Product Description

This is the story of the structural factors behind the Soviet Collapse, which did not suddenly end in 1991, and the relation of the structural to the great personalities such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Using several dozen memoirs of insiders, including top KGB personnel, and many previously classified documents, this book narrates and explains not just the collapse of socialism but also of the Union and in a comparative framework shows how and why the two collapsed
together.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #799238 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Synopsis
Stephen Kotkin charts the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the key developments in recent history, and analyzes why it happened. He examines the internal structural, cultural and political reasons for the demise both of the Communist system and of the Union, drawing on memoirs and documents of the senior figures involved, including Ligachev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as on the burgeoning secondary literature. The book puts the Soviet collapse in the context of the global economic changes from the 1970s to the present day, examining why the advent of Siberian oil at a time of shortage elsewhere had profound and long-term effects on the Soviet Union's raison d'etre.

About the Author
Stephen Kotkin is Director of Russian Studies at Princeton University has written an acclaimed two-volume case study on the rise and fall of Soviet socialism: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (1995) and Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (1991). He is under contract to write the Oxford History of Modern Europe volume on the Soviet Union, 1917-1991