DESC: Roald Z. Sagdeev, a top-ranked international scientist, has written a classic memoir that rips the curtain of secrecy off the world of Soviet science. Dr. Sagdeev was the youngest full member of the USSR's prestigious Academy of Sciences. As director of the Space Research Institute, he led the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission, the Venera series to Venus, and the international missions to Halley's Comet. Boris Yeltsin bestowed on him the Soviet Union's highest award for achievement. Born in 1932, he had grown up in the elite culture of the technical universities and done pioneering work on the behavior of hot plasma physics in controlled thermonuclear fusion at the beginning of the cold war, a time of fierce competition between east and west in nuclear science. From his vantage point at the pinnacle of Soviet science, he observed first-hand the inner workings of its secretive military-industrial complex. Now, as the first top decision maker to leave the "complex", he is finally free to expose the extra