Mikhail Nenashev was born in 1929 into a Cossack family in the Ural village of Borodinovka. He graduated with distinction at the History Faculty of the Magnitogorsk Pedagogical Institute, and completed his post-graduate studies at Leningrad University in 1956. Returning to Magnitogorsk, he became head of the social science faculty at the Institute for Mining and Metallurgy. He began his party career in 1963, becoming secretary to the Chelyabinsk Regional Committee of the Communist Party.

In 1975 transferred to Moscow to work in the Communist Party's Central Committee as deputy head of the propaganda department. 1978 to 1986 Editor-in-Chief of the central newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, and the Politiburo made him responsible for all areas of the mass media.

1986 Nenashev became a member of the government and chairman of the Committee for Book Publishing and in 1989 chairman of the Committee for Radio and Television Broadcasting in the USSR. President Gorbachev appointed him minister for Information and member of the cabinet. In this book Nenashev describes his growing disenchantment and despair with the intellectual and moral degradation as well as inefficiency of the system.

An Ideal Betrayed is an important and revealing testimony by an insider who was to some extent responsible for and at the same time victim of the events which led to the collapse of the communist empire.