Download or read book Gorbachev s Gamble written by Andrei Grachev and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 initiators of this project and describes their hopes and their illusions. He recounts the story of the internal debates and struggles in the Kremlin and behind-the-scene decisions that led to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and eventually the demise of the Soviet Union itself. The book is based on exclusive interviews with the leaders of the Soviet Union including Gorbachev, personal notes and diaries of their assistants and advisers and transcripts of the discussions inside the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee. Together they constitute a multi-voice political confession of a whole generation of decision-makers of the Soviet Union that enables us better to understand the origin and the breathtaking trajectory of the events that led to the end of the Cold War and the unprecedented transformation of world politics in the closing decades of the 20th century.

Download or read book Gorbachev s Gamble written by Baruch A. Hazan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-12 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an outcome of the 'Nineteenth All-Union Party conference, convened on Gorbachev's initiative. The conference recommends that, taking account of the new realities, legislation pertaining to union and autonomous republics and autonomous oblasts and okrugs should be developed and renewed.

Download or read book Gorbachev s Gamble written by Baruch A Hazan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an outcome of the 'Nineteenth All-Union Party conference, convened on Gorbachev's initiative. The conference recommends that, taking account of the new realities, legislation pertaining to union and autonomous republics and autonomous oblasts and okrugs should be developed and renewed.

Download or read book Vulkan written by David Shirreff and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a gripping debut thriller by journalist David Shirreff. The Soviet empire is crumbling - a plight made worse by its efforts to match President Ronald Reagan's multi-billion-dollar Star Wars programme. What better - and cheaper - response can there be than to smuggle a compact nuclear warhead into the heart of every metropolis in the Western alliance? Moscow's top-secret mission is run by a bunch of patriotic, but fallible, former cosmonauts. Only by chance do Western agents get wind of it, with a predictably flat-footed response. And only one man, William Pike, publisher of a magazine on specialist weaponry, sees the full magnitude of the threat posed by Project Vulkan. A chase ensues across various continents to locate and neutralise the hidden weapons before millions of lives are lost. Dark forces are at work - darker than the openly friendly regime of Mikhail Gorbachev. The technology has a potential far more sinister than the deterrent it was designed to be - if it falls into the wrong hands. This novel is no mere fantasy. For several decades, Nordic countries have experienced unexplained activity in their home waters. Here is a plausible scenario for what lay behind it: not just Soviet submarines in trouble, but a device to terrorise the entire Western world by stealth. If that technology could create panic in the dying days of the Cold War, how much more could it do so today, if it fell into the hands of a terrorist group. As William Pike speculates: "If they can fly planes into the twin towers they can certainly turn other forms of transport into lethal weapons."

Download or read book The Last Superpower Summits written by Svetlana Savranskaya and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book publishes for the first time in print every word the American and Soviet leaders – Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George H.W. Bush – said to each other in their superpower summits from 1985 to 1991. Obtained by the authors through the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S., from the Gorbachev Foundation and the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal donation of Anatoly Chernyaev, these previously Top Secret verbatim transcripts combine with key declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both sides to create a unique interactive documentary record of these historic highest-level talks – the conversations that ended the Cold War. The summits fueled a process of learning on both sides, as the authors argue in contextual essays on each summit and detailed headnotes on each document. Geneva 1985 and Reykjavik 1986 reduced Moscow's sense of threat and unleashed Reagan's inner abolitionist. Malta 1989 and Washington 1990 helped dampen any superpower sparks that might have flown in a time of revolutionary change in Eastern Europe, set off by Gorbachev and by Eastern Europeans (Solidarity, dissidents, reform Communists). The high level and scope of the dialogue between these world leaders was unprecedented, and is likely never to be repeated.

Download or read book Imperial Gamble written by Marvin Kalb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2015-09-21 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marvin Kalb, a former journalist and Harvard professor, traces how the Crimea of Catherine the Great became a global tinder box. The world was stunned when Vladimir Putin invaded and seized Crimea in March 2014. In the weeks that followed, pro-Russian rebels staged uprisings in southeastern Ukraine. The United States and its Western allies immediately imposed strict sanctions on Russia and whenever possible tried to isolate it diplomatically. This sharp deterioration in East-West relations has raised basic questions about Putin's provocative policies and the future of Russia and Ukraine. Marvin Kalb, who wrote commentaries for Edward R. Murrow before becoming CBS News' Moscow bureau chief in the late 1950's, and who also served as a translator and junior press officer at the US Embassy in Moscow, argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Putin did not "suddenly" decide to invade Crimea. He had been waiting for the right moment ever since disgruntled Ukrainians rose in revolt against his pro-Russian regime in Kiev's Maidan Square. These demonstrations led Putin to conclude that Ukraine's opposition constituted an existential threat to Russia. Imperial Gamble examines how Putin reached that conclusion by taking a critical look at the recent political history of post-Soviet Russia. It also journeys deep into Russian and Ukrainian history to explain what keeps them together and yet at the same time drives them apart. Kalb believes that the post-cold war world hangs today on the resolution of the Ukraine crisis. So long as it is treated as a problem to be resolved by Russia, on the one side, and the United States and Europe, on the other, it will remain a danger zone with global consequences. The only sensible solution lies in both Russia and Ukraine recognizing that their futures are irrevocably linked by geography, power, politics, and the history that Kalb brings to life in Imperial Gamble.

Download or read book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy written by Chris Miller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For half a century the Soviet economy was inefficient but stable. In the late 1980s, to the surprise of nearly everyone, it suddenly collapsed. Why did this happen? And what role did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms play in the country's dissolution? In this groundbreaking study, Chris Miller shows that Gorbachev and his allies tried to learn from the great success story of transitions from socialism to capitalism, Deng Xiaoping's China. Why, then, were efforts to revitalize Soviet socialism so much less successful than in China? Making use of never-before-studied documents from the Soviet politburo and other archives, Miller argues that the difference between the Soviet Union and China--and the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse--was not economics but politics. The Soviet government was divided by bitter conflict, and Gorbachev, the ostensible Soviet autocrat, was unable to outmaneuver the interest groups that were threatened by his economic reforms. Miller's analysis settles long-standing debates about the politics and economics of perestroika, transforming our understanding of the causes of the Soviet Union's rapid demise.

Download or read book What Is at Stake Now written by Mikhail Gorbachev and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, world peace is at risk again. The United States has withdrawn from the disarmament treaty with Russia, Europe is disintegrating, China is surging forward and a wave of nationalism and populism is destabilizing established political institutions and endangering hard-won liberties. Moreover, the coronavirus pandemic has brought into sharp relief the fragility of the global order and the speed with which it can slide into chaos. In view of this dangerous and unpredictable state of affairs, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last great statesman of the 1989 revolution, has written this short book to warn us of the grave risks we now face and to urge us all, political leaders and citizens alike, to take action to address them. He focuses on the big challenges of our time, such as the renewal of the arms race and the growing risks of nuclear war, the new tension between Russia and the West, the global environmental crisis, the global threat of diseases and epidemics, the rise of populism and the decline of democracy. He argues that self-serving policies and narrow-minded politics aimed at the pursuit of national interests are taking the place of political principles and overshadowing the vision of a free and just world for all peoples. He offers his view of where Russia is heading and he urges political leaders in the West to recognize that re-establishing trust between Russia and the West requires the courage of true leadership and a commitment to genuine dialogue and understanding on both sides. Now more than ever, the responses to the great challenges we face cannot be purely national in character but must be based on a collaborative effort in which political leaders put aside their differences and work together to advance the human security of all.

Download or read book Gambling with Armageddon written by Martin J. Sherwin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War—how such a crisis arose, and why at the very last possible moment it didn't happen. In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union—triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest—Sherwin shows how this volatile event was an integral part of the wider Cold War and was a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the original debate in the Truman Administration about using the Atomic Bomb; the way in which President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project U.S. power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared to deal with the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here too is a clarifying picture of what was going on in Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Martin Sherwin has spent his career in the study of nuclear weapons and how they have shaped our world. Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far.

