Armageddon Averted : The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000

Résumé du livre

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. - ;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. -