Download or read book Gorbachev s Retreat written by Melvin A. Goodman and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1991-06-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating inquiry into the Soviet retreat from the Third World, Melvin A. Goodman analyzes Gorbachev's policy from the standpoint of disillusionment with the Third World. He cites, among other reasons for the retreat, the diminished strategic significance of the Third World to current Soviet leadership, the limitations for Soviet power projection in distant areas, and the dilemmas in Moscow's relations with Third World regimes. Goodman contends that Gorbachev's foreign policy shift to achieve a more stable international arena and a less militant Soviet stance allowed Moscow to focus on its internal economic problems. This volume provides the first exploration of Afghanistan as a watershed in Soviet thinking on the Third World and discusses the current Soviet emphasis on conflict management and resolution in Third World states--particularly Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua. Gorbachev's Retreat explains how cooperation with the United States improves Moscow's image in the West and tends to stabilize Third World flash points. Up-to-the-minute data on Soviet military and economic assistance to the Third World as well as Third World responses to the new Soviet policy are also presented. The volume examines Soviet retrenchment and retreat in the Third World; analyzes Gorbachev's decisions relative to Third World relationships; zeroes in on the withdrawal from Afghanistan; explores some of the reasons for Soviet power limitations; and assesses the regional implications of Gorbachev's New Political Thinking. Gorbachev's Retreat then looks at Soviet power projection and crisis management, Soviet military and economic aid, and Soviet retreat in the 1990s. The volume will be particularly useful to undergraduate and graduate courses in foreign policy and international relations as a discussion of the impact of the new Soviet policy in the Third World and the consequences for U.S.-Soviet relations. Regional studies specialists will find its in-depth analyses of the limits on Soviet actions in the Third World cogent and timely.

Download or read book Retreat to Moscow written by Mark Almond and published by Hyperion Books. This book was released on 1990 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Foreign Policy in Transition written by Jan S. Adams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1992-09-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his years of leadership in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated revolutionary changes in that country's foreign and domestic policies. A Foreign Policy in Transition charts the changing Soviet policies toward Central America and the Caribbean during the Gorbachev years, examines the effects of these policies on individual countries, and looks to the role that Russia and the other Soviet-successor states will play in this region in the 1990s. Jan S. Adams analyzes the factors shaping Gorbachev's foreign policy in Central America by surveying Soviet political views old and new, by describing Gorbachev's bold restructuring of the Soviet foreign policy establishment, and by assessing the implications of his policy of perestroika. A series of country studies demonstrates how changes in Soviet policies and domestic and economic circumstances contributed to significant shifts in the internal conditions and external relations of the Central American and Caribbean nations. Adams discusses in detail such topics as the reduction of Soviet military and economic aid to the region and pressures exerted by Moscow on client states to effect the settlement of regional conflicts by political rather than military means. The author concludes by speculating about which trends in foreign policy by Russia and other Soviet-successor states toward Central America and the Caribbean may persist in the post-Soviet period, discussing as the implications of these changes for future U.S. policy in the region.

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 The House of Government written by Yuri Slezkine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 1128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Download or read book The Soviet Military Leadership and the Question of Soviet Deployment Retreats written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the many questions that have come to disturb the Soviet civil-military relationship in the Gorbachev era is the question of deployment retreat. This is the issue of whether and how far the Soviet Union should reduce its existing conventional force deployments in various regions around the Soviet periphery for the sake of compensating foreign political or domestic economic advantages. It seems clear that there is in fact now considerable contention within the Soviet elite over the linked issues of deployment retreat and unilateral or asymmetrical force reduction. In particular, there is evidence suggesting that within the last year the question of a Soviet troop cut has become a real political issue. One Soviet military leader-Deputy Defense Minister Tretyak-has openly displayed alarm at the possibility of a unilateral force reduction on the model of the large Khrushchev-era cut of the late 1950s. (JES).

Download or read book End of History and the Last Man written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

Download or read book Retreat from Doomsday written by John Mueller and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inside Gorbachev s Kremlin written by Yegor Ligachev and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir by the second most powerful Communist Party leader during the early Gorbachev years provides an important alternative view of the USSR's transformation?a view that is gaining ground in Russian politics today. In a substantial new piece for this edition, Mr. Ligachev outlines the political agenda of today's communist coalition?the establishment of a new Soviet Union, with strong economic and political integration of its member-states.Yegor Ligachev, a seasoned Party boss from Siberia, made a solid career for himself in the capital during the Khrushchev era, but, following Khrushchev's ouster, chose to retreat to the provinces. In 1985, his political patrons brought him back to Moscow to help them build a dynamic new leadership team under Mikhail Gorbachev. The two reform-minded communists launched an effort to inject life and energy into the Party, economy, and society through a series of liberalizing measures. But when Ligachev saw the reforms moving into a revolutionary phase that could result in the Party's loss of control over the helm of state, he found himself increasingly siding with the opposition.In this gripping book, Ligachev describes the evolving confrontation between opposing forces at high-level Party meetings and sessions of the Politburo as well as in less formal conversations. Along the way, he gives revealing glimpses not only of Gorbachev but also of Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko, Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Boris Yeltsin, and other top leaders. Notorious events such as the 1989 massacre in Tbilisi and the Gdlyan/Ivanov affair?in which, Ligachev argues, he was unjustly implicated?are also highlighted.

