experienced the upward social mobility rewarded to those who lived out the ideals of Homo Sovieticus. Brezhnev was only 11 years old at the time of the revolution and did not feel the need to capitalize on the revolutionary narrative to solidify his justified place in Soviet history. For him, the Great Patriotic War was the more important formative event. Gorbachev was ten years old when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, so the war...