Böcker av Anthony D'Agostino

Soviet Succession Struggles (1988) is a key study of the history, nature and development of Soviet politics and politicians from the earliest days of Soviet Russia up to the rise of Gorbachev, examining the power struggles between opposing factions within the Soviet leadership.

In the mid-1980s Mikhail Gorbachev's political and economic reforms promised a relaxation of tensions between the U.S.S.R. and the United States without disturbing the basic balance of power in Europe established after the Second World War. Then came the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the vast democratic revolution that swept the Soviet empire, creating a power vacuum east of Berlin. Could such an upheaval have been a natural and logical extension of the course of reform that Gorbachev began plotting in 1985? Gorbachev's Revolution argues persuasively that the end of Communism was never the goal of the Soviet leader but rather the unintended result of an intense and many-faceted struggle for power. Anthony D'Agostino demonstrates that the pervasive image of stable in-system reform in fact ignored evidence from history. Succession struggles in the U.S.S.R. were generally wars of ideas in which the victors got their way by challenging their opponents' interpretations of the past. Through political memoirs, newspaper accounts, and historical documents, Gorbachev's Revolution demonstrates once again that revolutionaries change the world not only according to their own designs but also according to the world's designs on them.

This detailed and scholarly history, based on contemporary and original sources, explains the fall of Soviet Communism by bringing into focus the process of revolution from above. It finds as its cause Gorbachev''s relentless political struggle to raise himself above the collective leadership which brought him to power. Gorbachev''s Revolution, 1985-91 examines: ┬╖ the impact of the SDI and other US arms programmes of the early 1980s which provided a stimulus for both Gorbachev''s domestic reforms and his arms control initiatives ┬╖ Perestroika, originally intended to show the world that a new Soviet foreign policy was based on real changes in Soviet society, however, Gorbachev launched its most radical measures in order to get an edge on his Politburo critics ┬╖ Glasnost, originally meant to be a strictly controlled process furnishing an argument for piecemeal economic reforms This multi-faceted volume provides a wide-ranging and revisionist analysis of this fascinating and influential period in Soviet and international history.