On March 26, 2003, Aron's colleague Richard Pipes of "The Times", lauded the work and stated the while there were over a dozen biographies written of Khrushchev, that the biography is "the first scholarly study of this Soviet leader based on a thorough examination of all the existing literature as well as the available archival sources and interviews with those who knew him". Pipes additionally surmised that the "lively narrative is likely to remain for a considerable time the standard study of [Khrushchev]". Archie Brown of "The Guardian" offered an assessment of the book, stating that he was "intrigued" by the influence that Khrushchev had on the Soviet political arena. In Brown's review, he states that Taubman's book is "by far the best and most thorough contribution to understanding Khrushchev's personality and politics ever written". At the same time, he dismisses Taubman's writing regarding the level of continuing acceptance that the citizens of the Soviet Union had toward communism, stating that Taubman "oversimplifies" the truth when he says that "Gorbachev shared Khrushchev's naivete about the extent of the Soviet people's commitment to communism". Brown countered that "Gorbachev himself ceased to be a Communist and increasingly embraced a social democratic conception of socialism; it was this that he believed corresponded with the aspirations of a majority of the Soviet people." Brown continued with his review, questioning the reliability of content attributed to an interview with a leading Russian pollster, who stated that "the only two periods of the 20th century that Russians evaluate positively are those associated with the last tsar, Nicholas II, and Nikita Khrushchev". Brown said that the surveys used by pollsters merely "reflect changing views of the present". He continued, by stating that Taubman was "misleading" by using this source, whereas the most reliable polling data shows that "public consensus in 1994 [revealed that] 33 [percent] of respondents held Khrushchev's period to be the best of the 20th century and 36 [percent] chose the Brezhnev era, by 1999 support for Khrushchev's time had dropped to 30 [percent], whereas that for life under Brezhnev had risen to a remarkable 51 [percent].