Gorbachev’s Gamble offers a new and more convincing answer to this question by providing the missing link between the internal and external aspects of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Andrei Grachev shows that the radical transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev years was an integral part of an ambitious project of internal democratic reform and of the historic opening of Soviet society to the outside world.Grachev explains the motives and the intentions of the...

As press secretary to Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrei Grachev witnessed and recorded many events unobserved by the general public. In this engaging and compelling book, he recounts these episodes in vivid detail, interpreting them in the context of the time. Highlighted are top-level meetings with Western leaders; State Council debates on a new treaty of union (promising, until Gorbachev and Yeltsin sparred over Russia's policy toward the Chechen republic); and Gorbachev's private talks with lea...

Accessibly written to appeal to a wide readership, this is a meticulous study of Gorbachev by a leading Western specialist on Soviet politics. - ;Mikhail Gorbachev was arguably the most important world statesman of the second half of the twentieth century. He played the decisive role in ending the Cold War and in allowing the countries of Eastern Europe to regain their independence peacefully. He left Russia a freer country than it had ever been. Although he failed in his attempts to turn the...

A brilliantly arresting historical work, John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War takes us as never before to the time when the world stood on the brink of destruction.In 1945 war came to an end. But a whole new terror was only just beginning...Here is the truth behind every spy thriller you've read: why America and the Soviet Union became locked in a deadly stalemate; how close we came to nuclear catastrophe; what was really going on in t...

Robert Service's The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century provides a superb panorama of Russia in the modern age.Russia's recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change.In his acclaimed history, now revised and updated with a new introduction and final chapter, Robert Service explores the complex, changing interaction between ru...

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies–East Germany, Romania, and Poland–to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be ...

From the ashes of World War II to the conflict over Iraq, William Hitchcock examines the miraculous transformation of Europe from a deeply fractured land to a continent striving for stability, tolerance, democracy, and prosperity. Exploring the role of Cold War politics in Europe’s peace settlement and the half century that followed, Hitchcock reveals how leaders such as Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, and Margaret Thatcher balanced their nations’ interests against the demands of the reig...

'A compelling and illuminating account of a great drama in the history of our times which showed once again that ordinary men and women really can change the world' Jonathan Dimbleby, MAIL ON SUNDAYFor more than 40 years after the Second World War the Iron Curtain divided Europe physically, with 300 km of walls and barbed wire fences; ideologically, between communism and capitalism; psychologically, between people imprisoned under totalitarian dictatorships and the...

In this widely praised book, Vladislav Zubok argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin’s pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other...

"A fresh multi-faceted look at the overthrow of the Soviet State, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the campaign to introduce capitalism from above. Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny have given us a clear and powerful Marxist analysis of the momentous events which most directly shaped world politics today, the destruction of the USSR, the 'Superpower' of socialism."-Norman Markowitz, author of The Rise and Fall of the People's Century"I have not read anything e...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZEFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and his Era, the most comprehensive portrait of the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on 30 August 2022.'A phenomenally researched life of the man who did more than any other to change Europe and the world in the last half of the 20th century' Jonathan Steele, GuardianThis is th...

**The Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe“The definitive account of what the transition away from communism in Eastern Europe has meant in moral terms. Brilliant and impassioned.” —LA Times Book Review**In four newly democratic countries in Eastern Europe, communism’s former victims and jailers are struggling to make sense of their history—and sometimes rewrite it. In this groundbreaking, stylishly reported book, a journalist ...