A comprehensive biography of the final leader of the Soviet Union chronicles Gorbachev's rise from peasant to politician and describes how his liberal policies ended the Cold War and unintentionally provoked the breakup of the USSR. "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....

Navigating readers through the shadow worlds of international espionage with critical knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carré tracks the dark and devastating trail of a document that could profoundly alter the course of world events. In Moscow, a sheaf of military secrets changes hands. If it arrives at its destination, and if its import is understood, the consequences could be cataclysmic. Along the way it has an explosive...

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. "A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all."--Wall Street Journal.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994" John B. Dunlop is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, and the author of The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton), among other works. 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...

A personal, detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire at the point of collapse. Kapuściński begins with his own childhood memories of the postwar Soviet occupation of Pinsk, in what was then Poland's eastern frontier, and takes us up to 1967, when, as a journalist just starting out, he traveled across Siberia and through the Soviet Union's seven southern and Central Asian republics, territories whose individual histories,...

"An internal account of the political activities taking place inside the Kremlin from the fall of the USSR under the administration of Gorbachev to the future of Russia under Putin"--Provided by publisher. "Elite-level Soviet politics, privileged access to state secrets, knowledge about machinations inside the Kremlin--such is the environment in which Andrei A. Kovalev lived and worked. In this memoir of his time as a successful diplomat serving...

Discusses how the forces of nationalism led to the collapse of the Soviet communist system.

The human story of an inner struggle, a struggle that is the culmination of the series of lives Gorbachev has led throughout his career. Presents the first full-scale portrait of this unique figure.