Ukraine: The "personal" in the title of this book comes suddenly to life when the author recounts being summoned one day in Kiev to a clandestine meeting with Ukrainian security officers, shortly before the outbreak of the Orange Revolution. Driven out of town, along a country road and into a wood, he has good reason to fear he will share the fate of a recently murdered opposition journalist
Instead, he meets police officers angry that the government is planning to steal the votes of, among others, police cadets.
Such accounts give parts of this book the feel of a thriller, partly because of the author's involvement, and partly because of the bizarre nature of the events themselves.
Askold Krushelnycky, a British journalist, was no innocent bystander. His parents were anti- communists who fled Ukraine after the second World War, and he admits throwing his hat into the opposition ring.
But from this position he takes judicious potshots at that opposition. Readers are reminded that opposition leader Victor Yushchenko was no outsider, but a former prime minister with the same government he later denounced. And his glamorous sidekick, Julia Tymoshenko, also has questions to answer about how she acquired the nation's gas wealth.
Krushelnycky has reported on Ukrainian politics ever since the country became independent with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. And, he reminds the reader, the Orange Revolution was above all unnecessary because Ukraine officially acquired democracy in 1991, only to lose it again.
His post-communist history of the second-biggest country in Europe is depressingly simple.
In 1991 Ukraine elected Leonid Kravchuk, its last communist boss, as its first president. He in turn ensured that his successor as president was his prime minister, Leonid Kuchma, another apparatchik. In 2004 Kuchma prepared another smooth handover, to Victor Yanukovich, a thug who had been jailed for assault.
By then Europe had changed. With the arrival of Vladimir Putin as Russian president the East-West divide was back, and the faultline snaked right through Ukraine.
Kuchma was by then presiding over a regime of wholesale corruption and nepotism. He flogged the state's steel business for a fraction of its true price to his son-in-law. Tapes were released, apparently showing his involvement in the murder of opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze. Reporting on this, the author finds himself summoned for a seven-hour police interrogation, with the British embassy phoning every two hours to check he is still alive.
As opposition mounted, the government wheeled out a bag of dirty tricks, using propaganda, falsifications and teams of agitators to disrupt opposition rallies. Finally Yushchenko was given poisoned soup after unwisely agreeing to dine with the head of the secret police.
The fraud in the December 2004 election was by turns evil and farcical. Buses and trains were mobilised to rush workers around the country to vote many times. Thugs smashed polling stations and monitors found pens in polling stations loaded with invisible ink.
Krushelnycky vividly recreates the energy and carnival-like atmosphere of the revolution that followed, with rock musicians and pop videos heading protests of half a million people.
The new government has fallen well short of expectations, with Yushchenko a disappointment as president. But, as this book reminds us, the revolution was about more than picking a new government. It was about the right of a people to elect the people who govern them, a right we in the West are lucky enough to take for granted.
And as for those police cadets, I can vouch that they later played their own small part in the protests. At the height of the revolution, with many expecting violence, I was with a group of female students suddenly confronted by police cadets debussing in full uniform in a snowy park. The students stopped in their tracks, but the cadets shouted that they had come to join the revolution, not bury it. Soon boys and girls were rushing together to hug and dance in the snow in a scene that sounds horribly clichéd. Except that it really happened.
It is to Krushelnycky's credit that, while hammering out the political machinery that saw a country turned inside-out by a popular revolution, he finds time to record many such vignettes in what is the most entertaining account yet written of events during those freezing three weeks in Kiev.
An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History By Askold Krushelnycky Harvill Secker, 360pp. £8.99
Chris Stephen is the Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times