Download or read book The Human Factor written by Archie Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this penetrating analysis of the role of political leadership in the Cold War's ending, Archie Brown shows why the popular view that Western economic and military strength left the Soviet Union with no alternative but to admit defeat is wrong. To understand the significance of the parts played by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in East-West relations in the second half of the 1980s, Brown addresses several specific questions: What were the values and assumptions of these leaders, and how did their perceptions evolve? What were the major influences on them? To what extent were they reflecting the views of their own political establishment or challenging them? How important for ending the East-West standoff were their interrelations? Would any of the realistically alternative leaders of their countries at that time have pursued approximately the same policies? The Cold War got colder in the early 1980s and the relationship between the two military superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, each of whom had the capacity to annihilate the other, was tense. By the end of the decade, East-West relations had been utterly transformed, with most of the dividing lines - including the division of Europe - removed. Engagement between Gorbachev and Reagan was a crucial part of that process of change. More surprising was Thatcher's role. Regarded by Reagan as his ideological and political soulmate, she formed also a strong and supportive relationship with Gorbachev (beginning three months before he came to power). Promoting Gorbachev in Washington as 'a man to do business with', she became, in the words of her foreign policy adviser Sir Percy Cradock, 'an agent of influence in both directions'.

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 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev. "Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]." —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

Download or read book Gorbachev s Russia And American Foreign Policy written by Seweryn Bialer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet post-Stalin period is examined in its economic, political, and foreign policy dimensions, stressing the factors that provided the gestation environment for Gorbachev's reforms. There follows an analysis of the nature, sources, and plausible outcomes of Gorbachev's "revolution" and the strategies he is applying to it. A separate part of the book examines the changing goals of past U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union and their effectiveness in influencing Soviet behavior. The final part puts forth suggestions and prescriptions for a U.S.approach to the changes in Soviet economic, security, and foreign policies. The East-West Forum is a New York-based research and policy analysis organization sponsored by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation. Its goal is to bring together experts and policy leaders from differing perspectives and generations to discuss changing patterns of East-West relations. It attempts to formulate long-term analyses and recommendations. In preparing the chapters of this book, the authors drew upon the work of a series of workshops initiated by the Forum.

Download or read book Postwar written by Tony Judt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Download or read book Gorbachev and Reagan written by and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-25 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the culmination of twenty years of research in which the editors gathered thousands of pages documenting the most important conversations of the late Cold War. Every word Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said to each other in their five superpower summits from 1985 to 1988 is included in this volume. The editors argue in their contextual essays and detailed notes that these summits fueled a learning process on both sides of the Cold War. Their anthology provides insight into the nuanced shifts of monumentally important discussions, showing how Moscow’s sense of threat was eased and how a hawkish Reagan softened his tone in negotiations during his second presidential term. Documents from foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and George Shultz offer a particularly intriguing look into the handful of conversations that ended almost half a century of conflict. These verbatim transcripts, until now top secret, are combined with fascinating photos and crucial information from declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both the Americans and Soviets, obtained in the US through the Freedom of Information Act and in Russia from the Gorbachev Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal files of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser.

Download or read book Unwanted Visionaries written by Sergey Radchenko and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mikhail Gorbachev's relations with the West have captured the imagination of contemporaries and historians alike, but his vision of Soviet leadership in Asia has received far less attention. The failure of Gorbachev's Asian initiatives has had dramatic consequences, by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was in full retreat from Asia, and since the Soviet collapse, Russia has been left on the sidelines of the "Pacific century." In this exceptionally wide-ranging and deeply researched book, Sergey Radchenko offers an illuminating account of the end of the Cold War in the East, tracing the death of Soviet ambitions in Asia. Radchenko shows that Gorbachev began with big gestures, of which the most important was his initiative in Vladivostok in July 1986, the opening salvo of the Soviet charm offensive in Asia Pacific. The problem, Radchenko points out, was that no one in Asia bought into Gorbachev's vision. If the Soviets had realized earlier that they needed Asia more than Asia needed them, they might have played a much more important role there. Instead, China was largely misunderstood, early gains in India were squandered, Japan was ignored or condescended to, and the Korean scenario played out in ways most unfavorable to Russia. Radchenko captures all of this in his compelling narrative, shedding important new light on many key players, including Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin, and George H. W. Bush, among others. Based on archival research in Russia, China, Mongolia, India, the United States, Britain, and numerous European countries and on interviews with former policy makers in a dozen countries, Unwanted Visionaries presents a deftly narrated and penetrating portrait of the Soviet failure in the East, with a wealth of valuable insight into Asia today.

Download or read book Russia and the Idea of the West written by Robert D. English and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.

Download or read book The Collapse written by Mary Sarotte and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West. The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident. In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin. We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control. Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.