Download or read book The Year I Was Peter the Great written by Marvin Kalb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia—and molded the future path of one of America's pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents 1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called “the year of the thaw”—a time when Stalin’s dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a “genius,” a wizard of communism—Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a “madman” whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state. This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year’s end. Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great. In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship. "

Download or read book Nuclear Folly A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis written by Serhii Plokhy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Download or read book The End of the Cold War 1985 1991 written by Robert Service and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 26 December, 1991, the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. Yet, just six years earlier, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and chose Eduard Shevardnadze as his foreign minister, the Cold War seemed like a permanent fixture in world politics. Until its denouement, no Western or Soviet politician foresaw that the standoff between the two superpowers -- after decades of struggle over every aspect of security, politics, economics, and ideas -- would end within the lifetime of the current generation. Nor was it at all obvious that that the Soviet political leadership would undertake a huge internal reform of the USSR, or that the threat of a nuclear Armageddon could or would be peacefully wound down. Drawing on pioneering archival research, Robert Service's gripping investigation of the final years of the Cold War pinpoints the extraordinary relationships between Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, George Shultz, and Shevardnadze, who found ways to cooperate during times of exceptional change around the world. A story of American pressure and Soviet long-term decline and overstretch, The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 shows how a small but skillful group of statesmen grew determined to end the Cold War on their watch and transformed the global political landscape irreversibly.

Download or read book Gorbachev His Life and Times written by William Taubman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist “Essential reading for the twenty-first [century].” —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review In the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

Download or read book Problems of Communism written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Masterpieces of History written by Svetlana Savranskaya and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With some irony, the way the USSR separated itself from its empire and its own peaceful end may seem to be its most beneficial contributions to history. These episodes are, in any case, masterpieces of history."-Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989 "When, where, why did the Cold War end? How did it manage to end peacefully? The answers are in this wonderful collection of crucial historical documents, penetrating essays by experts, plus the record of a revealing symposium including former Soviet and American officials. An invaluable source book on the end of the 20th century."-William C. Taubman, Amherst College, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchevò The Man and His Era "Evocative, illuminating, insightful: This volume is a brilliant collection of documents, conversations, and essays. It is absolutely indispensable for understanding the end of the Cold War."-Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia, G.L. Beer Prize-winning author of For the Soul of Mankind "The National Security Archive ... deserves the highest praise for its dedication to work and truth, and for overcoming numerous obstacles created by bureaucrats and other excessively cowardly and greedy custodians of the truth about the past." (From the Foreword)-Anatoly S. Chernyaev, adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, author of My Six Years with Gorbachev "The conference held at ... Musgrove [included in this volume]...illuminated one of the most important periods in 20th century history ... The National Security Archive [has] rendered a service to historians and the public as a whole." (From the Foreword)-Jack F. Matlock Jr., Former U.S. Ambassador, author of Autopsy on an Empire About The Editors Svetlana Savranskaya is Director of Russia/Eurasia Programs at the National Security Archive. Thomas Blanton is Executive Director of the National Security Archive. Vladislav Zubok is Professor of history at Temple University. Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers role in the annus mitabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev s senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand; and high-level CIA analyses, this volume offers a rare insider's look at the historic, world-transforming events that culminated in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. Most of these records have never been published before. Complementing the documents are the proceedings of an extraordinary face-to-face mutual interrogation of Russian and American former senior officials from 1998. Anchored by scholars and documents, the meeting - featuring Gorbachev advisers Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhriazarov, Shevardnadze aide Sergei Tarasenko, U.S.Ambassador Jack Matlock and CIA chief Soviet analyst Douglas MacEachin ùproduced fascinating insights into superpower policy-making during the miraculous year of 1989.

Download or read book Soviet Briefing written by Ben Eklof and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In writing this book I incurred a number of debts, which I now gratefully acknowledge. During a year at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution, I attended many seminars and discussions on current events. In one way or another the ideas, information, and debates that took place during my stay contributed to my opinions and shaped the direction of my research; unfortunately I cannot list all the names of those from whom I benefited. The Kennan Institute itself provided a stimulating and supportive environment for my work. I am especially thankful to Peter Reddaway and Ted Taranovski for all they have done.

Download or read book France and the German Question 1945 1990 written by Frédéric Bozo and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-07-12 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the victors were unable to agree on Germany’s fate, and the separation of the country—the result of the nascent Cold War—emerged as a de facto, if provisional, settlement. Yet East and West Germany would exist apart for half a century, making the "German question" a central foreign policy issue—and given the war-torn history between the two countries, this was felt no more keenly than in France. Drawing on the most recent historiography and previously untapped archival sources, this volume shows how France’s approach to the German question was, for the duration of the Cold War, both more constructive and consequential than has been previously acknowledged.