|
A member of the Soviet Communist Party's Politburo, Yakovlev had a falling out with other leaders and was sent off to be the Soviet Ambassador to Canada (1973-1983). After he returned, he helped make history as a key architect of two policies put forth by then-USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev: "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness), breaking the decades of iron-fisted dominance by the Soviet government. "He made an enormous contribution to the democratic processes and the transformation of the country," Gorbachev said when he learned of Yakovlev's death. Yakovlev pushed for more freedom in Soviet media, and allowed the truth of Josef Stalin's purges and other Communist-era crimes to be published. It didn't go as smoothly as Yakovlev hoped. "I thought it would be enough to say 'Look people, you are free'," he said later. "But intellectuals raised their heads, then started whining –- and everybody else did not give a damn." But indeed they did: the Soviet Union fell, and Yakovlev was appointed head of then-President Boris Yeltsin's commission for the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet political repression; he later founded the International Democracy Foundation, and chaired it until his death on October 18, at age 81. From This is True for 16 October 2005 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Paul Kengor List Price: $16.95 Amazon Price: $12.71 Editorial Review: Based on extraordinary research: a major reassessment of Ronald Reagan's lifelong crusade to dismantle the Soviet Empire–including shocking revelations about the liberal American politician who tried to collude with USSR to counter Reagan's efforts Paul Kengor's God and Ronald Reagan made presidential historian Paul Kengor's name as one of the premier chroniclers of the life and career of the 40th president. Now, with The Crusader, Kengor returns with the one book about Reagan that has not been written: The story of his lifelong crusade against communism, and of his dogged–and ultimately triumphant–effort to overthrow the Soviet Union. Drawing upon reams of newly declassified presidential papers, as well as untapped Soviet media archives and new interviews with key players, Kengor traces Reagan's efforts to target the Soviet Union from his days as governor of California to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of what he famously dubbed the "Evil Empire." The result is a major revision and enhancement of what historians are only beginning to realize: That Reagan not only wished for the collapse of communism, but had a deep and specific understanding of what it would take––and effected dozens of policy shifts that brought the USSR to its heels within a decade of his presidency. The Crusader makes use of key sources from behind the Iron Curtain, including one key memo that implicates a major American liberal politician–still in office today–in a scheme to enlist Soviet premier Yuri Andropov to help defeat Reagan's 1984 reelection bid. Such new finds make The Crusader not just a work of extraordinary history, but a work of explosive revelation that will be debated as hotly in 2006 as Reagan's policies were in the 1980s.  By: Richard Sakwa List Price: $42.95 Amazon Price: $38.66 Editorial Review: Drawing on a wide range of sources, including eye-witness accounts, official documents, and materials that have only recently come to light, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union places the Soviet experience in historical and comparative context. It provides a comprehensive overview of the Soviet Union from early comments by Marx on the possibility of Russia avoiding capitalism to the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. This source-book features several important documents published in full for the first time, including Lenin's letter of 1922 concerning the church and materials on the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Gorbachev's attempts to revive the system is reflected in a number of documents, while materials relating to the coup of 1991 and the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States are reproduced almost in their entirety. From a survey of the emergence of Marxism-Leninism to an analysis of the tumultuous events of the last decade, this book is an invaluable reference to anyone interested in Soviet history and politics.  By: Von Laue List Price: $56.20 Amazon Price: $52.30  By: Andrew Bennett List Price: $30.00 Amazon Price: $30.00 Editorial Review: Why did the Soviet Union use less force to preserve the Soviet empire from 1989 to 1991 than it had used in distant and impoverished Angola in 1975? This book fills a key gap in international relations theories by examining how actors' preferences and causal conceptions change as they learn from their experiences. Andrew Bennett draws on interviews and declassified Politburo documents as well as numerous public statements to establish the views of Soviet and Russian officials. He argues that Soviet leaders drew lessons from their apparent successes in Vietnam and elsewhere in the 1970s that made them more interventionist. Then, as casualties in Afghanistan mounted in the 1980s, Soviet leaders learned different lessons that led them to withdraw from regional conflicts and even to abstain from the use of force as the Soviet empire dissolved. The loss of this empire led to exaggerated fears of "domino effects" within Russia and a resurgence of interventionist views, culminating in the Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994. Throughout this process, Soviet and Russian leaders and policy experts were divided into competing schools of thought as much by the information to which they were exposed as by their apparent material interests. This helps explain how Gorbachev and other new thinkers were able to prevail over the powerful military-party-industrial complex that had dominated Soviet politics since Stalin's time.  By: David Satter List Price: $30.00 Amazon Price: $30.00 Editorial Review: The collapse of the Soviet Union figures among the important events of the latter half of the century. David Satter, a reporter in Moscow for the Financial Times of London from 1976 to 1982, recorded with great detail the failings of the Soviet Union during the time and has cast those failings into a telling postmortem on the Communist state. The bulk of his material comes in the form of vignettes from people who suffered through the iron rule and the oppression and bleakness it fostered. Their stories provide personal insights as to why the empire collapsed.The first state in history to be based explicitly on atheism, the Soviet Union endowed itself with the attributes of God. In this book, David Satter shows through individual stories what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea, how people were forced to act out this fictitious reality, and the tragic human cost of the Soviet attempt to remake reality by force. |
About the HUs
About This is True
Prev: TV writer Devery Freeman Next: Extraordinary doctor Bill Inman |