Gorbachev

An exemplary biography as well as a compelling history of the Soviet Union and Russia, Taubman's sweeping account has the amplitude of a Tolstoy novel. As memories of the Cold War fade, and worries about a new era of tense relations between
Russia and the West emerge, the moment is ripe to revisit the decades when the United States and the Soviet Union-the world's two “super powers”-dictated geopolitical strategy, foreign policy, and economic stability.

GORBACHEV shows how a dirt-poor farm boy of the Stalinist era and later a Communist Party stalwart became the USSR's most significant reformer; how the leader of the “evil Empire” forged a peaceful partnership with the United States aimed at the idealistic goal of eliminating nuclear arms; and, finally, how Gorbachev's reformist policies of perestroika and glasnost collapsed. Along the way, Taubman also affords revealing cameos of world leaders from Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who once compared Gorbachev to Goebbels.

'He had liberal Russian allies who welcomed his far-reaching reforms and worked to support them, but then chose Boris Yeltsin to lead them to the promised land. He had hard-line Soviet adversaries who resisted him, covertly at first, then openly and all-out. He had personal rivals,
especially Yeltsin, whom he tormented and who tormented him in turn, before ultimately administering the coup de grâce to both Gorbachev and the USSR. Western leaders doubted Gorbachev, then embraced him, and finally abandoned him, refusing him the economic assistance he
desperately needed. And, perhaps most important, he had to deal with Russia herself, with her traditional authoritarian and anti-Western ways: after rejecting both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, she finally embraced Vladimir Putin.'