Red Coleman, A Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, has spent over thirty years gathering observations and experiences to produce this in-depth, up-close, definitive examination of the fall of the Soviet Union and the people and events that contributed essentially to its demise. From the Kremlin Palace coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, to the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin's troubled presidency through 1995, Coleman was the man on the scene for virtually every defining event of Russian history in the postwar era.

For more than 80 years, the Soviet Empire cast an ever-lengthening shadow across the face of the world. Lenin's ruthless legacy consumed Eastern Europe and toppled governments on virtually every continent. Yet at the moment when the Empire appeared to have reached its zenith, it collapsed like a house of cards. "Brian Crozier's definitive history of the Soviet Empire is a chilling account of an ideology that haunted our century." -- Henry Kissinger In this seminal work, the eminent British writer and historian Brian Crozier tells the brutal history of the Soviet Empire--its birth, life, and sudden death. The book begins at the beginning, in 1917, when the oversized dreams of Lenin and the happenstance of events conspired to change the course of history. In meticulous detail, Crozier follows the Soviet conquests across Europe and into Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. He uses recently declassified information from Soviet archives to add texture and depth to familiar parts of the story--the betrayal at Yalta, the terror of Stalin, the tragedy of Hungary, the split with China, the false hope of Prague Spring, the rise of Castro, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Revealed along the way is the dark underside of a regime whose march toward supremacy resulted in the loss of tens of millions of lives. The book concludes with reflections on the extraordinary disintegration of Lenin's utopia and the seemingly endless chaos left in its wake. Provocative, comprehensive, and majestic in scope, "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire is the definitive account of history's most turbulent days.

Never before has there been an attempt to transform a massive state-owned economy into a dynamic free market system. The story of the conversion of the dinosaur Marxist Soviet state into the free-wheeling capitalist society of today's Russian Federation is one of the most compelling dramas in history. This tale includes violence, corruption, and a web of political conspiracy. It is a true-life economic-political thriller. Who are the new Russian financial magnates who are grabbing former state property? What were the terms for disposing of the state's immense wealth to private investors? What was the role of American financiers? These questions, and more, are answered here. In addition to what he saw with his own eyes (in the crucial period between 1992 and 1997), Kokh also paints vivid pictures of the influential decision-makers that he worked closely with, including Anatoly Chubais, the little known Kremlin kingpin who ran Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign and served as both Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. Kokh uses his expert knowledge of the Russian government to bring readers into the momentous meetings that changed the world, including his cogent analysis of events occurring in Russia at the present time.

This is the first work to set one of the great bloodless revolutions of the twentieth century in its proper historical context. John Dunlop pays particular attention to Yeltsin's role in opposing the covert resurgence of Communist interests in post-coup Russia, and faces the possibility that new institutions may not survive long enough to sink roots in a traditionally undemocratic culture.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.

The late Dmitri Volkogonov emerged in the last decade of his life as the preeminent Russian historian of this century. His crowning achievement is the account of the seven General Secretaries of the Soviet Empire in Autopsy for an Empire, a book that tells the entire history of the Soviet failure. Having utilized his still-unequaled access to the Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents, and secret Presidential Archive, Volkogonov sheds new light on some of the major events of twentieth-century history and the men who shaped them. We witness Lenin’s paranoia about foreigners in Russia, and his creation of a privileged system for top Party members; Stalin’s repression of the nationalities and his singular conduct of foreign policy; the origins and conduct of the Korean War; Kruschev’s relationship with the odious secret service chief, Beria, and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Brezhnev’s vanity and stupidity; a new view of Poland and Solidarity; the ossification of Soviet bureaucracy and the cynicism of the Politburo; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Leninism and his role in history. By profiling the seven successive Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, Volkogonov also depicts in painstaking detail the progressive self-destruction of the Leninist system. In his clear-eyed character assessments and political evaluations, lucidly translated and edited by Harold Shukman, Dmitri Volkogonov has once again performed an invaluable service to twentieth-century history.

The break-up of the Soviet Union is a key event of the twentieth century. The 39th IIS congress in Yerevan 2009 focused on causes and consequences of this event and on shifts in the world order that followed in its wake. This volume is an effort to chart these developments in empirical and conceptual terms. It has a focus on the lands of the former Soviet Union but also explores pathways and contexts in the Second World at large. The Soviet Union was a full scale experiment in creating an alternative modernity. The implosion of this union gave rise to new states in search of national identity. At a time when some observers heralded the end of history, there was a rediscovery of historical legacies and a search for new paths of development across the former Second World. In some parts of this world long-repressed legacies were rediscovered. They were sometimes, as in the case of countries in East Central Europe, built around memories of parliamentary democracy and its replacement by authoritarian rule during the interwar period. Some legacies referred to efforts at establishing statehood in the wake of the First World War, others to national upheavals in the nineteenth century and earlier. In Central Asia and many parts of the Caucasus the cultural heritage of Islam in its different varieties gave rise to new markers of identity but also to violent contestations. In South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have embarked upon distinctly different, but invariably contingent, paths of development. Analogously core components of the old union have gone through tumultuous, but until the last year and a half largely bloodless, transformations. The crystallization of divergent paths of development in the two largest republics of that union, i.e. Russia and Ukraine, has ushered in divergent national imaginations but also in series of bloody confrontations.

This text provides a survey of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. It traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of several official national languages and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programmes.

Documents the collapse of the Soviet Union's European empire (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslvakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and the transition of each to independent states, drawing on interviews and newly uncovered archival material to offer insight into 1989's rapid changes and the USSR's minimal resistance.

Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures.