Mikhail Gorbachev

Moscow, December 25th, 1991
by Conor O'Clery
Published 31 Jul 2011

There are three nuclear suitcases in total. One is with Mikhail Gorbachev, another is with the minister for defense, and a third is assigned to the chief of the general staff. Any one of the devices is sufficient to authorize the launch of a missile, but only the president can lawfully order a nuclear strike. So long as Gorbachev possesses the chemodanchik, he is legally the commander of the country’s strategic forces, and the Soviet Union remains a nuclear superpower. This all changes on December 25, 1991. At 7:00 p.m., as the world watches on television, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is resigning. The communist monolith known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is breaking up into separate states.

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Out of his window he can see the wide Moscow river as it begins a loop southwest like a horseshoe, past the Kievsky Railway Station, around Luzhniki sports stadium, back northeast by Gorky Park, and around the ramparts of the Kremlin two miles distant, where Mikhail Gorbachev is also grabbing a quick lunch and fighting fatigue and the onset of influenza as he prepares for the speech that will mark his transition from presidential to civilian life. Yeltsin will take Gorbachev’s place there behind the Kremlin’s high, red-brick walls, completing the remarkable resurrection that began four years ago, when he was left a broken man, physically and psychologically, and demoted from Moscow party chief to the junior post of first deputy chairman of the state committee for construction. CHAPTER 9 BACK FROM THE DEAD Mikhail Gorbachev’s warning to Boris Yeltsin in November 1987 that he would never let him into politics again left the former Moscow party chief with a sense of despair.

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Now, however, “having lived through these seventy lethal years inside communism’s iron shell, we are crawling out, though barely alive.”12 When he went for his summer vacation at Foros on the Black Sea, Mikhail Gorbachev mused aloud to Raisa about his future, wondering whether he should step aside. Now that people had got such a great measure of freedom, let others show that they know how to use it, he suggested. He was not serious, but Raisa was, perhaps sensing what lay ahead. “It’s time, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” she said, “to devote yourself to private life, to retire and write your memoirs. You’ve done your job.”13 CHAPTER 10 DECEMBER 25: MIDDAY In the Kremlin, after his lunch of small open-faced salami sandwiches and cottage cheese with sour cream, Mikhail Gorbachev is overwhelmed with tiredness and the enormity of what he has to do in a few hours.1 At the back of his office, behind the work table, is a door leading to a small resting room.

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
by Serhii Plokhy
Published 12 May 2014

On the same day, CNN presented a live broadcast of the resignation speech of the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was no more. What had just happened? The first to give an answer to that question was the president of the United States, George H. W. Bush. On the evening of December 25, soon after CNN and other networks broadcast Gorbachev’s speech and the image of the red banner being lowered at the Kremlin, Bush went on television to explain to his compatriots the meaning of the picture they had seen, the news they had heard, and the gift they had received. He interpreted Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation and the lowering of the Soviet flag as a victory in the war that America had fought against communism for more than forty years.

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Bush of the United States, the cautious and often humble leader of the Western world, whose backing of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and insistence on the security of the nuclear arsenals prolonged the existence of the empire but also ensured its peaceful demise; Boris Yeltsin, the boorish and rebellious leader of Russia, who almost singlehandedly defeated the coup and then refused to take the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s route of saving the crumbling empire or revising existing Russian borders; Leonid Kravchuk, the shrewd leader of Ukraine, whose insistence on his country’s independence doomed the Union; and, last but not least, Mikhail Gorbachev, the man at the center of events who had the most to gain or lose from the way they turned out.

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It was at Chernenko’s funeral, in March 1985, that Bush first met and greeted a new Soviet leader, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev.6 In July 1991 Bush came to Moscow as chief executive for the first time—he had won the presidency in 1988. He came not to attend another funeral but to negotiate with a vital and energetic Soviet counterpart. Much had changed in the USSR in the intervening period. “Since my last visit in 1985, we’ve witnessed the opening of Europe and the end of a world polarized by suspicion,” read a speech prepared by the president’s staff for the signing of a new treaty to reduce nuclear arsenals. “That year, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union, put many monumental changes into motion.

Gorbachev: His Life and Times
by William Taubman

Post, “Psyching Out Gorbachev: The Man Remains a Mystery,” Washington Post, December 17, 1989. 9 “Twenty Questions to Mikhail Gorbachev on the Eve of His Seventieth Birthday,” in A Millennium Salute to Mikhail Gorbachev on His 70th Birthday (Moscow: R. Valent, 2001), 10. 10 Olga Belan, “Mnogikh oshibok Gorbachev mog by izbezhat’,” Sobesednik, November 1992. 11 Olga Kuchkina, “Neuzheli ia dolzna umeret’, chtoby zasluzhit’ ikh liubov’,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, October 29, 1999, in Raisa: Vospominaniia, dnevniki, interv’iu, stat’i, pis’ma, telegrammy (Moscow: Vagirus/Petro-n’ius, 2000), 293. 12 “Twenty Questions to Mikhail Gorbachev,” 10. 13 I owe this phrase to George Kateb. 14 “Mikhail Gorbachev: Zhenit’sia ia ne sobiraius’,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, March 2, 2001. 15 See Aron Belkin, “Kto zhe takoi Gorbachev?

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George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 15. 75 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:51. 76 Kuchmaev, Kommunist s bozhei otmetinoi, 27. 77 Ibid., 30. 78 Grachev, Gorbachev, 310; Neokonchennaia istoriia: Tri tsveta vremeni (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2005), 12; Gorbachev’s talk at George Mason University, March 25, 2009. 79 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:52. 80 Ibid. 81 Brown, Gorbachev Factor, 26–27; Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 35. 82 Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 35; Lezvina, “Razgovor s zemliakom,” 53. 83 Author’s interview with former Gorbachev classmate, name unknown, July 6, 2005, Krasnogvardeisk, Russia. 84 Kuchmaev, Kommunist s bozhei otmetinoi, 32. 85 Neokonchennaia istoriia, 12. 86 Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 156. 87 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:53. 88 Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 156. 89 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:53. 90 Ibid., 54. 91 Ibid. 92 Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 43. 93 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:53, 55. 94 Ibid., 55. 95 Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 152. 96 Kuchmaev, Kommunist s bozhei otmetinoi, 30–31. 97 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:56. 98 Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 43–44. 99 Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 157; also see Ruslan Kozlov’s interview with Karagodina in “Ia zashchishchaiu nashu iunost’,” Sobesednik, 1991, no. 21. 100 Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 38–39; Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 157. 101 Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 39–40. 102 Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 156, 158; Kuchmaev, Kommunist s bozhei otmetinoi, 34. 103 Zenkovich, Mikhail Gorbachev, 44. CHAPTER 2: MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY: 1950–1955 1 Gorbachev, Memoirs, 41; Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:59. 2 See Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 22–24. 3 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 1:59; author’s interviews with Gorbachev, April 19 and May 2, 2007, Moscow. 4 Author’s interviews with Gorbachev, April 19 and May 2, 2007, Moscow. 5 Ibid. 6 Author’s interview with Gorbachev, November 14, 2011, Moscow. 7 Author’s interviews with Gorbachev, April 19 and May 2, 2007, Moscow. 8 Gorbachev, Naedine s soboi, 67. 9 “Molotovkskii raion VKLSM—Delo po priemu kandidatom v chleny VKP(b) Gorbacheva, M.

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White, “Gorby’s Choice,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2007. 88 Ibid. 89 “Gorbachevu vsego lish’ vosemdesiat,” Izvestiia, March 3, 2011. 90 Cited in Gorbachev, Posle kremlia, 248–58. 91 Ibid., 402, 404; Matthias Schepp and Britta Sandberg, “I Am Truly and Deeply Concerned,” Der Spiegel, January 16, 2015, http://www.spiegel.de/international/­world/gorbachev-warns-of-decline-in-russian-westernties-over-ukraine-a-1012992.html; also see Lezvina, “Razgovor s zemliakom,” in Karagez’ian and Poliakov, Gorbachev v zhizni, 53. 92 The author was present at the World Political Forum in Turin, the Harvard nuclear abolition conference, the 2005 Washington tribute, Gorbachev’s seventy-fifth, and the London birthday gala in 2011. 93 Natasha Singer, “Rubles, a Girl’s Best Friend,” New York Times, December 9, 2007; Irina Gorbachev’s remarks, quoted in Gorbachev, Posle kremlia, 240–41. 94 Lezvina, “Razgovor s zemliakom,” 58. 95 “Soured” cited by Steve Rosenberg, “Mikhail Gorbachev Denounces Putin’s ‘Attack on Rights,’ ” BBC News Europe, March 7, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/­world-europe-21695314; Gorbachev, Posle kremlia, 267, 269. 96 Aleksandr Braterskii, “Mikhail Gorbachev predstavil svoiu novuiu knigu,” Gazeta.ru, November 21, 2014; Irina Skvortsova, “Mikhail Gorbachev: Ia ne boius’ kritiki, potomu chto v politike nel’zia obizhat’sia,” Sobesednik, December 17, 2014. 97 Rosenberg, “Mikhail Gorbachev Denounces Putin’s ‘Attack on Rights.’ ” 98 Ivan Nechepurenko, “Gorbachev on Russia and Ukraine: We Are One People,” Moscow Times, November 21, 2014. 99 Neil MacFarquhar, “Reviled, Revered and Still Challenging Russia to Evolve,” New York Times, June 2, 2016. 100 Nechepurenko, “Gorbachev on Russia and Ukraine.” 101 Simon Shuster, “Gorbachev Blames the U.S.

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
by Serhii Plokhy
Published 1 Mar 2018

Nowhere was the political impact more profound than in Ukraine, the republic that was home to the failed reactor. Two conflicting political actors in Ukraine—the Ukrainian communist establishment and the nascent democratic opposition—discovered a common interest in opposing Moscow, and especially Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In December 1991, when Ukrainians voted for their country’s independence, they also consigned the mighty Soviet Union to the dustbin of history—it was officially dissolved a few weeks after the Ukrainian referendum. While it would be wrong to attribute the development of glasnost in the Soviet Union, or the rise of the national movement in Ukraine and other republics, to the Chernobyl accident alone, the disaster’s impact on those interrelated processes can hardly be overstated.

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The Central Intelligence Agency in the United States had made even grimmer estimates, putting the growth rate at 2 to 3 percent, and later reducing even that estimate to approximately 1 percent.3 With its goals for communism nowhere in sight, the economy in a tailspin, the Chinese launching their economic reforms by introducing market mechanisms, and the Americans rushing ahead not only in economic development but also in the arms race, under the leadership of the unfailingly optimistic Ronald Reagan, the Soviet leadership had lost its way. The people, ever more disillusioned with the communist experiment, had become despondent. And yet, with the communist religion in crisis, it suddenly appeared to have found a new messiah in a relatively young, energetic, and charismatic leader: Mikhail Gorbachev. This was to be the fifty-four-year-old Gorbachev’s first congress as general secretary of the party, and he was well aware that the eyes of the party leadership, of Soviet citizens—and indeed, of the entire world—were on him. The previous three years had become known as the era of Kremlin funerals.

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The task was relatively easy, given that many officials in both places had once worked at the Chernobyl plant that Briukhanov ran.9 ON THE morning of February 25, 1986, Viktor Briukhanov and his fellow deputies took their seats in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses in the center of the hall before the podium. For those like Briukhanov who were attending their first party congress, the ritual opening presented an interesting spectacle whose main features went back to Stalin’s times. At ten in the morning, the party’s Politburo members, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, marched to the podium. Like most people, Briukhanov knew them from their portraits, which were displayed on public buildings all over the Soviet Union. Among them was the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, whose portrait would survive for decades in the Prypiat palace of culture. Like everyone else, Briukhanov rose to his feet to welcome the leaders with applause.

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War
by Ken Adelman
Published 5 May 2014

She made wonderful suggestions—in tone, substance, and wording for this project—as she has throughout all our projects, including that of sharing a life together. Notes INTRODUCTION 1 “Truly Shakespearean passions”: Mikhail Gorbachev, letter to the prime minister of Iceland, the mayor of Reykjavik, and participants of the seminar on the tenth anniversary of the summit, September 10, 1996. 2 Cold War historian Don Oberdorfer: Don Oberdorfer, “At Reykjavik, Soviets Were Prepared and U.S. Improvised,” Washington Post, February 16, 1987. 2 “wearying and grueling arguments”: Ibid. 2 “no one can continue to act as he acted before”: Mikhail Gorbachev, Reykjavik: Results and Lessons (Moscow, 1990). 3 “No summit since Yalta”: Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and Soviet Union, 1983–1991 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 183. 4 “We were sitting around”: Shultz told this story many times, including Teresa Jimenez, “Shultz Shakes Lessons of Cold War,” Los Angeles Daily News, November 19, 1996. 1.

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Jere Hester, Michelle Caruso, and David Eisenstate, “Words of Hope,” New York Daily News, August 13, 1996. 335 Iceland’s president: Taken from Reykjavik newspapers in June 2004, as reported and translated by Astporsdottir. 335 In an op-ed piece for the New York Times: Mikhail Gorbachev, “A President Who Listened,” New York Times, June 7, 2004. 337 nearly a hundred and forty years earlier: Rudolph Bush, “A Time to Remember,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2004. 337 Mrs. Reagan stepped forward: Ken Fireman, “Ronald Reagan 1911–2004: Our Final Hail to the Chief,” Newsday, June 12, 2004. 337 the state funeral: I was startled to read later that Mikhail Gorbachev was there at the funeral, since neither Carol nor I saw him that morning. Otherwise, I would have gone over and greeted him. 337 musical interludes: Ann McFeatters, “A Nation Bids Farewell,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 12, 2004. 337 Margaret Thatcher: Ibid. 338 Reagan “did not shrink”: Margaret Thatcher, Eulogy for President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, June 11, 2004, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110360. 338 Sandra Day O’Connor: David Von Drehle, “Reagan Hailed as Leader for ‘The Ages,’ ” Washington Post, June 12, 2004. 338 top dignitaries: Sonya Ross, “Thatcher, Gorbachev Lead Foreign Leaders Paying Respects to Reagan,” Associated Press, June 12, 2004. 338 including Thatcher: McFeatters, “A Nation Bids Farewell.” 338 tipped a wing: Jeff Zeleny, “Reagan Laid to Rest,” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2004. 338 The Dixonian: The yearbook is displayed in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 338 More than a thousand people: Steve Chawkins, “Farewell to a President: Lasting Memories Gleaned Along the Final Leg,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2004. 339 “I know in my heart”: Ryan Pearson, “Reagan Entombed in Underground Crypt at Hilltop Presidential Library,” Associated Press, June 12, 2004. 340 “I gave him a pat”: Robert G.

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Contents Dedication Introduction 1 Departures 2 Arrivals 3 Minds and Moods Going into Hofdi House 4 Saturday in Reykjavik 5 Sunday Morning in Reykjavik 6 Sunday Afternoon and Evening in Reykjavik 7 Departures and Immediate Fallout Photographic Insert 8 From the Worst to the Best of Times 9 Reykjavik and the Soviet Breakup 10 Reflections and Conclusions on Reykjavik Epilogue - Mourning in America Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher Introduction The Reykjavik summit is something out of an Agatha Christie thriller. Two vivid characters meet over a weekend, on a desolate and windswept island, in a reputedly haunted house with rain lashing against its windowpanes, where they experience the most amazing things. The summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on October 11 and 12, 1986, was like nothing before or after—with its cliffhanging plot, powerful personalities, and competing interpretations over the past quarter century. A decade later, Gorbachev felt the drama was something out of the Bard, William Shakespeare, rather than the Dame, Agatha Christie: Truly Shakespearean passions ran under the thin veneer of polite and diplomatically restrained negotiations behind the windows of a cozy little house standing on the coast of a dark and somberly impetuous ocean.

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Michael Meyer
Published 7 Sep 2009

In the news business, too risky means “bad for one’s career.” The reporter opting out concluded that Germany and Eastern Europe were too far off America’s radar screen. Not much was happening. He feared he wouldn’t get into the magazine. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. For fifty years, Europe had been frozen. Now a new man was in charge: Mikhail Gorbachev. Change was afoot. You could feel it. I remember, vividly, thinking I would have perhaps a year or two to see the old Europe, a part of the continent that had been cut off behind the Iron Curtain, as if under glass, before it all went away. In my youthful enthusiasm, I considered it an almost anthropological adventure, a chance of a lifetime.

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“Once the wicked witch was dead,” as Francis Fukuyama, the eminent political economist, has put it, “the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation.” It is true that instead of seeking to contain the former Soviet Union, as previous administrations had done, the United States under Ronald Reagan chose to confront it. He challenged Mikhail Gorbachev not only to reform the Soviet system from within but to “tear down this wall.” Yet other factors figured in this equation, not least a drop in oil prices from roughly $40 a barrel in 1980 to less than $10 a decade later, not to mention the Soviet leader’s own actions. Even less well-known is Ronald Reagan’s political evolution.

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Unseen from the Western side, crowds of East Germans gathered to hear Reagan, hoping loudspeakers would project his voice across the divide. East German police pushed them back, the president was told. This in itself was a demonstration of all that Reagan hated about communism, and he punched out his words with angry force—a direct exhortation, delivered personally, to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan began slowly, speaking of other American presidents who had come to Berlin, John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, honoring their duty to speak out against what he called “the scar” that split the city. He spoke of America’s efforts to save Berlin after the war—aid under the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift of food and medicine when the Red Army cut supply lines to the West.

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989
by Kristina Spohr
Published 23 Sep 2019

Anatoly Chernyaev – Notes from a Meeting of the Politburo 31.10.1988 Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation Moscow (hereafter AGF) Digital Archive Wilson Center (hereafter DAWC); Mikhail Gorbachev Memoirs Bantam 1997 p. 459; Politburo meeting 24.11.1988, printed in V Politbyuro TsK KPSS. Po zapisyam Anatoliya Chernyaeva, Vadima Medvedeva, Georgiya Shakhnazarova, 1985–1991 Gorbachev Foundation 2008 pp. 432–6 esp. p. 433 Back to text 14. See video of UN speech c-span.org/video/?5292-1/gorbachev-united-nations Back to text 15. Address by Mikhail Gorbachev at the UN General Assembly Session (Excerpts) 7.12.1988 CWIHP Archive. See also video of UN speech c-span.org/video/?5292-1/gorbachev-united-nations; and video of ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1988 Address to the UN: 30 Years Later’, Panel Discussion with Andrei Kozyrev, Pavel Palazhchenko, Thomas W.

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Radchenko Unwanted Visionaries p. 166; Robert Service The End of the Cold War 1985–1991 Pan Books 2015 p. 385. On Gorbachev–Deng ‘58–85’, see also Excerpts from the Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Rajiv Gandhi 15.7.1989 AGF DAWC Back to text 133. Michael Parks & David Holley ‘30-Year Feud Ended by Gorbachev, Deng: Leaders Declare China–Soviet Ties Are Normalised’ LAT 16.5.1989 Back to text 134. Soviet transcript of meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping (Excerpts), 16.5.1989 DAWC. For a Chinese version of the record of conversation see also DAWC Back to text 135. Ibid. Back to text 136. Ibid.

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Novo-Ogarevo pp. 1–8 Back to text 182. Remarks at the Arrival Ceremony in Moscow 30.7.1991 APP; The President’s News Conference with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow 31.7.1991 APP Back to text 183. Soviet Record of Main Content of Conversation between Gorbachev and Bush, First Private Meeting, Moscow 30.7.1991 doc. 135 pp. 868–79 here pp. 876–7. No US transcript of this discussion has been released Back to text 184. The President’s News Conference with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow 31.7.1991 APP. Cf. Keith Badger ‘Soviet Trade Favor Costs US Little’ NYT 31.7.1991 Back to text 185. TLSS doc. 139 p. 893.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990
by Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds
Published 24 Aug 2016

Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York, 2009), 111–12. 33. Liang Zhang et al., eds, The Tiananmen Papers (New York, 2002), 143. 34. Mikhail Gorbachev, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 15 (Moscow, 2010), 261. 35. Zhang Ganghua and Li Peng, Li Peng liu si ri ji zhen xiang: Fu lu Li Peng liu si ri ji yuan wen (Hong Kong, 2010). 36. Oleg Troyanovskii, Cherez Gody i Rasstoyaniya: Istoriya Odnoi Sem’yi (Over Years and Distances) (Moscow, 1997), 373. 37. Excerpts from the conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping, 16 May 1989, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116536. 38. Ibid. 39. George Bush, The President’s News Conference, 30 May, 1989, APP website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

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There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures. Brutus, in Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3 Let’s say ‘to hell with the past’. We’ll do it our way and get something done. Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, Geneva, 20 November 1985 Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Thawing the Cold War 1 Erfurt and Kassel, 1970 Benedikt Schoenborn and Gottfried Niedhart 2 Beijing, 1972 Yafeng Xia and Chris Tudda 3 Moscow, 1972 James Cameron Living with the Cold War 4 Helsinki, 1975 Michael Cotey Morgan and Daniel Sargent 5 Bonn, Guadeloupe, and Vienna, 1978–9 Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds Transcending the Cold War 6 Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, 1985–8 Jonathan Hunt and David Reynolds 7 Beijing and Malta, 1989 Jeffrey A.

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Our deep gratitude, finally, to the contributors who probably got more than they bargained for when accepting our initial invitation to meet in the ‘Original Cambridge’, including our vigorous editing and the challenge of co-authoring chapters through hard summit bargaining. ARKS, DJR, March 2016 Introduction They were an unlikely pair and it was an almost inconceivable moment. American President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, sat together, relaxed and joking, in a joint press conference on 3 December 1989, at the end of their summit meeting in Malta (see Figure 0.1). ‘We stand at the threshold of a brand-new era of U.S.–Soviet relations’, Bush declared.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991
by Robert Service
Published 7 Oct 2015

Chernyaev, Sovmestnyi iskhod, p. 808 (9 October 1989). 47. V. Falin, Bez skidok na obstoyatel’stva: politicheskie vospominaniya, p. 440. 48. Ibid., p. 442. 49. East German Politburo, 7 October 1989: Mikhail Gorbachëv i germanskii vopros, pp. 209–12. 50. Chernyaev, Sovmestnyi iskhod, pp. 805–6 (5 October 1989). 51. Conversation between M. S, Gorbachëv and E. Honecker, 7 October 1989: Mikhail Gorbachëv i germanskii vopros, pp. 206–7. 52. Chernyaev, Sovmestnyi iskhod, pp. 805–6 (5 and 8 October 1989). 53. Ibid., p. 808 (11 October 1989). 54. DPA report (18 August 1991) on Tisch’s article in Kurier am Sonntag: John Koehler Papers (HIA), box 52, folder: End of the DDR, 1990–1997. 55.

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Shevardnadze to the Warsaw Pact’s Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Warsaw (East German report), 26 October 1989, pp. 6, 14, 24 and 28: ibid. 61. Record of conversation between M. S. Gorbachëv and W. Brandt, 17 October 1989: Mikhail Gorbachëv i germanskii vopros, pp. 229–30. 62. Record of conversation between Alexander Yakovlev and Zbigniew Brzezinski, 31 October 1989, pp. 4–5: ECWF, MTG-1989-10-31-AY-ZB. 63. ‘Memorandum of Krenz-Gorbachëv Conversation, 1 November 1989’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 12/13 (2001), p. 19. 64. Conversation between M. S. Gorbachëv and E. Krenz, 1 November 1989: Mikhail Gorbachëv i germanskii vopros, pp. 238–9. 65. Excerpt from record of conversation between M. S. Gorbachëv and E.

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Kohl, Erinnerungen, vol. 3: 1990–1994, pp. 169–70. 40. Ibid., p. 332; T. G. Stepanov-Mamaladze diary, 16 July 1990: T. G. Stepanov-Mamaladze Papers (HIA), box 5; record of conversation between M. S. Gorbachëv and H. Kohl, 16 July 1990: Mikhail Gorbachëv i germanskii vopros, p. 507; A. Chernyaev, Sovmestnyi iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epokh. 1971–1991 gody, p. 865 (15 July 1990). 41. Record of conversation between M. S. Gorbachëv and H. Kohl, 16 July 1990: Mikhail Gorbachëv i germanskii vopros, p. 509, 511–13, 517 and 519. 42. T. G. Stepanov-Mamaladze diary, 17 July 1990: T. G. Stepanov-Mamaladze Papers (HIA), box 5. 43. T. G. Stepanov-Mamaladze working notes, 16 July 1990: T.

The Cold War: A New History
by John Lewis Gaddis
Published 1 Jan 2005

Gorbachev’s account is in his Memoirs, pp. 626—45. 51 Suny, The Soviet Experiment, pp. 483–84; Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, pp. 554–55. 52 Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era, pp. 471–72. 53 Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. xxxviii. EPILOGUE: THE VIEW BACK 1 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 692—93; also Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, The Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism, translated by George Schriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 172–74. 2 See Louise Levanthes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 3 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1971), p. 542. 4 “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Robert C.

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There was Ronald Reagan, the first professional actor to become president of the United States, who used his theatrical skills to rebuild confidence at home, to spook senescent Kremlin leaders, and after a young and vigorous one had replaced them, to win his trust and enlist his cooperation in the task of changing the Soviet Union. The new leader in Moscow was, of course, Mikhail Gorbachev, who himself sought to dramatize what distinguished him from his predecessors: in doing so, he swept away communism’s emphasis on the class struggle, its insistence on the inevitability of a world proletarian revolution, and hence its claims of historical infallibility. It was an age, then, of leaders who through their challenges to the way things were and their ability to inspire audiences to follow them—through their successes in the theater that was the Cold War—confronted, neutralized, and overcame the forces that had for so long perpetuated the Cold War.

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And by the time of Deng’s death in 1997, the Chinese economy had become one of the largest in the world.47 The contrast with the moribund Soviet economy, which despite high oil prices showed no growth at all in the 1970s and actually contracted during the early 1980s, was an indictment from which Soviet leaders never recovered. “After all,” the recently deposed Mikhail Gorbachev commented ruefully in 1993, “China today is capable of feeding its people who number more than one billion.”48 Nor could it have been expected that the first woman to become prime minister of Great Britain would challenge the social welfare state in Western Europe. Margaret Thatcher’s path to power, like Deng’s, had not been easy.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

In the 1980s, in the same timeframe as factories closed and demand for labor declined in the United Kingdom and the United States, the USSR faltered. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan precipitated the end of the Soviet Union as well as the Cold War through the pressures their interactions with Mikhail Gorbachev imposed on him, at a time when he was attempting the reform of the entire Communist system. But in fact, domestically, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all engaged in the same reform project—out with the old, in with the new. Each adopted a top-down approach notable for its absence of broader social consultation and its politically polarizing effects.

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In his middle age, back at home, he was blacklisted by British business for being a union agitator. In his old age, he mellowed and turned to writing copious self-published poetry and letters to the local newspaper. When I was on an exchange program in Moscow in 1987–1988, Uncle Charlie had also started writing poems for Mikhail Gorbachev. He received a commemorative medal from the Soviet embassy in London in honor of his wartime service. I almost had a heart attack when I saw him referenced in an article in a Soviet English-language newspaper along with one of his poems. During the war scare in the mid-1980s, Uncle Charlie became obsessed with trying to figure out how the USSR had gone from wartime ally to mortal enemy.

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I didn’t know anyone at university who had a computer; it was still early days in the world of information technology. I was surprised when he wrote back—it was a typewritten letter, possibly dictated to a secretary, but it was a real letter, with a real signature, and real insight and advice. Robertson encouraged me to keep going with my Russian studies. Noting the potential of Mikhail Gorbachev to make significant change in the USSR, he assured me that I would certainly get a job if I kept on expanding my horizons. He also suggested that I consider studying abroad if there was an opportunity to do so. A decade later George Robertson became UK secretary of state for defense and then secretary general of NATO, and ultimately Lord Robertson, a British life peer.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment
by Noam Chomsky
Published 15 Mar 2010

To NATO leaders, it is the merest truism that they themselves are a force for peace. Most of the world, which has rather different memories of Western benevolence, sees matters differently. So does Russia. There seemed to be hope for long-term peace in Europe when the Soviet Union collapsed. Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow a unified Germany to join NATO, an astonishing concession in the light of history; Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia twice in that century, and now would belong to a hostile military alliance led by the global superpower. There was a quid pro quo: President Bush I agreed that NATO would not expand to the East, granting Russia some measure of security.

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Thus the editors of the Washington Post admonished Barack Obama for regarding Afghanistan as “the central front” for the United States, reminding him that Iraq “lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves,” and Afghanistan’s “strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq.” A welcome, if belated, recognition of reality about the U.S. invasion. The second divisive issue in the Caucasus is expansion of NATO to the East. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev made a concession that was astonishing in the light of recent history and strategic realities: He agreed to allow a united Germany to join a hostile military alliance. Gorbachev agreed to the concession on the basis of “assurances that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the east, ‘not one inch’ in [Secretary of State] Jim Baker’s exact words,” according to Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the crucial years 1987 to 1991.

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The outsiders’ military presence only arouses confrontations, whereas what is needed is a common effort among concerned regional powers—including China, India, Iran, Pakistan and Russia—that would help Afghans face their internal problems peacefully, as many believe they can. NATO has moved far beyond its Cold War origins. After the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO lost its pretext for existence: defense against a hypothetical Russian assault. But NATO quickly took on new missions, expanding to the east in violation of promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, a serious security threat to Russia, naturally raising international tensions. President Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, NATO supreme allied commander in Europe from 2003 to 2006, advocates NATO expansion east and south, steps that would reinforce U.S. control over Middle East energy supplies (in technical terms, “safeguarding energy security”).

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
by David Hoffman
Published 1 Jan 2009

He told Reagan the Soviet Union was caught in an inconclusive leadership struggle, from one generation to another, bound up in a stagnating economy and "extreme distrust verging, in some instances, on paranoia" about the United States. It wasn't clear how the leadership succession would be resolved, Shultz said, but one of the most promising candidates was a member of the younger generation, a man with a broader view--Mikhail Gorbachev.27 ---------- PART ---------- TWO ---------- 8 ---------- "WE CAN'T GO ON LIVING LIKE THIS" Five weeks after Reagan was reelected, Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, were driven from London through rolling English farmland to Chequers, the elegant official country residence of the British prime minister. Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, greeted the Gorbachevs just before lunch on Sunday, December 16, 1984.

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They recoiled from the balance of terror out of personal experience as designers and stewards of the weapons, or because of their own fears of the consequences of war, or because of the burdens that the arsenals placed on their peoples. At the center of the drama are two key figures, both of them romantics and revolutionaries, who sensed the rising danger and challenged the established order. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, abhorred the use of force and championed openness and "new thinking" in hopes of saving his troubled country. Ronald Reagan, fortieth president of the United States, was a master communicator and beacon of ideals who had an unwavering faith in the triumph of capitalism and American ingenuity.

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It is extremely difficult to distinguish this aircraft by its shape from a reconnaissance aircraft. Soviet military pilots are prohibited from firing on passenger aircraft. But in this situation their actions were perfectly justified because in accordance with international regulations the aircraft was issued with several notices to land at our airfield." Mikhail Gorbachev, a younger, rising star among the aging Politburo members, said, "The aircraft remained above our territory for a long time. If it went off track, the Americans could have notified us, but they didn't." Ustinov claimed the Korean aircraft had no lights. After firing warning shots, he said, the Soviet pilot "informed the ground that the aircraft was a combat one and had to be taken down."

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze
by Bridget Kendall
Published 14 May 2017

Introduction I shall never forget the August morning in 1991, when I was stationed in the Soviet Union as BBC Moscow correspondent, and was woken early by the BBC news desk to check out a statement that had just turned up on TASS, the Soviet state news agency. It declared that the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been taken ill and a state of emergency imposed. By mid-morning there were tanks rumbling through the city’s main thoroughfares, taking up positions on bridges and around the Kremlin walls, and it was clear that an attempt to seize power was under way by Soviet hard-liners who feared that Gorbachev’s reforms had given too much power away.

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The denouement of this four-decade-long drama came unexpectedly in the mid-1980s, largely as the result of a change of leadership in the Soviet Union. Few people anticipated that the challenge that would overturn Soviet Communism and destroy its empire would come from within. But within six short years, the reformist Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev overturned preconceptions and overhauled the Soviet Union’s internal and global relations, leading to the abrupt collapse of Soviet rule, first in Eastern Europe and client states elsewhere, and then also inside the Soviet Union in December 1991. The story of the Cold War did not end there.

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But inside the Soviet Union, the shift away from the repressions of the Stalinist period marked a dramatic turning point in Soviet politics at the height of the Cold War. And though the thaw did not last long – Khrushchev was deposed in 1964 – the process of de-Stalinisation that he began sowed the seeds for some of the thinking that would later be taken up in the 1980s ‘perestroika’ reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. Tatiana Baeva’s father was one of many millions denounced as traitors and executed, imprisoned in brutal gulag labour camps or banished to remote outposts. I was born in 1947 in the small village of Norilsk. We had some political men like Nikolai Bukharin, and this Bukharin had a secretary, and this secretary had a little philosophy society.

Checkpoint Charlie
by Iain MacGregor
Published 5 Nov 2019

Music aside, to Garton Ash, such was the atmosphere of oppressive and all-pervading fear that the regime didn’t actually have to resort to violence often. It was a model, he concluded, familiar from Orwell’s 1984, in being “the perfect dictatorship that doesn’t need to use physical violence.” He firmly believed that only the will of Mikhail Gorbachev made it inevitable that the Berlin Wall would not survive past 1989. “All this nonsense about violence and East Germany being bankrupt and therefore had to collapse—if you had had sufficient political will and ruthlessness from the center, there was nothing inevitable about it at all.” For Uli Jörges, the job, the chase for the story, and the comradeship with his fellow journalists were the benefits that outweighed witnessing the grimness of the East German rule up close.

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The Allied missions were enduringly brilliant in their ability to provide information that underpinned many crucial decisions made during the Cold War.” CHAPTER TWELVE Death of a Soldier Amid the overtures of high-level negotiations between the reelected President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev by the early spring of 1985, there were accurate indications of a thaw in US-Soviet relations that could be perceived within the Allied military in Europe and in Washington, Paris, and London. For the first time since the Soviets’ 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the United States Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) received permission to attend the annual Soviet Army-Navy Day reception in Potsdam in force rather than with the usual token representation.

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As the eighties unfolded, the pressure on the East German government to be less repressive of its population became ever more acute. Rising tensions, especially among the younger generation, were conspicuous even to the elderly cabal that ruled. In part that was due to reforms being introduced by President Mikhail Gorbachev in Soviet Russia. His twin policies of glasnost, or “openness,” and perestroika, which entailed restructuring a cumbersome economy, now made East Germany seem a dinosaur, even through the prism of Communism. Young East Germans were feeling increasingly suffocated by a regime that aimed to control how they thought, where they went, and what they watched or read.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

It ended on Christmas Eve, 1991, when the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin. In late 1978, Deng Xiaoping laid the foundations for the opening of China and his country’s emergence as an economic superpower. By contrast, the economic and political reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s brought about the breakup of the Soviet Union. But while the domestic political effects of Russian and Chinese economic reforms were very different, their global significance was similar. At the beginning of the 1980s it still made sense to speak of a socialist and a capitalist world.

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These political and international events were more dramatic and eye-catching than technical-sounding reforms to agriculture and foreign investment. Perhaps as a result, Western leaders were very slow to understand the speed and scale of the transformation of China. The memoirs of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan demonstrate an instant and passionate interest in Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union. But the economic transformation of China barely registers. All Thatcher’s references to China concern the tortuous negotiations to hand back the British colony of Hong Kong. Writing in 1990, Reagan noted that in 1984, Treasury Secretary Don Regan had “come back from a trip to Beijing with an intriguing report: The People’s Republic of China was moving slowly but surely towards acceptance of a free-enterprise market, and inviting investment by foreign capitalists.”16 But, like Thatcher, Reagan was understandably much more focused on the end of the cold war than on the economic transformation of China.

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She exulted, “People are no longer worried about catching the British disease. They are queuing up to obtain the new British cure.”15 In even more grandiloquent mode, she claimed as early as 1982 that Britain was “teaching the nations of the world how to live.”16 On a visit as prime minister to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russia in 1990, she noted wryly that the new mayor of Moscow appeared to be a disciple of her own economic guru, Milton Friedman.17 In her memoirs she boasted proudly, “Britain under my premiership was the first country to reverse the onward march of socialism.”18 By the end of her period in office, Thatcher was increasingly worried that the European Union posed a threat to her free-market policies in Britain.

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
by Steve Levine
Published 23 Oct 2007

After a few preliminaries with Kremlin authorities, word came that a meeting had been arranged. Giffen and Andreas would have an audience with a rising star of the Politburo, one Mikhail Gorbachev. Giffen had already transformed himself from the son of a haberdasher into a merchant banker with important international connections. The meeting with the fresh-faced Kremlin minister, however, would catapult him to even greater heights, putting him on the path toward his first big oil deal, on the shores of the fabled Caspian Sea. CHAPTER 7 * * * The Perfect Oil Field MIKHAIL GORBACHEV WAS UNLIKE Soviet rulers of the past. Open-minded and inventive, pragmatic and flexible, “he would look you in the eye, and you were the only person in the room.”

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But no middleman was more influential or had a more spectacular run than James Henry Giffen, a garrulous and worldly-wise New York lawyer who had become a millionaire by the time he was thirty. Giffen had a long history in the region, starting in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev lent his personal support to a Giffen consortium of blue-chip American companies anxious to do business in the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse stripped Giffen of his influence in the Kremlin, but he reemerged in Kazakhstan as the president’s chief oil adviser. It wasn’t long before he helped expel John Deuss.

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Two of his ornate, glass-and-wood bookcases had survived in the rare books section of the city library, and a mostly ignored bust of Tagiyev stood on a cornerstone of what was once his downtown mansion, now a museum. As for his proudest accomplishment—the school for Muslim girls that he built in defiance of Islamic conservatives—it now housed an Azerbaijan Academy of Science archive. His villa had become a tuberculosis sanatorium, its water pipes rusted and its wood siding rotting in the ocean air. Mikhail Gorbachev formally rehabilitated Tagiyev in a 1990 ceremony witnessed by the old baron’s granddaughter, Sophia, who at the age of sixty-nine was once again living in Baku. Her white hair parted neatly down the middle, she bore a striking resemblance to her grandfather. She was accompanied by her mother, Sarah, now ninety, and the two of them lingered for a while at Tagiyev’s gravesite next to the old villa.

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink
by Taylor Downing
Published 23 Apr 2018

But he was sufficiently clear-minded to realise that the Soviet Union was suffering from many inherent deficiencies. The economy was desperately held back by chronic low productivity. Both industrial and agrarian production needed substantial reform. Andropov picked out and promoted young men like Mikhail Gorbachev who had a clear vision of some of the changes that were needed. But Andropov himself would never be the man to bring about radical change. His thinking was still dominated by the core tenets of Marxist-Leninist belief. Whenever reform was needed, he would call for greater discipline within the party.

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Chazov later wrote, ‘His condition gradually worsened, his weakness increased, he again stopped trying to walk, but still the wound would not heal… Andropov began to realise that he was not going to get any better.’3 Andropov spoke to his deputy Chernenko every day from his Crimean villa. He regularly conversed with Ustinov and Gromyko too. His protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev, telephoned Andropov on several occasions and after one call thought he seemed brighter. He hoped he was getting better.4 After his exhausting medical procedures in the morning, Andropov liked nothing more than to sit on the veranda of his villa overlooking the Black Sea, reading the mountain of literature that was sent to him daily.

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Members of the Politburo travelled out to the Kuntsevo Clinic in their Zil limousines for meetings at Andropov’s bedside so that he could continue with his duties as head of government. These vehicles were always allowed to drive at speed along the road to Kuntsevo, preceded and followed by escorts from the security services. One of those who visited regularly was Politburo member Mikhail Gorbachev, who was genuinely fond of his mentor and who wrote of these bedside encounters, ‘whenever the doctors permitted it I went to the hospital. In fact everyone had been visiting him–some less often, others more frequently; some to support him, others to check on his condition once more.’ So the suffering induced by his illness was aggravated by another worry: Andropov knew what was going on around his bedside.

The Enemy Within
by Seumas Milne
Published 1 Dec 1994

Indeed, they started being made by some of those with an interest in the affair – apparently as a sort of immunization or insurance policy – even before this book was finished.49 When the Guardian first published details of large-scale counter-subversion operations against the NUM and an account of some of the political undercurrents behind the Scargill Affair, the Daily Mirror’s immediate response was to cry: ‘Conspiracy theory!’ In two full-page tirades, the Guardian was accused of stringing together ‘an unlikely chain of people who, it implies, took part in a great conspiracy: the KGB, CIA, Margaret Thatcher, MI6, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Mirror – and all of them out to get poor old Arthur’. The Guardian’s purpose, it was said, was to prove the NUM president to be a ‘maliciously maligned hero of the working class’. In fact, the stringing together was done by the Mirror itself. But as far as the journalists then working for the Maxwell-owned tabloid were concerned, just a whiff of conspiracy theory was enough to discredit the Guardian’s revelations.

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In the week between 4 and 10 March 1990, the Sunday and Daily Mirror – each with a circulation of getting on for four million copies –would between them publish twenty-five pages of reports and commentary about Scargill and the ‘dishonour’ he had brought on the miners’ union.3 The taster chosen for the Sunday Mirror was a suitably titillating morsel about missing ‘Moscow Gold’. In December 1984, at Mikhail Gorbachev’s first meeting with Margaret Thatcher at Chequers, the paper revealed, the British Prime Minister had taken the future Soviet leader aside after lunch to express her ‘great displeasure’ about Soviet ‘meddling’ in the miners’ strike, then in its ninth month. ‘We believe that people in the Soviet Union … are helping to prolong the strike’, Thatcher told him.

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Maxwell also owned 20 per cent of Central Television’s shares, which must have been a welcome added bonus. With the deal in the bag, money was by all accounts now spent with wild abandon as the new joint Central–Mirror investigation careered around Britain and a variety of suitable foreign locations: France, Australia, the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the Cook operation hired a cousin of Mikhail Gorbachev, then still the country’s president, to pin down the tale of the Soviet millions. In France, the Central–Maxwell investigating team found themselves in mortal danger when, in the middle of a hurricane, the intrepid Roger Cook insisted on taking the controls of a light aircraft they had chartered.

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley
Published 22 Jul 2009

CHAPTER 11 Showdown CHAPTER 12 Paint the Town Red BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES INDEX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Photo Insert Also by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley Copyright About the Publisher LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Roman Abramovich and Daria Zhukova © Big Pictures Chelsea win the Premier League © Reuters Mikhail Khodorkovsky © Camera Press Vladimir Putin and Oleg Deripaska © PA Boris Yeltsin and Boris Berezovsky © PA Boris Berezovsky in Surrey © Camera Press Alexander Lebedev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bono © Getty Images Evgeny Lebedev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Geordie Greig © Getty Images Naomi Campbell and Vladimir Doronin © Big Pictures Pelorus in St Petersburg © PA Helicopter in Sardinia © Big Pictures Roman Abramovich’s Boeing 767 © Rex Features Natalia Vodianova and Justin Portman © PA Damien Hirst and Daria Zhukova © Getty Images Christian Candy and Nick Candy © Getty Images Prince Michael of Kent © Camera Press Lord Bell © Camera Press Nat Rothschild © Getty Images George Osborne © PA Queen K © Getty Images Lord Mandelson © Camera Press Stephen Curtis © PA Pennsylvania Castle © Rex Features Helicopter crash site © Rex Features Alexander Litvinenko’s FSB credentials © Litvinenko/PA Alexander Litvinenko © PA Alexander Litvinenko in hospital © Getty Images Anna Politkovskaya © PA Paul Klebnikov © PA Andrei Lugovoi © Corbis Badri Patarkatsishvili and Boris Berezovsky © PA Fyning Hill estate © Getty Images Oleg Deripaska’s London home © Rex Features Russian women in London © Aleksei Kudikov/Eventica Russian gathering in Trafalgar Square © Aleksei Kudikov/Eventica Ksenia Sobchak © Landov Polina Deripaska, Tatyana Dyachenko, Valentin Yumashev © Landov Dmitri Medvedev © Nikas Safronov Vladimir Putin © Nikas Safronov Chocolate heads © Getty CHAPTER 1 The Man Who Knew Too Much ‘I have dug myself into a hole and I am in too deep.

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Like their ancient Greek counterparts, few of the modern Russian oligarchs became mega-rich by creating new wealth but rather by insider political intrigue and by exploiting the weakness of the rule of law. Driven by a lust for money and power, they secured much of the country’s natural and historic wealth through the manipulation of the post-Soviet-era process of privatization. When Boris Yeltsin succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev as President in 1991, Russia had reached another precarious stage in its complex history. It had difficulty trading its vast resources and was short of food, while its banking system suffered from a severe lack of liquidity. Its former foe the United States - in Russia referred to as glavni vrag (the main enemy) - was watching events eagerly.

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The indecisive and capricious Yeltsin was ill, often drunk and rarely in control, while the state was running out of money to pay pensions and salaries. Taking advantage of the growing crisis, a handful of businessmen dreamed up a clever ruse that appeared to offer a solution. This was a group that had already become rich by taking advantage of the early days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring), which, for the first time in the Soviet Union, allowed small private enterprises to operate. Led by a leading insider, Vladimir Potanin, the cabal offered Yeltsin a backroom deal known in the West as ‘loans for shares’. This was an arrangement (coming at the end of the voucher privatization scheme) whereby they would lend the government the cash it so desperately needed in return for the right to buy shares in the remaining state enterprises.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw
Published 29 Aug 2018

However, the choice has been made and we have paved the way for perestroika. Mikhail Gorbachev, speech to the Soviet people at New Year 1989 We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine. He has a song, ‘I Did It My Way’. So every country decides on its own which road to take. Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, October 1989 Hardly anyone, whether in Eastern or in Western Europe, foresaw what was coming. Radical change in an apparently ossified Soviet bloc seemed unthinkable. That it could come from within the Soviet Union itself was unimaginable. Nor did Mikhail Gorbachev have any idea, when he became head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 11 March 1985, that within six years his actions would utterly transform world history.

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IRA bombing in Belfast, 1972 (Bettmann/Getty Images) 20. Pope John Paul II in Warsaw, 1979 (Bettmann/Getty Images) 21. LechWałęsa at the Gdansk shipyard, 1980 (Jean-Louis Atlan/Sygma via Getty Images) 22. François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, 1984 (Régis Bossu/Sygma via Getty Images) 23. Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, 1987 (Georges De Keerle/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 24. Leipzig demonstration, 1989 (Georges Merillon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) 25. Romanian demonstrator, Bucharest, 1989 (Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) 26. Anti-Maastricht placards, Provence, 1992 (Philippe Giraud/Sygma via Getty Images) 27.

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How this burst into youthful protest in the late 1960s, and the changing social and cultural values that were left from the period of student revolt, is explored in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 focuses upon a key decade: the fundamental change that occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s. Although the problems east of the Iron Curtain were by the 1980s mounting alarmingly for the leaders of communist states, Chapter 8 emphasizes the personal part played by Mikhail Gorbachev in unintentionally but fatally undermining Soviet rule, while Chapter 9 turns the spotlight on the part played in Europe’s ‘velvet revolution’ of 1989–91 by pressure for change from below. How difficult and often disillusioning the transition to pluralist democracies and capitalist economies was for the countries of Eastern Europe, and the disastrous collapse into ethnic war in Yugoslavia, form the main topics of Chapter 10.

Who Rules the World?
by Noam Chomsky

It was always recognized that Europe might choose to follow an independent course; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was partially intended to counter this threat. As soon as the official pretext for NATO dissolved in 1989, it was expanded to the east, in violation of verbal pledges to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It has since become a U.S.-run intervention force with far-ranging scope, as spelled out by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who informed a NATO conference that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system.4 Grand Area doctrines license military intervention at will.

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In 1989, the democratic uprising was tolerated by the Russians, and supported by Western power in accord with standard doctrine: it plainly conformed to economic and strategic objectives, and was therefore a noble achievement, greatly honored, unlike the struggles at the same time “to defend the people’s fundamental human rights” in Central America, in the words of the assassinated archbishop of El Salvador, one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the military forces armed and trained by Washington.17 There was no Mikhail Gorbachev in the West throughout those horrendous years, and there is none today. And Western power remains hostile to democracy in the Arab world for good reasons. Grand Area doctrines continue to apply to contemporary crises and confrontations. In Western policymaking circles and political commentary, the Iranian threat is considered to pose the greatest danger to world order and hence must be the primary focus of U.S. foreign policy, with Europe trailing along politely.

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-run state terror campaign in El Salvador, part of a broader terror and torture campaign throughout the region.4 All routine, ignored and virtually forgotten in the United States and by its allies—again routine. But it tells us a lot about the factors that drive policy, if we care to look at the real world. Another important event took place in Europe. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow the reunification of Germany and its membership in NATO, a hostile military alliance. In light of recent history, this was a most astonishing concession. There was a quid pro quo: President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed that NATO would not expand “one inch to the East,” meaning into East Germany.

The Skripal Files
by Mark Urban

Then he was informed that someone else would go instead, his service had other plans for him. Eventually it became clear that his first foreign assignment, under diplomatic cover, would be in Malta. After a further period of training for life as part of the small diplomatic corps on that Mediterranean island, including lessons in English, he arrived there in 1984 not long before Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the leadership of the Communist Party back home. Skripal would remain there for over five years, an unusually long posting that testified to the Centre’s satisfaction with his work. Skripal’s cover at the embassy was as an attaché for sport and culture. That legend meant devoting a good many hours each week to the legitimate work of furthering good relations with the people of Malta.

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Fresh seafood was abundant along with traditional Maltese delicacies like fish pie and rabbit stew. Add to that the Western food and barbecues at diplomatic functions and it was a lifestyle all very far removed from the ups and downs of garrison life in the airborne forces. Late in 1989 it was to the island of Malta that Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, the American president, came for a symbolically important summit. Winding up the two-day, rain-soaked event without agreement on specific new steps to ease tension between the rival blocs, the Russian leader went for something symbolic. ‘We searched for the answer to the question of where do we stand now’, said Gorbachev at the press conference, ‘we stated, both of us, the world leaves one epoch, of Cold War, and enters another epoch.’

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They were penetrated, and their people in Moscow under intense surveillance. Sergei would have to look for other ways out if he was unhappy in his work and with what he saw happening to the country. And indeed events in the Kremlin were moving towards a dramatic denouement. * * * The party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, had thrown in the towel in Afghanistan, pulling out his army by early 1989. At home, in many of the USSR’s republics, from the Baltic coast to the Caucasus mountains, the Kremlin’s liberal policies allowed an upsurge of nationalism and protest. To the officers at GRU headquarters it was all very worrying.

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall
by Mary Elise Sarotte
Published 6 Oct 2014

The opening was not the result of a plan by the four powers that still held ultimate legal authority in divided Berlin: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East. The opening was not the result of any specific agreement between the former US president, Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The opening that night was simply not planned. Why, then, was it happening? Enormous crowds were surging toward both the eastern and western sides of the Wall. The East German regime struggled to maintain order not only at the Brandenburg Gate but also at the Wall’s border crossings—for there was no crossing at the gate itself—with armed troops, physical barriers, and other means.

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East Berlin could take comfort from the fact that Budapest had fulfilled the treaty’s terms for two decades. Hungarian leaders had not only prevented escapes but also, in many cases, identified the would-be escapees and handed them over to the Stasi, in violation of international norms for the treatment of refugees.1 Cooperation among Soviet bloc members began to break down, however, after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, since the leaders of the various countries disagreed about how to respond to the reforms in Moscow.2 In East Berlin, Erich Honecker personally took a number of steps to show his disapproval of such reforms. On Honecker’s orders, the GDR postal service started forbidding distribution of a German-language Soviet magazine called Sputnik in November 1988.

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The goal was, as Sello put it, “not to let up,” to keep up the pressure, to motivate others to get involved, and to shame the regime.5 Both places had become a kind of refuge as a result. When East Germans had shouted “Gorbi, Gorbi” and other unapproved slogans at the Soviet leader during the fortieth-anniversary celebrations on October 7—Mikhail Gorbachev, reluctantly, had come to East Berlin for the event—and police had dispersed the crowds by force, those who had suffered personally or had witnessed the violence, such as seeing a police truck running over a protestor, felt the need to bear witness.6 A number of such people ended up in Birthler’s office in the church, where they would describe their experiences to her.7 Listening to so many tragic stories, she soon became overwhelmed and, to give herself a respite, started asking visitors to put their experiences on paper instead.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future
by Laurence C. Smith
Published 22 Sep 2010

Our fifth billion came in 1987, now just twelve years after the fourth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time in history and the Irish rock band U2 released their fifth album, The Joshua Tree. Standing outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, U.S. president Ronald Reagan exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The world’s last dusky seaside sparrow died of old age on a tiny island preserve in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort. A self-absorbed college sophomore at the time, I only noticed The Joshua Tree. Our sixth billion arrived in 1999. This is now very recent history.

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The blast and consequent fire that burned for days released a radioactive cloud detected across much of Europe, with the fallout concentrated in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Two people were killed in the plant explosion, and twenty-eight emergency workers died from acute radiation poisoning. About five million people were exposed to some level of radiation. Soviet officials initially downplayed the accident. It took eighteen days for then-general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to acknowledge the disaster on Soviet television, but he had already mobilized a massive response. Soviet helicopters dropped more than five thousand tons of sand, clay, lead, and other materials on the reactor’s burning core to smother the flames. Approximately 50,000 residents were evacuated from the nearby town of Pripyat, still abandoned today with many personal belongings lying where they were left.

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One is a persistent trend of northern cooperation over the past two decades. A second is a legal document of the United Nations that is fast becoming the globally accepted rulebook on how countries carve up dominion over the world’s oceans. The story of the first begins October 1, 1987, with a famous speech delivered in Murmansk by then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Standing at the gateway of his country’s strategic nuclear arsenal in the Arctic Ocean, Gorbachev called for transforming the region from a tense military theater to a nuke-free “zone of peace and fruitful cooperation.” He proposed international collaborations in disarmament, energy development, science, indigenous rights, and environmental protections between all Arctic countries.341 The choice of Murmansk, the Arctic’s largest and most important port city and the heart of the Soviet Union’s military and industrial north, was highly symbolic.

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping
by Roger Faligot
Published 30 Jun 2019

A Chinese-style National Security Council? Setting up yet another spy station to throw light on an ever-changing world would not be enough for a country as big as China. Deng Xiaoping was all too aware of this, especially given the major upheavals of the mid-1980s. These began with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in March 1985, leading a reform team focused on glasnost (political transparency), and perestroika (economic restructuring). Gorbachev became president in 1990, and soon talks between him and US President Ronald Reagan were cleansed of the bitter taste of discord, evolving into cordial agreement.

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That night he sent the Kremlin a report, some details of which were supplied by sources at the highest level of the Chinese secret services.1 For the previous fortnight, Grigorov, the KGB rezident in Beijing since January 1987, had been under orders to send Moscow detailed and accurate information, several times a day, about what was going on in the Chinese capital. He was familiar with PRC politics, having been part of the Soviet delegation responsible for organizing a ceasefire with China following the border conflict on the Amur River (Ussuri). His dispatches were read not only by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, but also by Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had been deeply offended by the inauspicious welcome the Chinese had afforded him just two weeks earlier, on 15 May. That day had witnessed the first Sino-Soviet summit since the longstanding split thirty years earlier.

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In 1976, Chinese youth had marched there in memory of Zhou Enlai, demanding the opening up of the country—a strategy deployed by Deng Xiaoping to prepare the ground for his return to power. In 1986, young people had demonstrated on the square in support of student movements in other cities. The unintended consequence of those protests had been the fall of the reformist general secretary, Hu Yaobang, who had been forced to resign. Deng Xiaoping against Mikhail Gorbachev On 16 April 1989, Hu suffered a heart attack and died. The following day, thousands of students gathered in Tiananmen Square to show their support for his reforms, demanding that his agenda be pursued and the “fifth modernization” continue its progress. As celebrated dissident Wei Jingsheng declared, this was democracy in action.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

The coalition included Saudi Arabia, whose largest oil field was only 250 miles from its border with Kuwait and whose ruler, King Fahd, told Bush that Saddam was “conceited and crazy” and that “he is following Hitler in creating world problems.” It also included the Soviet Union, whose president, Mikhail Gorbachev, said something that would have been unthinkable only a couple of years earlier—that the Soviet Union would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States in the crisis.3 Over the six months that followed, a coalition force steadily and methodically assembled in northern Saudi Arabia until it numbered almost a million strong.

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As an article in Foreign Affairs put it in 1993, “Oil is truly a global business for the first time since the barricades went up with the Bolshevik Revolution.”7 This observation had particular significance for Russia, the country that had been home of the Bolshevik Revolution, and that now rivaled Saudi Arabia in its capacity to produce oil. PART ONE The New World of Oil 1 RUSSIA RETURNS On the night of December 25, 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev went on national television to make a startling announcement—one that would have been almost unimaginable even a year or two earlier: “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And, he added, the Soviet Union would shortly cease to exist.

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He concluded simply, “I wish everyone all the best.”1 With that, he faded out into the ether and uncertainty of the night. His whole speech had taken just twelve minutes. That was it. After seven decades, communism was finished in the land in which it had been born. Six days later, on December 31, the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, formally ceased to exist. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, handed over the “football”—the suitcase with the codes to activate the Soviet nuclear arsenal—to Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation. There were no ringing of bells, no honking of horns, to mark this great transition. Just a stunned and muted—and disbelieving—response.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

Yet since the reign of Peter the Great—less than half a century later—Russia has emphatically seen itself as a Eurocentric nation, vast positions in Asia notwithstanding.20 A few of Peter’s successors, such as Nicholas II, appreciated the Pacific, as we have seen. Yet such visionaries were few and far between. In recent history, Mikhail Gorbachev did sense the rising importance of the Pacific, expressed in his insightful July 1986 Vladivostok speech, as well as his historic August 1988 Krasnoyarsk address two years later. Broad and dynamic relations with India, China, and finally South Korea, culminating The Silk Road Syndrome 33 in Gorbachev’s dramatic June 1990 summit dialogue with Korean president Roh Tae-woo in San Francisco, were among the creative hallmarks of his career, building on his historic acquiescence in the transformation of Eastern Europe.

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In modern days, several of the major Eurasian nations have begun to grasp the potential of continentalism, albeit from subtly divergent perspectives. The first was arguably czarist Russia, as Nicholas II and his advisor Sergei Witte began contemplating the Trans-Siberian Railway in the early 1890s. In more recent years, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin, and various Korean leaders have also actively entertained notions of Eurasian continentalism and considered how their nations might benefit, both in economic and in geopolitical terms, since the Silk Road emphatically has never included the United States. Their interests, and those of Japan and Mongolia to some degree, in energy development and an Iron Silk Road across Siberia have run parallel to one another.

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This abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union was actually in the making for a decade or more, with its roots in Soviet economic stagnation, failed attempts at reform, and the USSR’s own overextension.17 The costly war in Afghanistan (1979 –1989) was a major factor, both in bleeding the Soviet Union physically18 and in triggering Western sanctions. Those sanctions deprived the Soviets of valuable foreign exchange, by preventing construction of major energy pipelines from the USSR to the European Union (EU) and Japan. Mikhail Gorbachev, taking power in 1985, understood the structural problems of the Soviet Union, responding with his glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) campaigns. Political turbulence intensified, however, following the Afghan withdrawal in early 1989, even though the withdrawal extinguished what had been a significant cause of previous dissatisfaction.

The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 9 Oct 2017

Better, he said, to save American lives from a nuclear attack than to avenge them after one.14 This was why Clancy’s other message, that NATO could defend itself without resort to nuclear threats, appealed to him. In 1986 he discussed the book with advisers en route to Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, for a summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader. There over two extraordinary days the two men almost agreed on drastic reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Reagan’s refusal to concede his strategic defence initiative resulted in failure. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a convinced advocate of nuclear deterrence, was alarmed at how far Reagan had been prepared to go down the non-nuclear route.

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Clancy was still imagining a war between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1991, even after the Warsaw Pact had fallen apart.16 Hackett assumed, as did almost all commentators at this time, that Moscow would take a hard line against dissidence. Yet it was essential to his plot that the old guard in the Kremlin knew that ‘time was running out’. In the event, instead of a war launched to hold the Soviet bloc together, 1985 saw Mikhail Gorbachev become president and the start of a process that would soon lead to the peaceful break-up of the Soviet bloc. JUST AS THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION WAS A RESPONSE TO the inability of the old regime to cope with war it was not unreasonable to assume that it would take a war to create the crisis that would break the Soviet system.

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He recalled, as an example, ‘West German colleagues and friends’ avoiding him in the early 1970s for fear that contact with someone out of favour with the government ‘would needlessly provoke that government and thereby jeopardize the fragile foundations of nascent détente.’ Havel cited this voluntary renunciation of freedom as an example of how easy it was ‘for a well-meant cause to betray its good intentions’.26 WHEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV BECAME SOVIET LEADER IN 1985 his aim was not to push human rights but to reform the sclerotic system which he could see to be failing by every measure.27 Unlike those he replaced, his world-view had not been shaped by the war with Germany, and he had not worked closely with the military-industrial complex that dominated the economy.

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
by Katja Hoyer
Published 5 Apr 2023

Quoted in Steppat. Bibliography All quotes from sources originally in the German language were translated by the author. Individual documents Address given by Mikhail Gorbachev to the Council of Europe (6 July 1989). In: Council of Europe – Parliamentary Assembly. Official Report. Forty-first ordinary session. 8–12 May and 3–7 July. Volume I. Sittings 1 to 9. 1990. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. ‘Speech by Mikhail Gorbachev’, pp. 197–205. Aktion Aufruf. ‘Für unser Land’. BArch, TonY 16/123. Andreas Falge’s account. ‘How the Fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 felt’. In: https://www.berlin.de/tourismus/insidertipps/5055005-2339440-wie-sich-der-mauerfall-am-9-november-198.html (last accessed 30 July 2022) Ausstattung der Haushalte mit langlebigen technischen Konsumgütern.

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His short-lived reign had followed that of Yuri Andropov, who had himself only ruled for fifteen months after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982. The world leaders looked sombre enough when Chernenko’s open coffin was carried past them, but they were unified in the hope that the era of interim leaders in the Soviet Union would come to an end. Chernenko’s successor Mikhail Gorbachev had just turned fifty-four and seemed practically youthful compared to the frail Soviet leaders the world had become accustomed to in the decade or so since Brezhnev’s health began to fail in the early 1970s. There was hope for reform, modernization and political stability in the Soviet Union on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

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Don’t you want to discuss this with your politburo?” I was surprised by this directness … Suspicions that Honecker might walk his own way with Bonn behind Moscow’s back were great.’48 By the time Honecker and Kohl finally met in March 1985, Chernenko and Ustinov were both dead and a very different, much younger man had taken their place. Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to understand that the permanent course of confrontation between East and West was unsustainable in the long run. A year earlier, in February 1984, he had still been deemed too inexperienced to take the political rudder of the Soviet Union and Chernenko had been chosen to follow Yuri Andropov’s short reign.

The Wars of Afghanistan
by Peter Tomsen
Published 30 May 2011

Konstantin Chernyenko: Communist Party official. General secretary of the Communist Party (1984–1985). Anatoly Dobrynin: Diplomat. Ambassador to the United States (1962–1986), Politburo Afghan Commission member (1986–1989), head of the Communist Party’s International Department (1986–1988). Mikhail Gorbachev: Communist Party official. General secretary of the Communist Party (1985–1991). President of the Soviet Union (1990–1991). Andrey Gromyko: Communist Party official. Diplomat. Soviet foreign minister (1953–1985). Politburo Afghan Commission member (1979–1985). Alexey Kosygin: Communist Party official and Politburo member.

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Other matters took priority over Reagan’s earlier pledges to moderate-nationalist Afghan leaders like Abdul Haq. Just when a firm diplomatic push for a political settlement from the world’s only remaining superpower was most needed, America was bowing out. The Cold War ended on Christmas Eve 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev moved his belongings out of the Kremlin, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin moved in. Moscow’s military and economic supply lines to the Afghan communist regime in Kabul evaporated. Five new struggling Central Asian states now separated Russia and Afghanistan. At its nearest point, the Russian border was more than 400 miles from Afghanistan.

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After Brezhnev’s death in 1982, his personal physician revealed that only the regular infusion of drugs had kept the ailing Soviet leader active after 1975.52 Brezhnev was a serial consumer of sleeping pills during both daytime and nighttime hours. They contributed to his slurred speech and occasional disorientation during high-level meetings. To the embarrassment of other Soviet officials, he sometimes mumbled when discussing affairs of state with foreign visitors. Mikhail Gorbachev recalled one meeting with a foreign communist delegation during which Brezhnev suddenly forgot the topic he was discussing. The group, Gorbachev remembered, “carried on as if nothing had happened.”53 Yuriy Andropov, the head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982—and the most influential member of the Politburo’s Afghan Commission—largely controlled the channeling of information to Brezhnev.

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89
by Rodric Braithwaite
Published 15 Jan 2011

His efforts ran out of steam even before he died in January 1984. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was also seriously ill and barely able to take a grip on policy. He died on 10 March 1985. By now it was obvious to the senior Soviet politicians that the Soviet system was not working as it should. Within hours of Chernenko’s death they elected Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor, because he was young, energetic, imaginative, and – they believed – orthodox. Gorbachev Moves Gorbachev came to power determined to press ahead for a solution in Afghanistan. As a first step he requested a policy review from the Committee on Afghanistan, which was told to look into ‘the consequences, pluses, and minuses of a withdrawal’.

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Soviets begin major operations. November 1982 Leonid Brezhnev dies, succeeded by Yuri Andropov. February 1983 UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar discusses withdrawal with Andropov. February 1984 Andropov dies, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko. March 1985 Chernenko dies, succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev. October 1985 Politburo agrees troops should leave Afghanistan within eighteen months. February 1986 Gorbachev tells Soviet Party Congress that troops will leave Afghanistan. May 1986 Karmal replaced by Najibullah. September 1986 First Stingers are fired, down three helicopters.

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Krivosheev, Rossia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil (Moscow, 2001), p. 540; according to the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, the total number of US helicopters destroyed in the Vietnam War was 5,086 out of 11,827 (http://www.vhpa.org/heliloss.pdf). 31 A. Chernyaev, Sovmestny iskhod: Dnevnik dvukh epokh 1972–1991 gody (Moscow, 2008), diary entries for 4 April 1985 and 17 October 1985, pp. 617 and 650. See account of the Soviet decision-making process in Chapter 12: ‘The Road to the Bridge’. Mikhail Gorbachev has confirmed that the arrival of the Stingers did not affect his decision-making, though of course the military had to take it into account in their tactical planning of the Soviet withdrawal (conversation, Sofia, 7 October 2010). 32 M. Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London, 1995), p. 197. 33 Gai and Snegirev, Vtorzhenie (Moscow, 1991), p. 162. 34 Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan (Barnsley, 1992), pp. 73–6; Tukharinov, Sekretny komandarm. 35 Sergei Morozov, interview, Moscow, 31 May 2007; Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan, pp. 73–6; Galeotti, Afghanistan, pp. 192–7. 36 Gai and Snegirev, Vtorzhenie, p. 262. 37 Ibid., pp. 227–9. 38 Alexander Gergel, interview, Moscow, 1 March 2010. 39 V.

The Cold War: A World History
by Odd Arne Westad
Published 4 Sep 2017

These were not men to face down such a massive US challenge. On 10 March 1985 Chernenko died. When the Politburo members met to consider his successor, it was already clear that a younger man would have to be found. The seventy-six-year-old Andrei Gromyko, who had been foreign minister since 1957, nominated Mikhail Gorbachev, who at fifty-four was the youngest member of the Politburo. When each individual member, as usual, spoke to confirm his support for a decision that had already been taken by the top leaders, Vladimir Dolgikh, one of the lesser lights of Soviet politics, in a somewhat tragi-comic manner provided the best summing up.

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Another was the rebellious Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party chief and member of the Politburo who back in 1987 had threatened to resign in protest against the slow pace of reform and as a consequence had been fired by Gorbachev. The party’s monopoly on power had been broken. And the breaking had been designed by the man who was the Communist Party’s general secretary and the country’s supreme leader. In his first years in power, Mikhail Gorbachev had attempted to redraw the political map inside and outside of the Soviet Union. To him, the Cold War no longer made sense, at least not in its classical form of global confrontation and lack of interaction. His starting point was Marxist-Leninist, or rather, Marxist and Leninist. He believed in materialist analyses but also in the ability of a small and determined minority to act on behalf of society as a whole.

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Their slogans would not have been out of place in eastern Europe: Long live democracy! Patriotism is not criminal! Oppose corruption! We are the people! The Communist Party leadership hesitated on what to do. Deng wanted an immediate crackdown, but the new secretary general, Deng’s protégé Zhao Ziyang, hoped to find a way of compromising with the protesters. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Beijing on the first visit of a Soviet leader for more than thirty years. Instead of being a stunning international triumph, the May 1989 visit turned into a quandary for the guests. With Tian’anmen off limits, the Soviet delegation had to be smuggled into the Great Hall of the People through a back entrance.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 20 Mar 2007

Neoconservatives after Vietnam simply continued to bear the torch of the earlier Cold War view about communism as a unique evil. Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but to "tear down this wall." His as- The Neoconservative Legacy sistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; and his proposal for a double zero in the intermediate-range nuclear forces negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien pensant centrist foreign policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department.

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It is also the case that the U.S. buildup played a role in convincing Soviet leaders that they would have difficulty competing with the United States. But an event as massive as the collapse of the former USSR had many causes, some deeply embedded in the nature of the Soviet system (for example, the illegitimacy of the governing ideology) and others accidental and contingent (the untimely death of Yuri Andropov and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev). Conservatives of all stripes tend to put too much emphasis on the American military buildup as the cause of the USSR's collapse, when political and economic factors were at least as important. Scholars John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney have argued that the attractive "pull" of the West, and Soviet awareness that partnership with the West was possible, were at least as important in explaining the Soviet collapse. 37 In any event, to the extent that military policy was important in explaining the Soviet Union's collapse, it was a policy of containment and deterrence rather than rollback.

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Rhoads, The Economists View of the World: Government, Markets, and Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 27. See Kiron Skinner, ed., Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003). Later on, of course, Reagan recognized the reality of the changes brought about by Mikhail Gorbachev and negotiated with him actively. 28. This was in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Feb. 26, 2003. 29. For a comprehensive realist critique of international institutions, see John J. Mearsheimer, "The False Promise of International Institutions," International Security 19, no. 3 (1994): 5-49.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Adelson: $5 million donation to Trump’s inauguration, the largest ever Nicholas Confessore, Nicholas Fandos, and Rachel Shorey, “Trump Inaugural Drew Big Dollars from Donors with Vested Interests,” New York Times, April 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/​2017/​04/​19/​us/​politics/​trump-inauguration-sheldon-adelson-fundraising.html. Mikhail Gorbachev: “the nuclear threat once again seems real…” Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mikhail Gorbachev: ‘It All Looks as If the World Is Preparing for War,’ ” Time, January 26, 2017, http://time.com/​4645442/​gorbachev-putin-trump/. Trump’s missile strike on Syria: illegal according to some experts Alex Emmons, “Legal Experts Question Whether Trump’s Syria Strike Was Constitutional,” TheIntercept.com, April 7, 2017, https://theintercept.com/​2017/​04/​07/​legal-experts-question-whether-trumps-syria-strike-was-constitutional/.

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But in Trump’s very short time in office, there has already been a level of military escalation that is both chilling and bizarrely haphazard. As indicated by his early deployment of the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB—Trump is drunk on the allure of showing the world he’s top dog. Which is why Mikhail Gorbachev, who worked toward disarmament when he was Soviet leader, wrote in Time magazine that today “the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.”

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Published 14 Sep 2015

It may be tendentious and self-serving, but it is an argument that could be made—which would lead to precisely the sort of back-and-forth bickering we want to avoid when we judge forecasting accuracy. 7. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 183. 8. Brian Till, “Mikhail Gorbachev: The West Could Have Saved the Russian Economy,” Atlantic, June 16, 2001, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/mikhail-gorbachev-the-west-could-have-saved-the-russian-economy/240466/. 9. Sherman Kent, “Estimates and Influence,” Studies in Intelligence (Summer 1968): 35. 10. Sherman Kent, “Words of Estimative Probability,” in Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates, ed.

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They were equally confident in their views. The experts were right about Chernenko. He died in March 1985. But then the train of history hit a curve, and as Karl Marx once quipped, when that happens, the intellectuals fall off. Within hours of Chernenko’s death, the Politburo anointed Mikhail Gorbachev, an energetic and charismatic fifty-four-year-old, the next general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev changed direction swiftly and sharply. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) liberalized the Soviet Union. Gorbachev also sought to normalize relations with the United States and reverse the arms race.

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They were asked about whatever topics experts could be found expounding on in the media and halls of power, which meant our experts would sometimes be asked to forecast in their zone of expertise, but more often not—which let us compare the accuracy of true subject-matter experts with that of smart, well-informed laypeople. In total, our experts made roughly twenty-eight thousand predictions. Asking questions took years. Then came the waiting, a test of patience for even the tenured. I began the experiment when Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Politburo were key players shaping the fate of the world; by the time I started to write up the results, the USSR existed only on historical maps and Gorbachev was doing commercials for Pizza Hut. The final results appeared in 2005—twenty-one years, six presidential elections, and three wars after I sat on the National Research Council panel that got me thinking about forecasting.

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Tim Mohr
Published 10 Sep 2018

Suddenly underground music that bypassed the state-run media could find a larger audience than ever before. The scale of underground tape distribution grew to be staggering—by 1988 three quarters of all music released in the DDR originated outside the state-controlled media system. Things were changing in a broader sense as well. Glasnost. Since the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the signals coming from the East had changed. Right from the start, Gorbachev broke taboos when he admitted to economic problems in the USSR. And he just kept going, deploying the word glasnost to describe his reform goals—a word that up to then was most familiar as the term dissidents used to describe their demand for openness in court proceedings. 1986 proved a landmark year: Gorbachev made concrete policy changes based on glasnost in March; in November he told Soviet satellite states that they had a sovereign right to self-determination, indicating his unwillingness to continue to meddle in their domestic affairs; and in between those two developments, the biggest nuclear disaster in history occurred at the Soviet power plant in Chernobyl.

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“And do you really need to change your own wallpaper just because your neighbor has?” he had asked. It was meant as a rhetorical question, of course, but as A-Micha and Jörn and Ina and Cabi and the other musicians could tell while touring in Poland, the USSR’s other neighbors were obviously changing their wallpaper as well. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t the exception; East German dictator Erich Honecker was. A-Micha and the rest left Poland feeling inspired. The bands wanted to plan something back home, something that reflected the boldness and scale of what they had heard and seen in Poland, something big. 55 On January 17, 1988, the East German government staged its annual parade to honor World War I–era communist martyrs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

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Thousands of Ausreiser had fled to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and especially Hungary, where the government led by Miklos Nemeth had taken perestroika and glasnost so far as to dismantle the wire fence dividing Hungary from Austria—the first break in the Iron Curtain—with the cryptic blessing of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who told Nemeth that border security was Nemeth’s own problem, not his. On August 19, 1989, Hungarian activists had staged a “Pan-European Picnic” near Sopron, directly on the Austrian border, during which hundreds of East Germans were allowed to push through a border gate and enter Austria.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

It could not produce the goods that people wanted, and what it did produce was shoddy, except for specific sectors, mainly defense. The oil crisis of the 1970s came just in time. The dramatic increases in petroleum prices delivered a massive surge in revenues that rescued the stagnant economy and helped fund a big Soviet military buildup. But this new lease on life would prove only temporary. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the new leader of the Soviet Union. Young and energetic, he was determined to reform the economy. But fate was against him. The next year, oil prices collapsed, delivering a terrible blow to the Soviet economy and marking the start of what Yegor Gaidar, former finance minister and acting prime minister, called “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”5 Oil revenues could no longer mask the failures of the centrally-planned economy.

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But now, no longer a rubber-stamp tool of the Soviet government, the Russian republic asserted a new authority. It took control of the Soviet oil and gas assets within its territory and of the petroleum revenues that had gone to the all-union Soviet government. Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian republic, and not Mikhail Gorbachev, was now in charge of the oil money. In December 1991, Yeltsin and the speakers of the Ukrainian and Belarusian parliaments met in a forest, in a hunting lodge. Over the course of a night, facilitated by large amounts of bison-grass vodka and Soviet-style champagne, they came to a stunning agreement: Invoking the status of their three “republics” as “founding states of the USSR” in 1922, they declared that “the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases in existence.”

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Today, only a handful of private oil companies remain. LUKOIL is the largest. Its CEO, Vagit Alekperov, started his career working offshore in the Caspian and then in West Siberia before coming to Moscow as a deputy energy minister in the late 1980s, where he developed the idea of starting a Western-style oil company in Russia. Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had bad luck when it came to oil, with price collapses that sent the economy spiraling downward. By contrast, Vladimir Putin had very good luck, for petroleum prices recovered as he came to power in 2000 and continued to rise during the BRIC era. Output, which had fallen by almost half with the collapse of the Soviet Union, rebounded.

Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Immanuel Wallerstein , Randall Collins , Michael Mann , Georgi Derluguian , Craig Calhoun , Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios
Published 15 Nov 2013

Wallerstein identified the third possibility in a pan-European economic and military bloc emerging around the axis of Paris—Berlin—Moscow. This scenario evidently conformed to the long-standing ambitions of Charles de Gaulle and the hopeful spirit of the 1970s German Neue Ostpolitik. Analytically, Wallerstein’s unrealized prediction directs our attention to an important counterfactual. It posits Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika as a viable possibility. Incidentally, this counterfactual still implies that a rebuilt Russia and the EU can find structural reasons to form a military and economic bloc in the near future. The past predictions of Collins and Wallerstein, however, were abstract sketches that left a lot to be filled in regarding the shifting social forces, specific mechanisms, and event sequences leading to the observed as well as aborted historical outcomes.

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The notorious rises in alcoholism, male mortality, and petty theft from the workplace, along with the shoddy quality of Soviet goods, all must be regarded as the pathological consequences of lost dynamism and pervasive cynicism. It was this avoidance of consequences and a social immobilism stifling the young that came to be despised in the Brezhnev “decades of stagnation.” HOW INEVITABLE THE COLLAPSE? The long-awaited energetic younger leader Mikhail Gorbachev belonged to the generation of Sputnik and de-Stalinization. These achievements of the early sixties had experientially validated the belief of his peers in the Soviet system. Gorbachev might be even considered a part of the New Left resurgence from the sixties. Yet he also came heavily invested in the official positions of authoritarian power and, objectively speaking, his goals were quite conservative.

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In 1989 and still in 1991 they were lacking serious organizational bases to rapidly mobilize and intercept the falling political power. Surprisingly enough, neither could the Soviet nomenklatura rely on any legitimate overarching networks to coordinate their self-defenses at a critical moment. During the years of perestroika in 1985–1989, Mikhail Gorbachev had been astutely using his supreme powers as General Secretary to safeguard himself from the bureaucratic backlash of the kind that had buried Nikita Khrushchev. Gorbachev’s maneuvering, conducted both in public (i.e., glasnost) and in the insider apparat intrigues, in which he was reputedly so adept, confused and immobilized all three institutional pillars of Soviet regime: the Communist Party, central ministries, and secret police.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

These meetings were mainly organized by one person, a former UN. official, Akio Matsumura. I remember the 1,300 delegates assembled in St. George's Hall in the Kremlin to hear an address by Mikhail Gorbachev. The session was opened by a venerable Vedic monk, representing one of the oldest religious traditions on Earth, inviting the multitude to chant the sacred syllable "Om." As nearly as I could tell, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze went along with the "Om," but Mikhail Gorbachev restrained himself. (An immense milky-white statue of Lenin, hand outstretched, loomed nearby.) That same day, ten Jewish delegates, finding themselves in the Kremlin at sundown on a Friday, performed the first Jewish religious service ever held there.

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RACHEL CARSON, Silent Spring (1962) INTRODUCTION In 1988 a unique opportunity was presented to me. I was invited to write an article on the relationship between the United States and the then Soviet Union that would be published, more or less simultaneously, in the most widely circu- 180 • Billions and Billions lated publications of both countries. This was at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev was feeling his way on giving Soviet citizens the right to express their opinions freely. Some recall it as a time when the administration of Ronald Reagan was slowly modifying its pointed Cold War posture. I thought such an article might be able to do a little good. What's more, at a recent "summit" meeting, Mr.

From Peoples into Nations
by John Connelly
Published 11 Nov 2019

The affable middle-aged Slovak with his paunch and good will incorporated socialism “with a human face,” but like Nagy, he had little taste for the blood sport of Communist politics and would discover that other party leaders were eager to betray him.21 Also like Nagy, and the later Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Dubček was the odd Leninist who rose to the top of the hierarchy only to discover a taste for consensual politics. Soon he was surprising Soviet leaders with his determination to achieve the “broadest possible democratization of the entire socio-political system” as well as the establishment of a “free, modern and profoundly humane society.”22 In March 1968, he lifted censorship, the most radical change seen in Eastern Europe since 1956.

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The pro-natalism was only one of the Romanian state’s nationalist policies, which also included the destruction of Hungarian villages as well as an avowedly independent foreign policy. The latter led Romania to send athletes to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, defying the Soviet boycott, and then to resist all ideas of reform emanating from a Soviet leader who emerged the following year, Mikhail Gorbachev. As the Ceaușescu regime descended into enforced miserliness, the secret police kept people in check—people living the lie of loving hated rulers—but also granted just enough “privileges” to keep potential sources of opposition under control, for example, in the upper ranks of the church hierarchies, which were corrupted by a mix of threats and favors.

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Central Europeans watched as the superpowers stationed or promised to station new generations of weapons of mass destruction astride the Iron Curtain, in West as well as East Germany. In the fall of 1982, the aged and infirm Brezhnev died, and rule passed to one (Yuri Andropov, d. 1984) and then another (Konstantin Chernenko, d. 1985) aged and infirm Soviet leader. Out of the protracted crisis, the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev emerged in March 1985. Some have said that his coming to power was a response to protests in East Central Europe, particularly Poland, but the economic malaise across the socialist world so clearly jeopardized the Soviet Union’s superpower status that deeper structural forces favored the emergence of a reformer of some kind.

In Europe
by Geert Mak
Published 15 Sep 2004

Under normal circumstances, simply playing that melody was enough to obtain a one-way ticket to Dachau, but now the entire Nazi elite stood to attention. Workers waved red handkerchiefs from the windows of a neighbouring factory. It was only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact finally emerged. (As late as 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was still denying its existence.) In those protocols, both superpowers’ European spheres of influence were carefully delineated. The Soviet Union was to have its way in part of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia. Germany could go ahead in the rest of Poland, and in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece.

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They had other things on their minds: their ‘socialism with a human face’ was under increasing pressure from a ranting and raving Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who had succeeded Khrushchev in 1964. On the night of 21 August, 1968, he drummed up half a million soldiers from five ‘socialist brother states’ to invade Czechoslovakia. When Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov was asked in 1987 to explain the difference between the Prague Spring and his boss Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, his reply was: ‘Nineteen years.’ A Parisian friend of mine once told me that, right before another storm blew in, he had walked past the cordons of riot police in the streets of the capital and saw behind their visors, to his amazement, not the faces of robots but of tired, middle-aged men, probably with teenage children at home.

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Someone else writes: ‘I wish for better education and less violence. Oh, if only we were back in the DDR!’ ‘I certainly wish YOU were!’ someone else has written angrily beside it. Big words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘heroism’ are used at all the commemorative meetings, and famous names are dropped: Helmut Kohl, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the ones who actually razed the wall were the people of Berlin themselves, and ten years later their feelings are a good deal more complicated. Their thoughts hang in the rain on Alexanderplatz, on all those cards: ‘We must learn from each other, really learn. Not accuse, not exaggerate.’

The Extreme Centre: A Warning
by Tariq Ali
Published 22 Jan 2015

Even so he learned his lines well and was lauded as a great communicator, till he began to forget which Latin American capital he had landed in and to fluff the script at home as well. In reality, the US under Reagan was run by a cabal of right-wing zealots, an imperial politburo that took most of the key decisions of that important period. They transmitted to the world through their president, whose standing reached its height when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided to follow Washington rather than Beijing. Reagan’s successor was his vice-president, George H. Bush (on secondment from the CIA). He only served a single term before being defeated by the Democrat Bill Clinton. But the legacy was safe in New Democrat hands: Clinton proved a zealous and effective defender of the Reagan revolution and much else besides.

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Then your lot come in, and in the very first year they go for tuition fees.’ 4 Seumas Milne in the Guardian regarded it as ‘a significant shift beyond New Labour politics’ – ‘that he represents a real change is not in question’ – and ‘an unmistakeable breach in the stifling neoliberal consensus that has dominated British politics’. Miliband’s maiden speech as opposition leader – pledging to stand with the Cameron–Clegg government on Afghanistan – and his Blairite shadow cabinet, not to mention supporting the fundamentals of austerity, should have banished such delusions. 5 Indeed, Thatcher had advised Mikhail Gorbachev that one way of preventing corruption within the bureaucracy was to ensure that jobs were available in the private sector, advice that the naïve Soviet leader took to heart. When he was forcibly retired, alas, none of the Russian oligarchs were prepared to play ball. It was Louis Vuitton who came to the rescue by providing him with an advertising gig, and huge lecture fees were lined up in the US as a tiny thank-you for what he had done to boost global capitalism. 6 Robert Mendick and Edward Malnick, ‘Tony Blair Widens His Web Via the Stock Markets’, Sunday Telegraph, 13 January 2013. 7 ‘The passionate note surfaced amid the flotsam of a shipwrecked marriage.

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction
by Rana Mitter
Published 25 Feb 2016

In 1979, full diplomatic relations were finally established between China and the US, and from the early 1980s, foreign tourists and students began to visit China in large numbers, just as a new generation of Chinese began to study and do business abroad. Deng Xiaoping was indubitably the senior figure in the party, and he made it clear that he favoured economic reform at the fastest possible speed. In the 1980s, the USSR was still intact, but the West regarded that country as a stagnant and hostile giant, at least until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev to the leadership in 1985. In contrast, China seemed to be the communist giant that the West loved to love. Keen to grow the economy, friendly towards the US, Deng Xiaoping even visited Texas and wore a Stetson at a rodeo. At home, cowboys of a different sort also found their moment as the economy grew by leaps and bounds.

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At its height, nearly a million Chinese workers and students, in a cross-class alliance rare by the late 20th century, filled the space in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace (see Figure 8). The Party was profoundly embarrassed to have the world’s media record events; they had been there for a historic occasion, the first visit of the reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, but the event had turned to farce as Gorbachev was escorted via a roundabout route to avoid him seeing the demonstrations. By June 1989, the numbers in the Square had dwindled only to thousands, but they showed no signs of moving. On the night of 3–4 June, the party acted, sending in tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

The America That Reagan Built
by J. David Woodard
Published 15 Mar 2006

Concern over the captives led to another round of negotiations, even though there was no evidence that earlier efforts had been effective. This time the Israelis proposed to ship 500 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in exchange for the release of all remaining American hostages. During this second round of negotiations, McFarlane was working to prepare Reagan for a summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, so he entrusted the details of the assignment to his deputy, Oliver North. North was a Vietnam veteran with a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, and a Navy Commendation Medal. He was zealous to succeed in his covert mission, even though he admitted later that he was largely unfamiliar with what was being done.

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Even the crusty Tip O’Neill, Democratic Speaker of the House and inveterate White House opponent, dabbed his eyes after the president’s remarks on the Challenger disaster and said, ‘‘He may not be much of a debater, but with a prepared text he’s the best public speaker I’ve ever seen.’’47 The great turning point in the Cold War tension between East and West coincided with Ronald Reagan’s second term and the first four years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership of the USSR. The prelude was set by the deaths of Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1983, and Konstantin Chernenko in 1984. These three leaders were old men who adhered to the Marxist-Leninist ideology in spite of the suffocating effect it had on their own 96 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT nation and the rest of the world.

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Treasury provided Reagan with an estimate that a $5 drop in the price of a barrel of oil on the world market increased the GNP of the country by 1.4 percent.49 The friendship between the United States and Saudi Arabia was an economic weapon that Reagan exploited to force the Soviets into a defensive posture. Lower oil prices also reduced the U.S. trade deficit. In the summer of 1985, the Saudis opened the oil spigots and the domestic economy boomed. That expansion spelled trouble for the Soviet Union, with its Afghanistan incursion and multiplying problems at home. The new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came from a family of peasants who suffered under Stalin’s ruthless effort to drive farmers off their private land onto collectivized farms. He was not a deep believer in communism. As an agricultural minister he knew the limits of a command economy, and at age fifty-four he was no dyed-in-the-wool cold warrior either.

After the Berlin Wall
by Christopher Hilton
Published 15 Dec 2011

Bahro said in 1983: ‘The Soviet Union has specific reasons for wanting to hold on to East Germany and, in view of the proximity of NATO and West Germany, would never allow any experiment in the GDR unless it were an absolutely safe manoeuvre. So an opposition there has no possibility of crystallizing.’6 Bahro, of course, was speaking before Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalisation. His words reflect – accurately, I am sure – the position when he spoke them. They are valuable for that reason, and valuable also because they show the extent of the change to come. Another perceptive German, Peter Schneider, set out (in 1990) the position from the West. ‘No one wanted to admit it, but we saw and treated East Germans as foreigners; in fact, according to polls, a majority of young people defined East Germany as a foreign country.’

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TIMELINE 1945 7 May Germany surrenders 3 July Allied troops take over their four sectors in Berlin 16 July Potsdam Conference begins 2 August Potsdam Conference ends 1946 21 April Communist Party and Social Democrats form the SED (Socialist Unity Party) to rule East Germany 1947 5 June Marshall Plan launched 1948 21 June Deutsche Mark introduced in the West 24 June Berlin blockade and airlift begins 24 July East German Mark introduced 1949 4 April NATO formed 11 May Berlin blockade and airlift ends 24 May FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) founded in the West, merging the American, British and French Zones 7 October GDR (German Democratic Republic) founded in the East from the Soviet Zone, with East Berlin as its capital 1953 16 June GDR workers uprising over increasing work norms 1955 9 May FRG accepted into NATO 14 May Communist states, including the GDR, sign the Warsaw Pact 1958 27 October Walter Ulbricht, GDR leader, threatens West Berlin 10 November Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev says it is time to cancel Berlin’s four-power status 1961 4 June At a summit in Vienna, Khruschev tries to pressure US President John Kennedy to demilitarise Berlin 1–12 August 21,828 refugees arrive in West Berlin 13 August Berlin Wall built 1963 26 June Kennedy visits Berlin and makes his ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech 1968 21 August Warsaw Pact countries crush Prague Spring 1970 19 March Willy Brandt visits GDR city Erfurt as part of his Ostpolitik policy 1971 3 May Ulbricht forced to resign, succeeded by Erich Honecker 1972 October Traffic Agreement signed, giving FRG citizens access to the GDR 21 December Basic Treaty signed, the FRG in effect recognising the GDR 1973 18 September The GDR and the FRG admitted to the United Nations 1985 11 March Mikhail Gorbachev elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party 1987 12 June Ronald Reagan speaks at the Brandenburg Gate: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ 7–11 September Honecker visits FRG 1989 2 May Hungary opens its border with Austria, allowing GDR holidaymakers to cross 7 May GDR elections with 98.85 per cent for the government and widespread allegations of fraud 4 September Leipzig demonstrations begin 30 September GDR citizens in FRG Prague Embassy told they can travel to the West 6 October GDR fortieth anniversary 18 October Honecker forced to resign, succeeded by Egon Krenz 4 November A million people demonstrate in East Berlin 9 November The Wall opens 29 November Chancellor Helmut Kohl issues plan for a ‘confederation leading to a federation in Germany’ 7 December Krenz resigns.

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A British tourist was quoted as saying he’d anticipated it would resemble something out of‘a cold war spy novel, but it is more like grotty Disneyland’. Map 6. It became convoluted and unique: Friedrichstrasse bisected, Zimmerstrasse the death strip. Note that the GDR boundary was the northern side of Zimmerstrasse but The Wall was constructed just back from that. There were moves by leading European politicians, including Mikhail Gorbachev, to establish a cold war museum on the site because a generation had arisen who’d been born after the fall and couldn’t relate to The Wall or find very much of it to try and relate to. The intersection is on Friedrichstrasse, a broad north–south avenue, and Zimmerstrasse, a side road. The Wall bisected Friedrichstrasse – putting the northern part in the East, the southern part in the West – and ran along Zimmerstrasse.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson
Published 25 Mar 2014

Worse, it appeared there were also Soviet generals who thought in terms of winning a nuclear war.” Someone else was speaking similarly. In December 1984, the USSR’s parlimentary delegate Mikhail Gorbachev said to Britain’s legislature: “Whatever is dividing us, we live on the same planet and Europe is our common home—a home, not a theater of military operations. . . . The Soviet Union is prepared . . . to advance towards the complete prohibition and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.” On January 15, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev directly proposed to Ronald Reagan “a concrete program, calculated for a precisely determined period of time, for the complete liquidation of nuclear weapons throughout the world . . . within the next fifteen years, before the end of the present century. . . .

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He would regularly discuss eliminating atomic bombs in private, but no one in his administration supported this, and the president did nothing about it in practice, either militarily or diplomatically. When he met with his political comrade-in-arms Margaret Thatcher at Camp David on December 22, 1984, and told her about this goal, she was “horrified.” Thatcher was one of many who had come to believe that nuclear arms were what kept the Cold War cold, telling Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev three years later, “Both our countries know from bitter experience that conventional weapons do not deter war in Europe whereas nuclear weapons have done so over forty years.” On March 1, 1982, President Reagan watched the National Military Command Center rehearse a nuclear attack. A screen displayed a map of the United States, and as the missiles arrived, and the warheads fell, red dots bloomed, over and over, growing together into a bloody cloud—in a mere thirty minutes, America was no more.

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After hearing of this, Reagan wrote in his diary: “We’d be hard put to explain how we could turn it down.” Yet, as Moscow halted testing for ninety days to try to shame the United States into following suit, on March 22, the AEC detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb at the Nevada Test Site. Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan—one instantly recognizable from his ocher birthmark peninsula; the other from his shiny black macassar helmet—then met on October 11, 1986, at Reykjavík, Iceland, where the first secretary raised his January offer to now include the two superpowers’ eliminating all offensive nuclear arms—the triad of ICBMs, bombers, and sub-launched cruise missiles.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
by John J. Mearsheimer
Published 1 Jan 2001

Soviet efforts at expansion between 1950 and 1990 were confined to the Third World, where it met with occasional success, but always with firm resistance from the United States.85 After decades of competition with the United States for control over Europe, the Soviet Union suddenly reversed course in 1989 and abandoned its empire in Eastern Europe. That bold move effectively brought the Cold War to an end. The Soviet Union itself then broke apart into fifteen remnant states in late 1991. With few exceptions, the first wave of scholars to study these events argued that the Cold War ended because key Soviet leaders, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, underwent a fundamental transformation in their thinking about international politics during the 1980s.86 Rather than seeking to maximize the Soviet Union’s share of world power, Moscow’s new thinkers were motivated by the pursuit of economic prosperity and liberal norms of restraint in the use of force.

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During that decade, the Soviet Union lagged behind the United States in developing and deploying nuclear weapons, as well as the systems to deliver them. By 1960 the Soviet inventory contained only 354 strategic nuclear weapons, compared to 3,127 for the United States.171 But the Soviet force grew rapidly during the 1960s. By 1970 it numbered 2,216; ten years later it numbered 7,480. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new thinking” notwithstanding, the Soviet Union added almost 4,000 bombs and warheads to its nuclear inventory during the 1980s, ending up with 11,320 strategic nuclear weapons in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. Furthermore, most Soviet strategists apparently believed that their country had to be prepared to fight and win a nuclear war.172 This is not to say that Soviet leaders were eager to fight such a war or that they were confident that they could gain a meaningful victory.

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The social constructivists provide no answers to these important questions, which makes it hard to believe that a marked change in our discourse about international politics is in the offing.19 Social constructivists sometimes argue that the end of the Cold War represents a significant triumph for their perspective and is evidence of a more promising future.20 In particular, they maintain that in the 1980s a group of influential and dovish Western intellectuals convinced Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to eschew realist thinking and instead work to foster peaceful relations with the United States and his neighbors in Europe. The result was Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War, a Soviet Union with an enlightened foreign policy, and fundamental change in the norms that underpin great-power politics.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq
by Steve Coll
Published 27 Feb 2024

He had apparently decided that getting along with Washington was no longer a priority, and that he would stand with what Scowcroft called the “rejectionists” of the Arab world—those states opposed to peace with Israel or even Israel’s existence.[10] Scowcroft was busy. That winter, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the dissolution of Moscow’s sphere of influence in Europe. Germany moved toward reunification. At this turning point in world history, the White House had little time to parse Saddam Hussein’s rambling speeches. The Iraqi president’s “combination of bellicosity and tractability,” as the scholar Jerry Long has described it, as well as his habit of saying quite different things to visitors he received only days apart, was confounding even to those diplomats and intelligence analysts who watched him closely.[11] Nonetheless, after Saddam’s “devour with fire” speech, Scowcroft and his aides decided to send an “unambiguous message” to Baghdad.

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Bush did not know what he would be prepared to do if Iraq invaded Kuwait until it happened, as the president’s diary and record of decision-making clearly show. The global response that he orchestrated would have been very difficult for Saddam to foresee. Nearly forty countries would join the U.S.-led effort to oust Iraq from Kuwait. Such a coalition might never have formed but for the Cold War’s expiry, coupled with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s willingness to experiment with a “new world order.” Moreover, Saddam tended to think that the C.I.A. was omniscient, that it knew Iraq’s important secrets. Surely, therefore, the U.S. knew about his clandestine plan to occupy Kuwait. In any event, by mid-July, Saddam was no longer hiding his preparations.

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His uncompromising policy was perhaps the best available, given American and European interests in the free flow of oil, and in light of Israel’s security, yet it also closed down the president’s curiosity and ability to listen. Arguably, he had stumbled into this mess by taking too much counsel from Arab friends; he now seemed determined to use the Hitler analogy to close off further arguments.[17] Weeks after the invasion, Bush met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit in Helsinki, Finland. Gorbachev had already gone to unprecedented lengths to cooperate with Bush. Yet he sought to maintain Soviet influence even as his multinational country crumbled. At a morning session in the Finnish presidential palace, Gorbachev unveiled a plan by which Saddam would withdraw and the U.S. would agree to participate in a conference on the Middle East to address Saddam’s grievances.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns
by Michael W. Covel
Published 14 Jun 2011

With humility, hope, and extraordinary determination, greatness is something everyone can aspire to.2 Challenging accepted norms has always been my passion. Unearthing details that some may have wanted buried has made me pretty damn good at navigating obscure fields unrelated to trading—like State and Federal open records law. In this small world, one of the more unlikely people to have asked me, “How do you go about unearthing details?” was Mikhail Gorbachev. The former president had been told in Russian that my career involved profiling traders who make the big money, so when an introduction was made, he asked me in Russian through a translator, “What is it like to write about these traders?” Realizing his time was limited, my response was short: “Very interesting,” I said.

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Blood Hound 1. Patton, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, perf. George C. Scott, 20th Century Fox, 1970. 2. David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. New York: Random House, 2010, p. 11. 3. See http://www.michaelcovel.com/2010/02/06/meeting-mikhail-gorbachev-myjourney/. 4. Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement. New York: Free Press, 1986, p. 12. 5. John Tierney, “When Every Child Is Good Enough.” New York Times, November 21, 2004. See http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/weekinreview/21tier.html. 6. Mark Cuban, “Success and Motivation—You Only Have to Be Right Once.”

China's Future
by David Shambaugh
Published 11 Mar 2016

Jiang Zemin’s power was not yet consolidated and China’s leaders remained traumatized from their Party’s own near-death experience and having just witnessed the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union and East European communist party-states. They remained convinced that had they not taken lethal action in 1989, China’s Communist Party would have gone the same way. Political reform was the furthest thing from their minds. In fact, they specifically blamed Mikhail Gorbachev’s political reforms, as well as the subversive “peaceful evolution” efforts of the West, for precipitating the collapse of Soviet Communist Party rule and the USSR. This was their initial consensus explanation for the regime implosions of 1989–1991. Over time, however, as the CCP undertook an extraordinarily detailed series of assessments of the causes of collapse, a more nuanced and fundamentally different narrative and explanation emerged.

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The Dragon and the Bear Redux By contrast, Beijing and Moscow currently enjoy the best relationship they have had in six decades. This is a good thing. The world should not wish that these two powers and giant neighbors be locked in antagonism. When this occurred during the 1960s–1980s it was highly dangerous and destabilizing. Beginning in the mid-1980s the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping orchestrated a series of mutual confidence-building steps to improve relations (which culminated in the renormalization of relations in 1989). Despite a brief hiatus following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the two sides continued their efforts to reduce sources of friction and rebuild their ties.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
by Catie Marron
Published 11 Apr 2016

The men and women who came to Red Square to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia went barely noticed by the vast majority of the population, and yet they provided inspiration to Czech democrats, including Vaclav Havel, who heard about them through underground channels. “For the citizens of Czechoslovakia,” Havel said, the demonstrators who came to Red Square out of a civic sense of duty represented “the conscience of the Soviet Union.” Mikhail Gorbachev, the future (and last) leader of the Soviet Union, was a young man in 1968, but he had Czech friends who had believed in Dubček and Russian friends who very privately expressed dismay at the regime even as they climbed the Party ladder. In 1987 Gorbachev was asked the difference between Prague Spring and perestroika.

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THE REVOLUTION I WAS witnessing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, in Moscow and beyond—the implosion of communism and the Soviet Union—had many sources: the widespread cynicism about ideology; the collapse of the economic system; cheap oil; the rise of a technological age; dissent of various forms around the empire; the independence movements in the Baltic states and, later, Ukraine and the Caucasus; pressure from the West, including Reagan and every other president since the end of World War II; the moral suasion of the human rights campaigners; the demands of a new generation; and above all, the well-intentioned but ultimately futile attempts by the reformist wing of the Party, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, to rescue the situation. And to see this drama play out, one could do worse than witness the set-piece dramas on Red Square. When I arrived in Moscow in 1988, May Day was in its final throes of Sovietism. On my first trip to the celebration, I saw all sorts of Party-approved reformist slogans: “Uskorenie!”

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Neither formally approved nor fully rejected, the OGAS Project found itself (and proposals to use computer-programmed networks to plan social and economic resources, including those by the chess grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik) stalemated in a morass of bureaucratic barriers, mutinous ministries, and institutional infighting among a state that imagined itself as centralized but under civilian administration proved to be anything but. By the time that Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Glushkov had died, and the political feasibility of technocratic economic reform had passed. This chapter frames how hidden social networks unraveled computer networks. The conclusion reflects on and complicates the plain statement that is the conceit of this book—that the first global computer networks began among cooperative capitalists, not competing socialists.

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Gosplan was entrusted with creating the economic plans of action—the governing documents defining the economic inputs (such as labor and raw materials), the timetable for execution, the wholesale prices, and most of the retail prices—divided into five-year increments (the so-called five-year plans). These nationwide economic plans were first rolled out from 1929 to 1933 under Stalin and ended, with one seven-year exception (1959–1965) under Khrushchev, with the twelfth plan (1986–1990), which oversaw Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policies of uskorenie (acceleration) and perestroika (rebuilding). The thirteenth five-year plan was cut short by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gossnab, in contrast, was responsible for implementing Gosplan’s plans by procuring and supplying producer goods to factories and enterprises and by monitoring the schedules for the production plans.

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Viktor Glushkov (1923–1982): Prominent Soviet cyberneticist, director of the Institute for Cybernetics in Kiev, Ukraine (1967–1982), author of OGAS (All-State Automated System) (1963–1982), coauthor of the EGSVTs (Unified State Network of Computing Centers) (1963) network projects, academician. Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–): General secretary, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1985–1991). Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986): Soviet economic mathematician, pioneer in linear modeling, Nobel Prize in economics (1975). Mstislav Keldysh (1911–1978): Mathematician, Soviet space theorist, chair Soviet Academy of Sciences (1961–1975) (where he helped rehabilitate cybernetics and genetics).

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron
by John Preston
Published 9 Feb 2021

He would definitely be waiting for her in Ephesus on the Turkish coast, Maxwell said. The yacht duly set sail. He never appeared. 27. Intangible Assets Maxwell Communications Press Information. 4 June 1990. MAXWELL INSTITUTE TO BOOST PEACE The Gorbachev–Maxwell Institute of Technology was launched in America yesterday by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The Institute of Global Technology will be an international centre for American, Soviet and European scientists and engineers to conduct research into problems ranging from food and health to global warming and communication. With President Gorbachev at his side during the launch ceremony in the Minnesota Governor’s mansion, Mirror publisher Robert Maxwell said the Institute will honour the Soviet leader and he praised him for the ‘great service’ he had rendered in ending the Cold War.

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By October 1990, Perpich was close to raising the $50,000,000 he had promised back in June. All that remained was for Maxwell to contribute his $50,000,000 and then the ‘great human endeavour’ could get underway. But when the Governor tried to get in touch with him, he found that Maxwell was peculiarly elusive. His calls were never put through, his letters went unanswered. Mikhail Gorbachev seemed just as puzzled as Perpich by Maxwell’s behaviour. It would take a while longer before the truth finally dawned on them: the money was never coming. Maxwell had reneged on the deal. Quite possibly he’d never had any intention of donating $50,000,000; instead he was milking his pledge for as much publicity as he could – just as he had done with the 1986 Commonwealth Games.

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In Romania Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife, Elena, had been executed by firing squad. Like President Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Ceaus¸escu had been the subject of one of Maxwell’s Leaders of the World series, lauded for his ‘constant tireless activity for the good of the country’. On 18 August 1991, a group of senior army officers went to see the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, at his dacha in the Crimea. There, they presented him with an ultimatum: he must either declare a state of emergency or resign. Gorbachev refused. The next day Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic – the largest republic in the Soviet Union – clambered on to a tank outside the Russian parliament building in Moscow and called on the rebel soldiers to lay down their guns.

The Cold War
by Robert Cowley
Published 5 May 1992

IRBMs from Turkey and Italy—and that here, as with the Soviet and American response to the strategic dilemmas posed first by the possibility and then by the reality of the ICBM, technology ruled. The presence of mobile Soviet SS-20 IRBMs in Europe from 1977, and the threat of a subsequent tit-for-tat Pershing II deployment by the U.S., loomed large in the logic behind the negotiations between President Ronald Reagan and Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that, as we now know, marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The logic of the scenarios posited above is debatable. What is not is that ICBM-based mutual deterrence was central to the Cold War, a reality reflected in the strategic vocabulary. Such expressions as circular error probable (CEP), preemptive first strike, survivable second-strike capability, and launch on warning, while not exclusively related to ICBMs, arose within a context shaped by the intercontinental ballistic missile.

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There was a quiet crisis in the early 1980s, the ramifications of which we do not yet understand. It is possible that the Cold War might have ended sooner but for the prevailing atmosphere of confrontation. It is also possible that the critical international situation steeled subsequent Soviet leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev in their determination to end the superpower struggle. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the end of history could have come right then, in nuclear annihilation. In the spring of 1948, when the government of Czechoslovakia fell to a Russianbacked factional coup, beginning an escalation of tension that culminated with the Berlin Blockade, people spoke of a “war scare of 1948.”

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American analyst Raymond Garthoff, among our foremost experts on Russia, concludes in a study of the end of the Cold War that any such alert would have been kept very quiet by Soviet intelligence. Garthoff interviewed a number of key Moscow officials, including the first deputies to the foreign minister and chief of the general staff, and the chief of the international department of the Communist Party, and no one had any recollection of an alert. Mikhail Gorbachev, then a Politburo member, also said the matter never came before that body. On the other hand, Gorbachev affirms the general proposition that 1983–84 proved the most delicate moment in the superpower relationship. Ambassador Dobrynin confirms that he heard of the KGB alert from his rezident in Washington.

Roads to Berlin
by Cees Nooteboom and Laura Watkinson
Published 2 Jan 1990

e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-098-8 Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway New York, NY 10019 www.quercus.com For Willem Leonard Brugsma CONTENTS List of Illustrations PART I Prologue: Crossing the Border Intermezzo in the Third Person: Vestigia pedis Second Intermezzo: Ancient Times PART II Berlin Suite Dead Aeroplanes and Eagles Everywhere Village within the Wall Rheinsberg: An Intermezzo Return to Berlin PART III PART IV A Visit to the Chancellor Epilogue Glossary including biographical and other explanatory notes Afterword to Part I Notes on this Edition Index LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The banks of the Spree near Oberbaumbrücke, West Berlin, March 1989 The Wall at Lübars, West Berlin, April 1989 Bismarck, Kiel Mikhail Gorbachev and Erich Honecker: the kiss. © Corbis Queue for Begrüßungsgeld (“welcome money”), West Berlin, November 1989 Brandenburger Tor, November 4, 1989 S.E.D. (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) demonstration, East Berlin, November 10, 1989 Potsdamer Platz, West Berlin, November 12, 1989 Potsdamer Platz, West Berlin, November 12, 1989 Marx and Engels, East Berlin, November 1989 “Socialism with a future—S.E.D.”

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Film recordings show them advancing on a masked enemy who is dressed in black and throwing stones: “They show more understanding for the Chaoten than for us.” Then more pictures: rooms full of police gathered around their new hero, the only one who understands. And concerned police unions, who cannot risk losing the twenty thousand Republikaner from their ranks. Then, still on this side, Beijing, Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping dropping a piece of meat from his chopsticks, tens of thousands of students calling for democracy. And on the other side: also Beijing, but no one is dropping any food, and no one is asking for democracy. Speeches, anthems, grand words, just like at home, where Honecker is welcoming Mengistu.

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The philosophy that broke everything wide open is kissing the philosophy that wants to hold on tightly to the past. The communal house is kissing the divided house. One man represents one of the greatest adventures in history, a revolution that the other man perceives as betrayal of the Revolution. Mikhail Gorbachev and Erich Honecker: the kiss. © Corbis The others, the ones it is all about, cannot be seen in this photograph. While an oompah band in traditional costume plays on East German television, I see the others on the television on this side. Interviews on the street. Mothers with children, old people, young people.

Hopes and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2009

McFaul informed the press that “we’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense,” referring to U.S. missile defense programs in Eastern Europe (to which we return) and NATO membership for Russia’s neighbors Ukraine and Georgia. Obama has spoken about eventual abolition of nuclear weapons, in accord with the legal obligation of signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but again in rather vague terms. And as longtime antinuclear activist Joseph Gerson has observed, Mikhail Gorbachev and others have recognized that “Russia will not be able to embrace serious efforts to achieve abolition unless space is demilitarized—something which is not discussed in Washington’s agenda.”47 Obama’s approach may be an improvement over Bush, and offers prospects for popular movements that seek to rid the earth of these threats to survival of the species.

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The call for negotiations and diplomacy on the part of the American unpeople extends to Cuba, and has for decades, but is again dismissed by both political parties.30 The possibility that functioning democracy might alleviate severe dangers is regularly illustrated. To take another current example, of great importance, there is now justified concern about Russian reactions to U.S. aggressive militarism. That includes the extension of NATO to the East by Clinton in violation of pledges to Mikhail Gorbachev, but particularly the vast expansion of offensive military capacity under Bush, and more recently, the plans to place “missile defense” installations in Eastern Europe. Putin is ridiculed for claiming that they are a threat to Russia. But U.S. strategic analysts recognize that he has a point.

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Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that lie ahead. TWELVE 1989 and Beyond The month of November 2009 was marked by the joyous twentieth-anniversary celebration of what British historian Timothy Garton Ash calls “the biggest year in world history since 1945.” That remarkable year “changed everything,” thanks primarily to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia and his “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force…a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history,” leading to the partially open Russian elections of March 1989 and culminating in the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, which opened the way to liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny.

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service
by Eric Thompson
Published 18 Apr 2018

It took only eleven minutes to destroy her. The hulk now rests one mile down at the bottom of the Barents Sea. The Soviet Union never admitted such failures as the Party was not prepared to lose face. The reason for details of the Komsomolets disaster being known is that, one year earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet Head of State and had introduced glasnost, a new regime of openness. Gorbachev authorised release of the Komsomolets investigation report and I was able to read it. As with the K19 disaster, the salient feature was the heroism of the Russian submariners, a number of them helping shipmates to safety but perishing in the process.

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There would now be redundancies in the Armed Forces. Career prospects would evaporate. And did we still need a Strategic Nuclear Deterrent? What brought about this political earthquake was not military victory but the combination of economic pressure on the Soviet Union and the arrival in 1985 of the fifty-four year old reformist Mikhail Gorbachev. He had succeeded the geriatric Communist dinosaurs, Andropov and Chernenko, who had died in quick succession. Gorbachev had inherited massive economic problems, an escalating Cold War arms race, and was faced with President Reagan, who was upping the stakes on American defence spending, including the ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defence Initiative.

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Arms reduction treaties were now agreed and former Warsaw Pact Soviet republics gained independence from Moscow, most opting for democracy, and many aspiring to membership of both NATO and the European Union. If this caused a planning upheaval in Whitehall, one shudders to think of the mayhem in Moscow. It was the greatest world event since the end of the Second World War. For the first time in my life, I was not at war with an enemy that had the power to destroy me. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace – Time magazine named him Man of the Decade and ex-President Nixon called him Man of the Century. Sadly for Gorbachev, his popularity at home did not match his popularity in the West. Six years later he was removed from power by the very democratic system he had enabled.

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal
by David E. Hoffman
Published 9 May 2016

The Moscow station and headquarters seemed optimistic that they could solve the photography problem, even if it meant urging Tolkachev to take pictures in the toilet only on sunny days.15 19 Without Warning On the evening of March 10, 1985, the ailing Soviet leader, Konstantin Chernenko, passed away. The next day, the youngest member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev, became the fourth leader of the Soviet Union in three years. Tolkachev usually paid little attention to politics. At home, he was content to bury himself in his technical books, ignoring broadcasts and pronouncements of the party-state. He loathed them all and rarely even glanced at a television.

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Tolkachev also provided the United States with renewed confidence in weapons systems that cost billions of dollars and took years to develop, especially those designed to strike the Soviet Union at low altitude. The terrain-hugging, winged cruise missile was flight-tested and deployed in the years of Tolkachev’s espionage. The Soviet leaders knew it was a potent threat. In Moscow on June 4, 1984, Anatoly Chernyaev, who later became Mikhail Gorbachev’s national security adviser, went to a military briefing at the Central Committee. The briefing was titled “The Characteristics of Modern Warfare,” and Chernyaev wrote in his diary afterward that he saw films about American weapons systems. “It was amazing,” he wrote, “missiles homing in on their targets from hundreds and thousands of kilometers away; aircraft carriers, submarines that could do anything; winged missiles that, like in a cartoon, could be guided through a canyon and hit a target 10 meters in diameter from 2,500 kilometers away.

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People were “caught loafing” during working hours in subways, saunas, and shops. Tolkachev would certainly have known about the new climate, although it seems unlikely to have triggered the investigation. Andropov’s campaign is described in R. G. Pikhoia, Soviet Union: History of Power, 1945–1991 [in Russian] (Novosibirsk: Sibersky Khronograf, 2000), 377–79, and in Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 147. 3. Tolkachev was named as the inheritor of the house by the owner but had no explicit title, and a dishonest owner could change it at any time. Libin, “Detained with Evidence.” Other sources confirmed to the author this was a common technique. 4.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

On the other hand, if action is taken too fast, it may nervously amplify short-term variation and create unnecessary instability. Delays determine how fast systems can react, how accurately they hit their targets, and how timely is the information passed around a system. Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays. Understanding delays helps one understand why Mikhail Gorbachev could transform the information system of the Soviet Union virtually overnight, but not the physical economy. (That takes decades.) It helps one see why the absorption of East Germany by West Germany produced more hardship over a longer time than the politicians foresaw. Because of long delays in building new power plants, the electricity industry is plagued with cycles of overcapacity and then undercapacity leading to brownouts.

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Thou shalt not kill. Everyone has the right of free speech. Contracts are to be honored. The president serves four-year terms and cannot serve more than two of them. Nine people on a team, you have to touch every base, three strikes and you’re out. If you get caught robbing a bank, you go to jail. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and opened information flows (glasnost) and changed the economic rules (perestroika), and the Soviet Union saw tremendous change. Constitutions are the strongest examples of social rules. Physical laws such as the second law of thermodynamics are absolute rules, whether we understand them or not or like them or not.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
by Ian Bremmer
Published 12 May 2010

Today we’re living in a G20 world, and when leaders of free-market democracies diagnose what ails the global economy and prescribe their respective remedies, they now face the skeptical smile of He Yafei—and of all those across the table who believe that the free market has failed and that the state should play the leading role in national economic performance. That’s an enormous problem, one that will pose important challenges for the next several decades. How did we get here? Didn’t the end of the Cold War signal the final victory of free-market capitalism? On December 25, 1991, a dazed Mikhail Gorbachev looked deeply into the lens of a single television camera and told his people that they were living in a new world. Proud that he had helped guide the Soviet people “toward the market economy,” he resigned as Soviet president, shuffled the papers before him, and waited for aides to signal that he was off the air.

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Within two years, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and his premier, Zhao Ziyang, overcame considerable resistance from senior Communist Party officials to launch a slow but deliberate plan to experiment with capitalism. For China’s economy and the ruling party’s future, it was a matter of necessity, and without Deng’s personal and political talents, the changes might never have been made. Years before Mikhail Gorbachev first charmed a Western audience, a willingness to move beyond Mao and an openness to Western culture transformed Deng into one of the American media’s most improbable celebrities of all time. Not long after the United States and the People’s Republic of China established formal diplomatic relations in 1979, the barely five-foot-tall Deng visited the United States, famously donning a cowboy hat while watching a Texas rodeo.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published 7 Jan 2020

All-out nuclear war had been averted. The cause of freedom, which Americans felt certain they themselves embodied, had prevailed. Victory was decisive, sweeping, and unequivocal. In another sense, however, the passing of the Cold War could not have been more disorienting. In 1987, a senior adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had warned, “We are going to do a terrible thing to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”2 As the Soviet Union passed out of existence, Americans were left not just without that enemy but without even a framework for understanding the world and their place in it. However imperfectly, the Cold War had for several decades offered a semblance of order and coherence.

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Although tensions between the United States and the USSR eased in the mid-1980s, few observers possessed the imagination to conceive of a world in which the Cold War might become a mere memory. For national security professionals, especially those charged with thinking unthinkable thoughts about World War III, the one thought that remained truly beyond the pale was the prospect of the Cold War actually ending. As late as 1988, even with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acting like best buddies, Pentagon propagandists were still insisting that the Kremlin’s “long-standing ambition to become the dominant world power” remained intact, as did its commitment to “a basically adversarial relationship” dictated by the “Marxist dialectic.” Having “amassed enormous military power, far in excess of what might be required for defense,” the Soviets were even then continuing to “expand their military power,” in large part to “satisfy their imperialist urge.”

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

. -~ • • = - " More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. History took an astonishing turn when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. But even more amazing to me in the following days was the economic ruin exposed by the fall of the wall. By the time Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev made his third visit to the United States during the following spring, the Soviet Union itself had begun to disintegrate. He is shown below with President George H. W. Bush and me in a receiving line at a state dinner in Washington on May 31, 1990. LEFT: AP Images/John Gaps HI; BELOW: Courtesy of the George Bush Presidential Library The strain between President George H.

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I was struck by how quickly the Chinese leadership acquired a relatively sophisticated understanding of the workings of market economies, given the distance it had to traveL Here I am meeting with Chinese president Jiang Zemin in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Chinese finance m i n i s t e r Jin R e n q i n g is to t h e r i g h t . The collection of Alan Greenspan Ohinese premier Zhu Rongji ranks with Mikhail Gorbachev in his impact on world economic events. In the course of meetings over many years, he and I became good friends. Bob Rubin and I saw him during his visit to Washington, D.C., in 1999, when he urged President Clinton and Congress to back China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Epix/Getty Images More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. 

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Nonetheless, another international golf t o u r n a m e n t , on China's Hainan Island, was staged in March 2 0 0 7 . 298 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. THE CHOICES THAT A W A I T C H I N A I have always been of the opinion that Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were the proximate cause of the Soviet Union's demise. They exposed the Soviet people to "liberal" values that Stalin and most of his successors had long suppressed. After the Pandora's box was opened, given the way ideas spread, the demise of collectivism in the USSR and its satellites was just a matter of time.

The Abandonment of the West
by Michael Kimmage
Published 21 Apr 2020

Reagan’s optimism acquired a retrospective legitimacy from events that occurred after he left the White House in January 1989. The course of events was circuitous. In 1981 and 1982, the United States and the Soviet Union were in mutual peril, with the United States pressuring Moscow and with the Kremlin a revolving door of geriatric (and hard-line) leaders. Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival in 1985 was an opening for Reagan and for those in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who sensed the weakening of the old order. Reagan’s unexpected receptivity to diplomatic engagement with Gorbachev gave Gorbachev political cover back in Moscow, but Gorbachev could not balance a declining Soviet economy with the maintenance of control over Eastern Europe and the many restive populations of the Soviet Union.

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This less visible, less stylized Reagan was a diplomat rather than a general or a missionary, and a diplomat in search of a structured end to the Cold War. Reagan once described his grand strategy as “we win, they lose”; but he did not have the Soviets’ unconditional surrender in mind. A nuclear superpower could not be defeated. Reagan could, however, find justification for negotiating with the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev, a buoyant statesman and the least cynical of Soviet politicians, came to power in 1985. Gorbachev had studied law at Moscow State University and was a practicing Leninist. He retained Lenin’s desire to plant real, existing socialism in Europe and to reclaim the Western possibilities the Soviet Union had sacrificed to brutal leaders like Stalin and Khrushchev.

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Clinton agreed with both Bush and Acheson on Europe and showed himself to be a skilled diplomat in Europe, a friend to other center-Left leaders such as Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder and a friend of a different sort to Boris Yeltsin, who served as Russia’s president in the 1990s. Yelstin was an exotic European leader, neither inside nor outside of the Western club. His grand strategy was to enable a “Greater Europe” from Lisbon to Vladivostok, a concept of Mikhail Gorbachev, a Eurasian zone of peace and commerce. Meanwhile, within Europe the Schengen Agreement, which was put into practice starting in 1995, removed many borders for Europeans. The euro was introduced in 1999 and Berlin restored to its capital-city status in 2000, a German and a European capital. From an American and from a European and for a while from a Russian point of view, the EU was an institutional nucleus around which a greater Europe could form.

Bomb Scare
by Joseph Cirincione
Published 24 Dec 2011

In 1991 President Bush announced that the United States would unilaterally withdraw all of its land- and sea-launched tactical nuclear weapons and would dismantle all of its land- and many of its sea-based systems (thereby denuclearizing the Army and the Navy surface fleet). The president also unilaterally ended the twenty-four-hour alert status of the U.S. bomber force and took a substantial portion of the land-based missile force off of hair-trigger alert (readiness to launch within fifteen minutes). Two weeks later, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev reciprocated with similar tactical weapon withdrawals and the de-alerting of 503 Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. While the process was begun by Eisenhower, inspired by Kennedy, and pushed by Johnson, most of the major diplomatic lifting was actually done by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, who either negotiated or brought into force almost all the instruments that make up the interlocking network of treaties and arrangements we refer to as the nonproliferation regime.

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.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), cited in Universal Compliance, p. 130. AFTERWORD: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 1. “Suicide Bomb Hits Pakistani Bus,” BBC News, November 1, 2007, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7072428.stm. 2. Bill Roggio, “Suicide Attack at Pakistani Nuclear Weapons Complex,” Long War Journal, December 10, 2007. 3. Mikhail Gorbachev, “The Nuclear Threat,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2007. 4. Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, “The Saga of a Bent Spear: Six Nuclear Missiles Were Flown Across America,” Washington Post, September 23, 2007, p. A1. 5. Robert Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2008,” NDRC Nuclear Notebook, The Bulleting of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2008. 6.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990
by Mary Fulbrook
Published 14 Oct 1991

More specialized groups developed, focusing on issues pertaining to human rights and the environment, in addition to peace initiatives, which could no longer so easily be contained by the church. This proliferation of dissent coincided with, and was to a degree fuelled by, a quite separate factor of major, indeed decisive, importance. In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Inheriting an ailing economy burdened by high defence spending, a world role it could no longer sustain, and political troubles at home, Gorbachev embarked on a radically new course in the Soviet Union, characterized by his slogans of perestroika and glasnost.

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Children guarded the candles which were kept alive, symbolically, with the flames of hope for a peaceful revolution. Yet many who joined the protests were deeply afraid, and not without reason. Earlier in the year, the East German regime had officially congratulated the Chinese leadership on the brutal massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Peking's Tiananmen Square. Mikhail Gorbachev came to the GDR, to stand by Honecker's side for the anniversary parades. But he took the opportunity to advise the East German leadership that some willingness to reform was in order and that it might be time for Honecker, given his age and ill-health, to make way for a more effective leader given the current crisis.

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Yet it was clear that the Warsaw Pact was no longer a cohesive body posing a serious military threat; and by 6 July 1990, a two-day NATO summit was able to issue the 'London Declaration' announcing a radical reconceptualization of its role and effectively declaring peace, as one newspaper headline put it, on the Warsaw Pact. Little over a week later, on 16 July after discussions in Moscow and the Caucasus between Chancellor Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev, the latter was able to announce that he no longer objected to membership of a united Germany in NATO. Warsaw Pact troops would be withdrawn from the territory of East Germany in phases over a four-year period, and the new, post-unification domestic military force of a united Germany would be reduced from the number produced simply by combining existing East and West German troops.

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation
by Serhii Plokhy
Published 9 Oct 2017

After he published an article in 1972 attacking manifestations of Russian nationalism in literary and cultural life, Yakovlev was dismissed from his high position in the party’s Central Committee and sent to Canada as Soviet ambassador. A decade later, he would be discovered there by a rising star of Soviet politics, Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought him back to Moscow in the mid-1980s. Yakovlev would become one of the architects of Gorbachev’s reforms. In the mid-1970s, however, the party leadership preferred to sacrifice Yakovlev in order to make peace with the rising nationalist trend in the Russian intelligentsia, and, more important, to co-opt the rebels and keep that trend under party control.

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Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the country for eighteen years, passed away in November 1982; his successor, the former head of the KGB, Yurii Andropov, succumbed to illness in February 1984; and Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, followed suit in March 1985. The old Soviet Union had long run out of new ideas. By the mid-1980s, it had also run out of leaders committed to maintaining old ideological, economic, and social models. The new Soviet leader, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, was eager to try new things. The immediate and most obvious challenge before him was the sorry state of the Soviet economy, which was in free fall. Income growth, which had averaged about 14 percent per year in the 1930s, had slowed to about 10 percent in the 1950s, and dropped to approximately 5 percent in the first half of the 1980s.

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It was a good candidate to form a nation, but in 1990 there were numerous odds against that proposition. In June 1991, Yeltsin won the race for the newly created office of president of the Russian Federation in competition with candidates supported by his onetime protector and then nemesis, the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike Gorbachev, who had been installed in office in the spring of 1990 by the Soviet parliament, Yeltsin was elected by the voters of Russia. As he took office, Yeltsin pledged his loyalty to the citizens of the Russian Federation, promising to defend the interests of the republic and its peoples.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

However, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan, people found that Russia was not a reliable ally. The same way Soviets invaded Afghanistan they could invade any country as well. The occupation of Afghanistan caused irreversible internal conflicts between the Soviet republics and the Soviet government. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev took the position of general secretary in the Community Party and ordered the Red Army to withdraw from Afghanistan, the economic and military resources for the invasion were drained. Oil cratered from $66 per barrel in 1980 down to $20 by 1986, no doubt due to external forces that had a vested interest in bankrupting the USSR’s oil industry.

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Clearly, this was a monumental task, and one that brought a ton of heat on Gorbachev, but he felt that moving away from the arms race and using that cash to reform the government and improve the lives of ordinary Soviets was the right thing to do. This is part of the reason why Oliver Stone, through his amazing 10- part docuseries The Untold History of the United States, describes Mikhail Gorbachev as one of the most important men of the 20th century. The decentralization of power meant that the empire could no longer retain their colonies like Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, so they were spun off like a company going through bankruptcy that splits their divisions into separate entities and sells them off for pennies on the ruble.

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A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.” – George H.W. Bush, 1991. “The ‘affirmative task’ before us is to create a New World Order.” – Joe Biden, former Vice President, United States of America. “We are moving toward a New World Order, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road.” — Mikhail Gorbachev, former President, USSR, 1987. “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.” – David Rockefeller, Founder, Club of Rome & Chase Bank. “A New World Order is required to deal with the Climate Change crisis.” – Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
by Richard Haass
Published 10 Jan 2017

Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak. This is the vision that I shared with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.2 Now, some twenty-five years later, it is clear that no benign new world order materialized. What exists in many parts of the world as well as in various venues of international relations resembles more a new world disorder.

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In 1987 the historian Paul Kennedy published an influential book on why major powers rise and fall throughout history, a principal reason being that the burdens of empire often undermine prosperity and as a result stability at home.8 The burden of its overseas role and activities surely contributed to the failure of the USSR, which had to support a large military budget, a far-flung set of allies that often needed financial help, the cost of occupation in Eastern Europe, and the economic and human price of imperial adventures such as its ill-fated 1979 intervention in Afghanistan. These costs exacerbated a difficult, inefficient reality brought about by decades of an economy ruled much more by political than by market forces. Political decisions and diplomacy mattered too. Here much of the history derives from decisions of Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the USSR starting in 1985. Gorbachev clearly concluded that the Soviet Union could survive and compete on the world stage only if it changed in basic ways at home. But his approach to change, in which political reform came before economic restructuring, mostly resulted in a loss of control over what was happening in the streets.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning
by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Published 31 Oct 2019

Writing a few months before the Germans would joyfully dance on the sledge-hammered remains of the Berlin Wall, he proclaimed the Cold War effectively over. The comprehensive victory of liberalism over communism had been sealed by a decade of economic and political reforms initiated in China by Deng Xiaoping and in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev. The elimination of ‘the Marxist-Leninist alternative to liberal democracy’, Francis Fukuyama argued, signalled ‘the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism’. Having been crowned by Marxists as the culmination of ‘History’ in the Hegelian sense, communism was suddenly demoted to ‘history’ in the American sense of something of negligible significance.

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Bush through an implant in the president’s tooth. Following the Kremlin’s instructions, the teacher, pretending to sound like God, encourages the forty-third President to invade Iraq. Later in the novel we discover that in the 1980s the CIA had conducted a similar operation – this time posing as Lenin’s spirit to convince Mikhail Gorbachev to initiate perestroika, setting off a chain of events that ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. What you once did to me, I will now do to you. Russia is driven to mirror Western aggression and especially Western hypocrisy by more than a desire for revenge. The Kremlin also hopes to recreate, at least superficially, the symmetry between Russia and the United States that it lost when the Cold War ended.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny
Published 7 Apr 2008

All three industries—drugs, arms, and high tech—were deemed of immense strategic value to the Bulgarian state. At the heart of the smuggling operations lay Military Counter Intelligence, the Second Directorate of the DS, which controlled all of Bulgaria’s borders. And the head of Military Counter Intelligence was General Petur Chergelanov, the father-in-law to Ilya Pavlov. In 1986, as Mikhail Gorbachev consolidated his authority in Moscow, Western leaders were unaware that the Soviet Union’s hegemony over its East European allies was coming to an end. The Bulgarian state security service had no such illusions about the system it policed. Experienced observers of the Soviet scene, the DS’s leadership calculated that Communism did not have long to last.

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Gaunt, serious, and with penetrating blue eyes, Shakhnazarian is an unlikely anti-mafia campaigner, although since he has fought in two wars on the periphery of the Soviet Union as it was breaking up, his courage should not be underestimated. Together with his energetic wife, Oksana Martinuk, he has been fighting to prevent the extermination of the sturgeon for more than a decade. “They were overfishing to such a degree that they ran out of rail trucks to export the stuff. To his credit, Mikhail Gorbachev put a stop to this overfishing and strengthened the Spetznaz [Special Forces] teams who were charged with protecting the sturgeon,” Oksana said. In a short time, the armed protection and a new restocking program had a demonstrably positive impact on sturgeon numbers. But after 1989, the police state that had cowed so many people for seven decades appeared to shrivel and die.

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“Sharks only move in for the kill when they can taste the fear of their victims,” he mused, “and I don’t believe I understood quite how serious things stood with the gangsters at this time, so I wasn’t as scared as perhaps I should have been.” Tarasov’s affable manner belies his exceptional business acumen, which transformed him from Communist bureaucrat into Russia’s first millionaire after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms had opened a window on private enterprise. “Our first business was fixing Western television sets. There were no spare parts so we had to improvise with Russian ones. And they worked, although if people had looked inside them, they would have seen a rather monstrous apparition—we couldn’t get the genuine parts so we had to bodge them ourselves.

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power
by Patrick Major
Published 5 Nov 2009

Scenes of revellers from East and West Berlin dancing atop the Berlin Wall have remained lodged in memories as the moment the Cold War ended. The ‘fall of the Wall’ became a metaphor for the end of an era, although it was not until August 1991 that the Soviet Union imploded, taking with it the architect of reform, Mikhail Gorbachev. Nevertheless, the fall of the Wall was a symptom as well as a cause of other changes. Radical challenges to orthodox communism had already been under way for years in Poland and Hungary, where, in the latter instance, citizens had been granted freedom of travel in 1988. The GDR, on the other hand, had always been viewed as the most loyal eastern bloc regime.

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The Fall of the Wall 231 towards the FRG under the auspices of Ostpolitik and the modernization of its economy. Nor were his successors much more supportive. Various decisions, such as the dismantling of fragmentation devices along the border fence in 1983, or Honecker’s visit to Bonn in 1987, were not taken with prior consultation with Moscow, much to the Kremlin’s irritation.¹⁶ Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership of the CPSU, beginning in March 1985, signalled fundamental changes to the special relationship. For his common ‘European house’, Gorbachev was keen to foster relations with West Germany, even at the GDR’s expense, despite all protestations to the contrary. The Soviet General Secretary made Delphic allusions to ‘history’ solving the German question.

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S. 1 Paris summit (1960) 38 liberalization 165–74 Party Information (SED) 13, 14, 15, 17, 33, ending of at 11th Plenum 174 35, 233, 249–50, 284 and New Economic System 166–8 Pass Law (1957) 102–3 limes 2 Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) 281–2 Lindenberg, Udo 175–6 Pervukhin, Mikhail (Soviet ambassador to Lindenberger, Thomas 7–8 GDR) 51, 110 Litfin, Günter 146 petitions ( Eingaben) 19, 84–5, 104–5, 157, Lüdtke, Alf 5, 6 201–3, 210, 230, 236, 249 Lünser, Bernd 146–7 Pfaff, Steven 242 Pieck, Wilhelm, president of GDR 19 Macmillan, Harold 36 Plato 2 Maginot Line 2 Poland 235 320 Index police see Volkspolizei Sex Pistols 1 popular music see music Sheriff Teddy (1957) 98 popular opinion 11–12, 16, 25, 33–4, shootings 145–8, 265; see also trials 120–1, 156–7, 163 Siegfried Line 2 declarations of support 17–18, 121 Social Democrats see SPD postal censorship 189 Sokolovsky, Vasily 27 Potsdamer Platz 278–9 Sonnenallee (1999) 261 propaganda see under Berlin Wall Soviet Union 3, 24, 27, 31, 232, 240, 254; see protests see demonstrations also Mikhail Gorbachev public opinion see popular opinion and Berlin blockade 27 Puhdys 175, 201 Red Army 26, 90 Sparta 2 radio 28, 34, 168, 171; see also music SPD 163–4, 257 Operation Blitz (1961) 191 Springsteen, Bruce 175 ransoming of political prisoners 214 Sputnik ban 233 Ratzel, Friedrich 3 Stalinism 12 refugees see Republikflucht Staritz, Dietrich 289 Stasi 12, 14–15, 15–16, 17, 30, 31, 32, 66, Reimann, Brigitte 179 67–8, 78, 86, 97, 106, 107, 121, 132, Republikflucht 12, 25, 43, 47, 100–1, 197–8 145, 147, 187–8, 189, 199, 220, 237, and Berlin 105 246, 250 combatting of 92–3, 97, 102, 105–6, 109 and building of Berlin Wall 113, 116 demographic impact 56, 79 Central Coordination Group to combat as migration 74–5 emigration 213–4, 215–7 political motives for 57, 64–74 Markus Wolf 232, 250 pull factors 75–6 Strauß, Franz Josef 152, 203, 228 push factors 66, 77, 82, 88 Streletz, Fritz 265 regional factors 59, 60–1 strikes 44, 134–6, 256 social factors 73 suicides 158–9 situational motives for 57–63 threats to commit 83–7, 211–2 teachers 70–1, 73, 200 trigger factors 79–82 television 192–3 RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) 13, 28, Templin, Wolfgang 275 34, 191 Third Reich 11, 13, 59, 65, 131, 156–7, 192, rock ‘n’ roll see under music 264 Rolling Stones 172 Tiananmen Square massacre 236–7, 245 Roman Empire 2 totalitarianism 4, 6, 7, 10 Ross, Corey 289–90 tourism 196–7 Russia see Soviet Union West German tourists 228 trade unions 130 Schabowski, Günter 253 transport 28–9 Schneider, Peter 258 travel 100–4, 194–208 Schnitzler, Karl-Eduard von 122 freedom of 103–4, 198 Schroeder, Klaus 4 travel cadres 196 Schürer, Gerhard 229, 232, 251 travel law (1989) 251–3 Schultz, Egon 148, 275 trials 107, 131–2, 140 Scott, James 6 wall shooter trials 263–7 secret police see Stasi Tucholsky, Kurt 199 SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) 12, tunnel 30 16, 18, 20, 24, 42 Turba, Kurt 170–1, 172 grass roots functionaries 30, 52–3, 65, 67, Turner, Frederick Jackson 8–9 88, 129–31, 192, 203, 222–3, 233–4, 249–50 Ulbricht, Walter 19, 24, 39, 40, 46, 47, 82, reformers within 232 87, 107–8, 156 see Party Information United Nations 3, 202 Seidel, Harry 144–5, 285 United States of America 28, 35, 36 Selbmann, Fritz 181 USSR see Soviet Union Index 321 Versprechen, Das (1994) 260 Weber, Max 4 Vietnam 161 West Germany see Federal Republic of violence 131, 165, 245, 246–7 Germany visas 89, 100, 197 Wings of Desire (1987) 274 Volkspolizei (People’s Police) 12, 19, 28, 67, Wolf, Christa 179–81, 250, 261 76, 87, 92, 93, 100, 104, 106, 132, 157, Wolf, Hanna 102 199, 203, 241; see also arrests women 94, 102, 126, 236 and building of Berlin Wall 114 Wonneberger, Pastor 244 workers 43–6, 138–9 writers 176–83, 234 Wall see Berlin Wall ‘wall sickness’ 158–9 young people 62–3, 67, 77, 95–9, 124–5, ‘wallpeckers’ 274–5 131, 141–3, 160–1, 170–4, 238–9 war, fear of 126–7 Warsaw Pact 109, 112–3 Weber, Hermann 5, 159, 288–9 Zeiss optics works 46, 76 Document Outline Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations 1.

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan
by Seth G. Jones
Published 12 Apr 2009

Power is transferred to Nur Mohammad Taraki, who establishes the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. 1979 Nur Mohammad Taraki is arrested by his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, and executed. As instability grips the country, Soviet forces invade on Christmas Eve. On December 27, Soviet Special Forces and KGB storm the Presidential Palace, kill Hafizullah Amin, and install Babrak Karmal as president. 1986 Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev announces a partial withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In November, the Soviets replace Babrak Karmal with Muhammad Najibullah, former head of the Afghan secret police. 1989 On February 15, the last Red Army units roll across the Termez Bridge from Afghanistan and return to the Soviet Union. 1992 The United States ends arms shipments to the Afghan government and militia groups.

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A CIA assessment concluded: “The Soviets have had little success in reducing the insurgency or winning acceptance by the Afghan people, and the Afghan resistance continues to grow stronger and to command widespread popular support. Fighting has gradually spread to all parts of Afghanistan.”46 Initial Soviet assessments of the war were optimistic, but by 1985, Soviet leaders had become increasingly concerned.47 At a Politburo session on October 17, 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev read letters from Soviet citizens expressing growing dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan. At that same session, Gorbachev also described his meeting with Babrak Karmal in which he said the Soviet Union would pull its troops from Afghanistan. “Karmal was dumbfounded,” Gorbachev noted.

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“I would get twenty-five dollars or have the pleasure of paying twenty-five dollars on the occasion of an early Soviet withdrawal. A small price to pay for a large victory.” Gates was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb: “What the bear has eaten, he never spits out.” But he lost the bet. Mikhail Gorbachev announced in February 1988, before a nationwide audience, that Soviet withdrawals from Afghanistan would begin that May, and they were completed by December 1989. “I paid Mike Armacost the twenty-five dollars—the best money I ever spent,” Gates said. “I also told myself it would be the last time I’d make an intelligence forecast based on fortune cookie wisdom.”1 A Patchwork of Competing Groups The initial U.S. reaction to the Soviet withdrawal was referred to as “positive symmetry.”

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

Just three days after the devastation of Hiroshima, Bertrand Russell began writing his first essay on the implications for the future of humanity.65 And not long after, many of the scientists who created these weapons formed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to lead the conversation about how to prevent global destruction.66 Albert Einstein soon became a leading voice and his final public act was to sign a Manifesto with Russell arguing against nuclear war on the explicit grounds that it could spell the end for humanity.67 Cold War leaders, such as Eisenhower, Kennedy and Brezhnev, became aware of the possibility of extinction and some of its implications.68 The early 1980s saw a new wave of thought, with Jonathan Schell, Carl Sagan and Derek Parfit making great progress in understanding what is at stake—all three realizing that the loss of uncounted future generations may overshadow the immediate consequences.69 The discovery that atomic weapons may trigger a nuclear winter influenced both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce their country’s arms and avoid war.70 And the public reacted too. In 1982, New York’s Central Park saw a million people come together to march against nuclear weapons. It was the biggest protest in their nation’s history.71 Even in my birthplace of Australia, which has no nuclear weapons, we joined the global protest—my parents taking me with them on marches when I was just a small child they were fighting to protect.

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Goodfellow, I. J., et al. (2014). Generative Adversarial Networks. ArXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661. Goodhart, C. (1975). “Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience,” in Papers in Monetary Economics. Reserve Bank of Australia. Gorbachev, M., and Hertsgaard, M. (September 24, 2000). “Mikhail Gorbachev Explains What’s Rotten in Russia.” Salon. Gordon, N. D., Jonko, A. K., Forster, P. M., and Shell, K. M. (2013). “An Observationally Based Constraint on the Water-Vapor Feedback.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 118(22), 12,435–43. Gould, C., and Folb, P. (2002). Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (R.

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And if you think back to a couple of natural calamities… there was snow in July in many temperate countries. And they called it the year in which there was no summer. Now if one volcano can do that, what are we talking about with the whole nuclear exchange, the nuclear winter that scientists have been talking about?” Speaking in 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev reflected (Gorbachev & Hertsgaard, 2000): “Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us.” 71 The crowd size has been estimated from 600,000 to 1 million, with 1 million being the most common number reported (Montgomery, 1982; Schell, 2007).

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Without the assistance, advice, and inspiration of others, the gears of our mind grind to a halt, and we’re stuck with nowhere to go. I have been blessed to find mentors and idols at every step of my life, and I’ve been lucky to meet many of them. From Joe Weider to Nelson Mandela, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Muhammad Ali, from Andy Warhol to George H.W. Bush, I have never been shy about seeking wisdom from others to pour fuel on my fire. You have probably listened to Tim’s podcasts. (I particularly recommend the one with the charming bodybuilder with the Austrian accent.) He has used his platform to bring you the wisdom of a diverse cast of characters in business, entertainment, and sports.

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* * * Tony Robbins Tony Robbins (TW/FB/IG: @tonyrobbins, tonyrobbins.com) is the world’s most famous performance coach. He’s advised everyone from Bill Clinton and Serena Williams to Leonardo DiCaprio and Oprah (who calls him “superhuman”). Tony Robbins has consulted or advised international leaders including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and three U.S. presidents. Robbins has also developed and produced five award-winning television infomercials that have continuously aired—on average—every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, somewhere in North America, since 1989.

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Spirit animal: Sponge * * * Cal Fussman Cal Fussman (TW: @calfussman, calfussman.com) is a New York Times best-selling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the What I’ve Learned feature. The Austin Chronicle has described Cal’s interviewing skills as “peerless.” He has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with icons who have shaped the last 50 years of world history: Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pelé, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others.

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
by Mark Lilla
Published 14 Aug 2017

All this was an extraordinary experience for peoples who had been prevented from determining their collective destinies for generations. They were finally citizens. In the United States the picture was very different. Though Ronald Reagan publicly supported pro-democracy groups like Solidarity in Poland and dramatically called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, at home he had been elected by people who could no longer quite see the point of arguing about the common good and engaging politically to achieve it. A new outlook on life had been gaining ground in the United States, one in which the needs and desires of individuals were given near-absolute priority over those of society.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

Citizens of the region, Russian and European, were exposed to a cloud of nuclear radiation that first traveled north to Scandinavia and then covered almost all of Europe and its 500 million inhabitants. Not only were Europe’s citizens not warned about the potential threat, even the top Soviet leaders in the Kremlin were in the dark. Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was general secretary of the Communist Party, recounts: “I got a call around 5 A.M. I was told there was some accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The first information consisted of ‘accident’ and ‘fire.’ The information report was that everything was sound including the reactor. … At first, I have been told there was no explosion.

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But the 1965 “economic reform” that aimed at introducing entrepreneurial management ideas reflected the limitation of the centralized 1.0 economy. The war in Afghanistan, economic problems, and then the political changes that led to the revolutions in Eastern Europe ended the Soviet Union. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika and glasnost, which marked the transition from a centralized 1.0 to a 2.0 society. After his removal from power and with guidance from Harvard advisers, this transition took full effect in the form of “shock therapy.” The result was nothing short of catastrophic, with a rapid increase in poverty and even worse living conditions.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

Years of smoking cigarettes and drinking massive quantities of vodka felled him as well, turning his lungs into emphysema-besieged, wheezing apparati and his liver into cirrhotic Jell-O. In March 1985 the Politburo finally gave up on placing men who had served in Stalin’s shadow in power, turning to Mikhail Gorbachev, comparatively youthful at age fifty-four. It was the beginning of the great change. Gorbachev would be the first leader of the Soviet Union—indeed, in Russian history dating back to A.D. 913—to survive his political tenure, not either dying in office or forced out, having been crippled by fatal physical or mental illness.

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While some women were heavy drinkers, alcoholism regionally was an overwhelmingly male phenomenon. And vodka, when consumed at Russian levels, drove men to astounding heights of violence and brutality committed against their wives, girlfriends, children, even suicidally against themselves. In the six years Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union, he had saved, conservatively, more than a half million lives in the region—but not because of any military or political decision he made. Startled to learn that Soviets were in 1983 consuming, on average, three liters a year of pure ethanol equivalent, Gorbachev waged an all-out war on alcoholism, using the classically repressive apparatus of the Soviet state.

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38 Prior to 1991, therefore, no legitimate academic departments of toxicology, environmental sciences, human environmental epidemiology, or epidemiological oncology existed in the Soviet Union. There was no trained pool of scientists who could sift through the evidence, separating fact from fiction. The first time the Soviet government tried to confront the pollution issue came in 1988. In a startling address to the nation, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said that fifty million Soviet citizens were living in 102 cities in which air pollution exceeded the USSR health standards by more than tenfold. In the years since, the Yeltsin government determined that, minimally, two hundred cities in Russia alone posed “ecological danger to human health” due to toxic pollution of the air and/or water.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
by Michael Dobbs
Published 3 Sep 2008

Together, they reviewed plans for the destruction of the naval base. The commander of the local FKR regiment, Colonel Dmitri Maltsev, took out a map and briefed Raúl on the positions of his troops. The Soviet officer responsible for the ground defense of Oriente was Colonel Dmitri Yazov. (He would later become Mikhail Gorbachev's defense minister and a leader of the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev.) Like Kovalenko in Remedios, Yazov had great difficulty finding a suitable camp for his motorized rifle regiment. The first site was in a forest filled with poisonous trees and bushes. Unaware of the danger, the troops had used branches from the trees to construct makeshift huts and even beds.

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It had originally been built for Stalin's putative successor as Soviet prime minister, Georgi Malenkov, who was quickly pushed aside by the more forceful Khrushchev. After Malenkov's disgrace, the estate was taken away from him and turned into a government guest house. Novo- Ogaryevo would achieve greater fame decades later as the presidential retreat of Mikhail Gorbachev and the site of negotiations that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Presidium members were seated in front of the first secretary along the long, polished oak table. The eighteen attendees included Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, and Rodion Malinovsky, the defense minister.

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George Anderson was dismissed from his position as chief of naval operations in August 1963 and appointed U.S. ambassador to Portugal. William Harvey was removed as head of Operation Mongoose after the missile crisis and sent as CIA station chief to Rome, where he drank heavily. Dmitri Yazov became Soviet defense minister in 1987 and led a failed coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. John Scali served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Nixon. Curtis LeMay was caricatured as the maniacal Air Force general Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. In 1968, he ran for vice president of the United States on a ticket headed by the segregationist George Wallace.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Published 30 Oct 2012

The security forces never went into action. After that the number of demonstrators swelled with each successive Monday evening. In fact, the Leipzig tradition of regular Monday-evening “Prayers for Peace” dated back to 1982, three years after John Paul II’s first pilgrimage and three years before Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to the top of the Soviet leadership. Protestant clergy at Leipzig’s Church of St. Nicholas organized the prayers as a forum for the non-state-approved airing of controversial social topics, ranging from military conscription to industrial pollution. Although the human rights movement in the German Democratic Republic never assumed the same prodigious scale as its Polish counterpart, it is striking how much East German dissident activity—much of it avowedly secular and left-wing—took place under the aegis of local churches.

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In January 1988, Tomášek publicly came out in favor of a petition calling for religious freedom that drew six hundred thousand signers (both Christians and non-).17 The petition was an important act of resistance that set a precedent for the tumultuous events of the following year, when the Czechs (inspired by the examples of their neighbors in Poland and East Germany) succeeded in launching their own nonviolent uprising against Communist rule that came to be known as the “Velvet Revolution.” Here, too, Tomášek also played a vital part, pledging the support of the church to the peaceful demonstrators who clashed with the security forces. To be sure, John Paul II cannot be credited with masterminding everything that happened in Central Europe in 1989. The ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 was, of course, a factor of enormous consequence; so, too, was the deepening economic malaise within the USSR, which weakened its ability to retain its hold over its satellites. Yet neither of these conditions determined the form that change, when it came, would take. In this respect, the nine days of John Paul II’s June 1979 pilgrimage had a profound impact.

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Some of the students camped out on Tiananmen Square started a hunger strike to press their demands for more democracy. Various party stalwarts paid visits to the students, warning them to desist. The visitors included, toward the end, Zhao Ziyang himself, who pleaded with them to put an end to the protests. Mikhail Gorbachev came to Beijing, and his example inflamed the malcontents: why couldn’t China implement its own brand of perestroika? How it all ended is known. In the early hours of June 4, 1989, the Communist Party declared martial law and sent in the troops. We may never know the precise casualties, but it seems safe to say that hundreds of people were killed in central Beijing that day.

Inside British Intelligence
by Gordon Thomas

As abruptly as he had appeared, he departed the office, leaving unanswered questions. How had he been drugged? By injection? Tablets? Liquid? How could he have answered questions while drugged? How had he escaped from his captors? How had he made his way to the embassy? Was this a plot by the KGB to embarrass President Reagan on the eve of his summit with President Mikhail Gorbachev to settle the Arms Control Treaty? Two days later Vitali Yurchenko was on a flight back to Moscow, never to be seen again in public. No one would ever know his ultimate fate. More certain was the embarrassment for Casey, who had assured his contacts in Congress after his lunch with Yurchenko that the defector was “probably the most valuable asset we have.”

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The NSA covers east of the mountains, including Japan and China, as well as North and South America and the Caribbean. Australia and New Zealand monitor the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. This global-eavesdropping network ensures there are no gaps in coverage. On their workstation screens at Fort Meade, people had watched the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and listened to President Mikhail Gorbachev say that Russia still had “its proper place as a superpower.” For his listeners it was sufficient reason for them to continue spying on an old enemy. At GCHQ the annual budget was increased to £600 million, making it by far the largest slice of the British intelligence funding, and it also received money to work on NSA black projects from funds hidden inside the costs of other U.S. defense projects.

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She would give them advice on how to recruit and train new personnel to replace the cold war veterans who, so she believed, “were tainted by their activities under Communism.” It was not purely goodwill that had prompted her visit. The idea had been Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s when she had invited Colin McColl to lunch and had explained the advantage for both MI5 and MI6 in supporting the diplomatic initiatives with the new commonwealth. She had told Mikhail Gorbachev he was the sort of man she “could do business with,” and that included helping to develop a new KGB that would no longer spy on Britain and, at the same time, would provide valuable information for its intelligence services. Rimington saw the sense of what Thatcher had said but nevertheless felt “it was as if suddenly everything was turned on its head, but nothing was impossible.”

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

Chinese university students’ blinkered knowledge and understanding of their own society, past and present, is one of the regime’s most deliberate and profound achievements. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were sparked by the death of a reformist leader, Hu Yaobang, but the fire was fueled by the historic Beijing visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev soon thereafter. Students hoped that Chinese leaders would follow his policy of glasnost, the Russian word for “openness,” which became the catchphrase for a loosening of controls on the Russian press and discussion of political reform. After the bloody June 4 crackdown, Deng Xiaoping quashed all hopes that China would follow Gorbachev’s lead.

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Having altruistic-sounding mission statements on the corporate website is well and good, but how can people be sure a company is living up to its own ostensibly high ethical standards—any more than they should trust that a sovereign is good simply because he says he is? In the long run, an Internet-related company’s value proposition is questionable at best and fraudulent at worst if it rejects the need for accountability. As Ronald Reagan famously said to Mikhail Gorbachev when they signed a major arms control treaty in 1987, “Trust, but verify.” As citizens, we are right to hold the same attitude toward Internet and mobile communication companies, which we now depend upon to inform ourselves, participate in political discourse, and exercise our rights as citizens.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2009

Indeed, it is in this last category, stories, where Animal Spirits itself fits in, because the goal of the book is to give its own story about how the economy behaves. Its intent is to tell a more accurate story than the dominant one of the past thirty years or so, ever since the free market revolution that swept the world, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Deng Xiaoping, Manmohan Singh, Mikhail Gorbachev, Brian Mulroney, Bertie Ahern, Carlos Salinas de Gotari, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Carlos Menem, and others. These stories, embellished by oft told vignettes of newly successful people, and in their mostly justified enthusiasm for expanded free markets, led to too much economic tolerance. Underlying this revolution is the powerful principle of the “invisible hand”—that market forces should be the fundamental framework of resource allocation.

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Even more significantly, there are changes over time in the prevalence of bad faith—economic activity that, while technically legal, has sinister motives.1 The exponents of capitalism wax poetic over the goods it provides.2 It produces whatever can be turned out at a profit. Thus the urbanologist Jane Jacobs sees architectural poetry in the variety and excitement of cityscapes that are the creation of individual private entrepreneurs.3 At the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s apertura, Gary Becker, the intellectual heir to Milton Friedman’s legacy at the University of Chicago, described the Yellow Pages to Muscovites. These volumes themselves are a result of free enterprise and an indication of the bounty of capitalism, with their alphabetical listings of its many offerings.

Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall
by Anna Funder
Published 19 Sep 2011

And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism’s successor, for forty-five years after the war ended. They had to, as a Soviet satellite state, and the Eastern Bloc’s bulwark against the west. But in East Germany they did so more thoroughly and with more pedantic enthusiasm than the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, or the Russians themselves. They never wanted to stop. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 he implemented the policies of perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (‘openness’ of speech). In June 1988 he declared a principle of freedom of choice for governments within the Eastern Bloc and renounced the use of Soviet military force to prop them up.

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But they were also ordered not to shoot or use violence unless it was used against them. On 7 October 1989 the GDR celebrated its forty years of existence with lavish parades in Berlin. There was a sea of red flags, a torchlight procession, and tanks. The old men on the podium wore light-grey suits studded with medals. Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the dangers of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’.

How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn
by Gregg Carlstrom
Published 14 Oct 2017

None had the stature of the nonagenarian Shimon Peres, a leading figure on the Israeli political scene for nearly half a century and a darling of the international community. President Obama awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 2012, calling him “the essence of Israel itself, an indomitable spirit that will not be denied.” His ninetieth birthday celebration the following year drew an A-list crowd, from Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev to Barbra Streisand and Robert DeNiro. “Shimon, you are the world’s social Einstein. You have tried to put together a unified theory of meaning,” Clinton told him. In some ways, the reputation was undeserved. As the defense minister in 1975, Peres helped to authorize one of the earliest Israeli settlements, Ofra.

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Since the country was founded in 1948, some 2.7 million Jews have made aliyah, a Hebrew word that literally means “to ascend”. They came in waves: hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors who left the ruins of Europe; more than half a million Arab and North African Jews who fled, or were expelled; and then the great exodus of nearly a million Soviet Jews after Mikhail Gorbachev finally opened the borders. Today, however, the great waves of immigration seem to be finished. Scholars describe two sets of reasons why people migrate, separating them into “push” and “pull” factors. The former are external crises like war, discrimination, and economic collapse, which drive people involuntarily from their homelands.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

CHAPTER 4 THE SIZZLER A riot of noise greeted Mark Spitznagel as he stepped into the visitors’ gallery of the Chicago Board of Trade’s cavernous Grain Room. It was the summer of 1987. The market was on a roll, and so was America. The Dow industrials closed above two thousand points for the first time. In Berlin, Ronald Reagan exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall. Michael Jackson released Bad. Prozac was approved by the FDA. Inside the Board of Trade, the adrenaline-soaked machinery of naked capitalism was hard at work. Spitznagel’s teenage eyes widened at the sights before him. Shouting hordes of traders—sardined into the open-outcry floor, many outfitted in brightly colored jackets—made wild indecipherable gestures.

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Another key concept in the book was hindsight bias—the tendency people have to claim, after a Black Swan event, that they could see it coming all along. The political scientist Philip Tetlock illustrated the concept in his 2016 book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. He recounted how in 1988, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was implementing a series of major reforms such as glasnost (a more open society), he asked experts to estimate the odds that the Communist Party would lose its grip on the country in the next five years. Several years later, after the Soviet Union collapsed, he asked the same experts to recall their estimates.

Tunnel 29
by Helena Merriman
Published 24 Aug 2021

People are feeling bolder, not because of anything that’s happened in East Germany, but because of what had happened in the country theirs was modelled on: the Soviet Union. After a succession of elderly leaders who’d either died on the job or were about to, the Soviet Union was now led by spring chicken (fifty-four-year-old) Mikhail Gorbachev. For the first time, communist Russia was ruled by someone born after the 1917 revolution, and it showed. Gorbachev turned his back on Stalinism, reforming Russia through his twin policies of glasnost (opening society) and perestroika (economic reform). This wasn’t so much idealism as pragmatism – the Soviet Union was in the middle of an economic crisis and this was Gorbachev’s way out.

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This wasn’t so much idealism as pragmatism – the Soviet Union was in the middle of an economic crisis and this was Gorbachev’s way out. The previous year, in 1988, President Reagan had visited Gorbachev in Moscow, where the two men announced they were now ‘friends’, despite Reagan’s visit to Berlin, where he’d called on Mr Gorbachev to ‘tear down this Wall!’ Then a few months ago, in July 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced that his army would no longer prop up communist governments in Eastern Europe; people could choose their own rulers. The ‘Sinatra doctrine’, he jokingly called it – people could now do things ‘their way’. And within weeks, they were all doing just that. In Hungary, people voted for a new reformist government, which pulled down its barbed-wire fence on the border of Austria.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

Bush, a former oil wildcatter who earned his fortune in West Texas before embarking on his career in politics, intelligence, and diplomacy. That spring President Bush was preoccupied by events abroad—spreading dissent in Eastern and Central Europe, pro-democracy students camped out in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and the rising radicalism of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. Admiral Yost had made his professional reputation as a patrol boat commander in Vietnam. As Coast Guard commandant since 1986, he had pulled the service toward military discipline. He banned beards, earning the enmity of a generation of officers, and he moved to install naval weapons systems aboard Coast Guard vessels.

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From the beginning it was an engagement marked by exceptional optimism on the American side, shadowed by a long history of mistrust rooted in the cold war—“old think,” as Bush’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander “Sandy” Vershbow, put it in a cable to Washington.3 The hypothesis Evans and others in the Bush administration pursued after the Crawford dinner was that a strategic campaign to deepen commercial ties between oil companies in the United States and Russia might transform Russia’s internal politics, remake U.S.-Russian relations, and even alter the global geopolitics of oil. President George H. W. Bush had seen oil-for-friendship as a critical element of his campaign to build a partnership with Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Union cracked up; Bush persuaded Gorbachev to endorse Chevron’s pioneering, lucrative entrance into the Tengiz oil project in the then Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. George W. Bush intended something similar with Putin, whose intentions as a political leader and as a sponsor of market-led modernization were at best enigmatic.

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Otherwise, the corporation negotiated in private.8 ExxonMobil owned one significant oil interest in Russia at the time the Bush administration made its push to deepen cooperation. In the chaotic last months of the Soviet Union, investment bankers retained by elements of the dying regime presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev shopped around all sorts of natural resource deals; Lee Raymond had authorized bids on an exotic project in Russia’s far eastern territory, near Sakhalin Island, just above Japan. The project dated to the 1970s, when Japanese corporations had lent money to the Soviet Union in exchange for exploration rights.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War
by Fred Kaplan
Published 1 Mar 2016

When his successor, the Cold War hawk Ronald Reagan, heard the same briefing a year later, he evinced little interest in the technical details, but was riveted to the big picture: it meant that if war broke out between the superpowers, as many believed likely, the United States could win, maybe quickly and decisively. In his second term as president, especially after the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Kremlin, Reagan rethought the implications of American superiority: he realized that his military’s aggressive tactics and his own brazen rhetoric were making the Russians jumpy and the world more dangerous; so he softened his rhetoric, reached out to Gorbachev, and the two wound up signing a string of historic arms-reduction treaties that nearly brought the Soviet Union—the “evil empire,” as Reagan had once described it—into the international order.

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* * * Four and a half months earlier, on April 27, 2007, riots broke out in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, the smallest and most Western-leaning of the three former Soviet republics on the Baltic Sea, just south of Finland. Estonians had chafed under Moscow’s rule since the beginning of World War II, when the occupation began. When Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Kremlin and loosened his grip almost a half century later, Estonians led the region-wide rebellion for independence that helped usher in the collapse of the Soviet Union. When Vladimir Putin ascended to power at the turn of the twentyfirst century on a wave of resentment and nostalgia for the days of great power, tensions once again sharpened.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety
by Eric Schlosser
Published 16 Sep 2013

With strong encouragement from his wife, Nancy, he publicly called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Reagan’s criticism of the Soviet Union became less severe, and his speeches soon included this heartfelt sentiment: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The deaths of Yuri Andropov and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power. Gorbachev represented a dramatic break from the past. He was youthful and dynamic, the first Soviet leader since Vladimir Lenin who’d attended a university. Although Gorbachev’s attempts to change the Soviet Union were tentative at first, he was committed to reforming its stagnant economy, allowing freedom of speech and religion, ending the war in Afghanistan, rejecting the use of force against other nations, linking the Soviet bloc more closely to the rest of Europe, and abandoning the pursuit of nuclear superiority.

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Secretary Watkins and his staff met with Senator Glenn, read the Moe panel report, got worried about the safety of older weapons in the stockpile, and contacted the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, about the issue. Instead of taking the weapons off alert, the Pentagon commissioned two more studies of the SRAM. One would be conducted by the Air Force, the other by Gordon Moe—who was rehired by the Department of Energy to repeat his earlier work. Almost another year passed. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Mikhail Gorbachev had visited the White House; signed major arms agreements; removed hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe; allowed Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to leave the Soviet bloc. By any rational measure, the Cold War was over.

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Butler eliminated about 75 percent of the targets in the SIOP, introduced a targeting philosophy that was truly flexible, and decided to get rid of the name SIOP. The United States no longer had a single, integrated war plan. Butler preferred a new title for the diverse range of nuclear options: National Strategic Response Plans. • • • MIKHAIL GORBACHEV WAS ON VACATION in the Crimea on August 18, 1991, when a group calling itself the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” entered his house and insisted that he declare martial law or resign. After refusing to do either, Gorbachev was held hostage, and the communications lines to his dacha were shut down by the KGB.

Polaroids From the Dead
by Douglas Coupland
Published 1 Jan 1996

For a dollar one can ascend to the fourteenth-floor tower, the only manmade sightseeing spot in the entire Silicon Valley. One is informed that the gentleman who once operated the tower’s carillon has retired, and that the bells play only rarely now, the last time being the 1992 visit to Stanford of Mikhail Gorbachev. It is a beautiful day, and the view is staggering. To the north are San Francisco and the bridges of the Bay. To the south are San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View and other cities—the forges of the post-industrial age housed in their industrial parks and flanked by Palo Alto-ish suburbs whose well-considered greenery almost visibly pump oxygen into the blue sky of this fine spring day.

Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Published 1 Jan 2008

The wheels of history can be cruel. Luba’s English consists entirely of the words “no” and “feevty-feevty,” the latter of which she invariably accompanies with a seesawing of her palm. For Luba, everything is feevty-feevty, from the fish sold at the local market to the president of Moldova. Except for Mikhail Gorbachev. The former Soviet leader, the man who hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, scores much lower than feevty-feevty in Luba’s estimation. My Russian is more extensive than Luba’s English, but just barely. In addition to “no,” I can also say “yes” and “I don’t understand” and “one more vodka, please.”

…

Daughter falls ill from the radiation, so they move to Moldova. Luba takes out a yellowing staff directory and shows me her picture. She looks important. She had risen high in the construction ministry; she had a car and a dacha. She lived well, not extravagantly but well. Then a man entered her life. His name was Mikhail Gorbachev, and he was a fool, she says, with a roll of her eyes. He moved too quickly in dismantling the Soviet Union. She lost everything. With this, she begins to sob. I hand her a tissue. Her husband had a stroke and lapsed into a coma for a year, then died. Now she survives on a forty-dollar-a-month pension.

Armed Humanitarians
by Nathan Hodge
Published 1 Sep 2011

And it was not equipped to handle the latter. Had the Berlin Wall never come down, Barnett probably would probably have made a career as a Kremlinologist, counting ICBM payloads in advance of arms control talks with the Soviets. But his timing was off: He graduated from Harvard University’s Soviet area studies program in 1986, just as Mikhail Gorbachev began accidentally dismantling the Soviet system through perestroika and glasnost. He completed his Ph.D. in 1990—his dissertation compared Romanian and East German policies in the Third World—just a year before the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Before joining the faculty at the Naval War College, Barnett worked at the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research, federally funded nonprofit research organizations.

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Georgia had stabilized somewhat under the rule of President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former secretary general of the Georgian Communist Party and onetime member of the Soviet Politburo. Shevardnadze, known as the “Silver Fox” for his political longevity, was well known in Western capitals: He served as Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign minister, and played a key role in allowing the Warsaw Pact states to go their own way during the wave of democratic transformations that swept Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Shevardnadze was a canny political operator, and he had cultivated closer ties with the United States. Under his leadership, Georgia joined the Partnership for Peace, a club for NATO aspirants, and he signed off on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a new route for transporting Caspian oil from Azerbaijan that was favored by the United States.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by David Enrich
Published 18 Feb 2020

He had a long pointy nose and wore his fine brown hair short, parted neatly on the left, with no trace of sideburns. His skin was tan and so clean-shaven that it seemed to shine. He was a leading German voice for the economic integration of Europe and an advocate for forgiving the debts of third-world countries. He became a confidant of Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, he dined with Mikhail Gorbachev, and he was a guest in the Connecticut home of Henry Kissinger. Perched on the thirtieth floor of one of Deutsche’s skyscrapers, the fifty-nine-year-old Herrhausen looked down on the rest of the German financial capital. In November 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall appeared to vindicate much of Herrhausen’s liberal free-market ideology, a leading German newspaper, Der Spiegel, gushed: “Hardly ever before has one person ruled the economic scene the way Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred Herrhausen does at the present time.

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A booth offered souvenir photos in case any shareholders wanted to take home a memory of their day with Deutsche. The bank had printed stacks of a glossy magazine to commemorate Ackermann’s decade as CEO. It featured photos of him with world leaders—across a conference table from Vladimir Putin, dancing with Christine Lagarde, smiling at Angela Merkel, sitting with a stone-faced Mikhail Gorbachev—and quotes from academics, journalists, and international dignitaries. “His skillful leadership of Deutsche Bank through difficult economic times has been an inspiration for the world’s financial community,” Henry Kissinger cooed. “When Joe retires in May, he will leave with the knowledge that Deutsche Bank is well equipped to face the future with confidence.”

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump
by James Naughtie
Published 1 Apr 2020

By the mid-1980s, there was much less of the Cold War rhetoric that Reagan had deployed enthusiastically in his first term, talking of a ‘Star Wars’ defence system to confront an ‘evil empire’ and pursuing new weapons deployments in Europe against a strong tide of popular opposition there. Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent produced the most unlikely but significant coming together of American and Soviet leaders since Franklin Roosevelt sat down with Joseph Stalin. Reagan had a stroke of luck that came at the right moment, from an old friend. The Thatcher government was able to pass on much of the intelligence flowing from Oleg Gordievsky, the spy of spies.

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I spoke to Daniel Barenboim about what it had been like to play a Beethoven piano concerto in the Philharmonie in West Berlin to an audience that had flocked from the East for an experience that had been impossible for more than three decades. He was tearful at the memory of it. But the most intriguing event of these days was a colloquy about the end of the Cold War, which my producer Roger Hermiston and I found out about just in time, with three of its most important participants talking together – Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush. They sat together and reminisced. Bush was asked, of course, why he hadn’t come to Berlin in 1989 to give a presidential victory dance on the wall, as Reagan would almost certainly have done. I recall that his reply was directed at Gorbachev. ‘Well, I didn’t know whether or not you’d be there next week.’

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

Through the 1980s, as China began to plug into the grid of global capitalism, the nascent debates described by Bao Pu addressed China’s political model—a different version of debates happening across the Communist bloc. In Hungary, popular frustration with Soviet-backed Communism was making sweeping change inevitable. In Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev was testing whether economic and political reform could be controlled, even as Soviet elites were beginning to prepare for a post-Soviet future. In China, there wasn’t a similar tipping point that had ripened in the society. But there was a sense that the leadership would soon face a choice about whether China’s economic opening should be accompanied by political reforms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, efforts to combat corruption, and ultimately a multiparty system rooted in democratic accountability.

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When Sandor Lederer’s life was transformed by the fall of the Berlin Wall, my parents marveled at the sight of Berliners deconstructing this symbol that had shaped their lives; I saw it simply as the natural order of things, the good guys winning. When Alexey Navalny was watching grim-faced Soviet military men briefly depose the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup, I had little doubt that they would fail to stop the momentum of history, embodied by the bearish Boris Yeltsin on top of a tank. When Bao Pu was watching his friends get gunned down in Tiananmen Square, I assumed that the Chinese student standing in front of a tank would prevail. The new world order.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

The post-invasion regime in Czechoslovakia spoke of “normalization,” which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal. To say otherwise in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was to be condemned to an insane asylum. Brezhnev died in 1982. After two short interludes of rule by dying men, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Gorbachev believed that communism could be reformed and a better future promised. His main opponent was the party itself, in particular the ossified lobbies accustomed to the status quo. So Gorbachev tried to build new institutions to gain control over the party. He encouraged the communist leaders of the Soviet satellites in eastern Europe to do the same.

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All of the members of what was then called the European Community were democracies, most of them markedly more prosperous than the communist regimes to their east. In the 1970s and 1980s, the gap in living standards between western and eastern Europe grew, as changes in communications made it harder to hide. As Mikhail Gorbachev tried to repair a Soviet state to rescue the Soviet economy, west European states were building a new political framework around economic cooperation. In 1992, a few months after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the European Community was transformed into the European Union (EU). This EU was the practice of the coordination of law, the acceptance of a shared high court, and an area of free trade and movement.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
Published 5 Aug 2008

They are the world’s masters of mis-and disinformation, the Soviet KGB and their Kremlin masters, who have much to gain from America remaining ignorant. As late as 1990, with the Warsaw Pact itself having rebelled successfully against the Soviets, the magazine was still insisting that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms were merely “strategic deception,” a clever trick staged to cause headaches for the Western “pro-defense consensus.”15 Ridiculous though this stuff seems today, the IFF had good reason to believe in a world in which grand conspiracies gulled the masses and public opinion was manipulated by the hidden hand of a foreign power.

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It was brilliant! Here is how Human Events covered the book’s publication, in its August 15, 1987 issue. Pick your issue: Pershing and MX missile deployment, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or aid to freedom fighters in Nicaragua and Angola. Then compare the positions of, say, Ted Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev. The same? They usually are. This alarming affinity is served up with skill and humor in My Dear Alex, a new novel by two of the brightest young rising stars in the conservative movement. 35. “Now it’s our turn”: Sidney Blumenthal, “Jack Wheeler’s Adventures with the ‘Freedom Fighters’: The Indiana Jones of the Right and His Worldwide Crusade Against the Soviets,” Washington Post, April 16, 1986.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

GfobAlizATtoN EteqiNs The changes in technology and the political economy of the West paralleled the third set of events that fell along that 1980 axis— globalization. Technically, these events also fell in the realm of politics and economics, but with more global implications than what Reagan and Thatcher represented. In 1980, Mikhail Gorbachev became a Politburo member and began the process that led to the Soviet Union's move toward democracy and capitalism. And in 1978, Deng Xiaoping wrestled control of political power in the People's Republic of China and began moving the Chinese toward the market economy. It's hard to exaggerate the significance of these two events.

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It's not that the world is completely out of control. Everybody is in control to a certain extent, doing her or his part to make the whole system sing. It's just that no one individual or organization can control situations the way they could be controlled in the past. That kind of centralized control is gone. No one knows that better than Mikhail Gorbachev, who had to take a huge leap of faith and let go of the control apparatus of the centralized communist economy and state. To a large extent, his hand was forced by historical forces beyond his control. Still, he took a courageous stand against the large control constituency of which he was the head.

Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert B. Cialdini
Published 1 Jan 1984

The problem for a government that seeks to improve the political and economic status of a traditionally oppressed group is that, in so doing, it establishes freedoms for the group where none existed before. Should these now established freedoms become less available, there will be an especially hot variety of hell to pay. We can look to events in the former Soviet Union for evidence that this basic rule holds across cultures. After decades of repression, Mikhail Gorbachev began granting the Soviet populace new liberties, privileges, and choices via the twin polices of glasnost and perestroika. Alarmed by the direction their nation was taking, a small group of government, military, and KGB officials staged a coup, placing Gorbachev under house arrest and announcing on August 19, 1991, that they had assumed power and were moving to reinstate the old order.

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The difficulty comes when the child is capriciously allowed a treat on some days but not on others and can see no good reason for the difference. It is this arbitrary approach that can build perceived freedoms and provoke rebellion. * * * Tanks, but No Tanks Incensed by the news that then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had been replaced in favor of plotters planning to cancel the newly instituted freedoms, Moscow residents confronted the tanks, defied the coup, and won the day. * * * READER’S REPORT 7.3 From a New York Investment Manager * * * I recently read a story in the Wall Street Journal that illustrates the scarcity principle and how people want whatever is taken away from them.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda
by John Mueller
Published 1 Nov 2009

Its love affair with revolution in the advanced capitalist world, frustrated for decades, ceased to have even theological relevance, and its venerable and once visceral attachment to revolution and to “wars of national liberation” in the Third World no longer even inspired much in the way of lip service. As Francis Fukuyama observed at the time, the role of ideology in defining Soviet foreign policy objectives and in providing political instruments for expansion steadily declined in the postwar period, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev further accelerated that process after he took office in 1985. Early in his tenure, Gorbachev said his country required “not only a reliable peace, but also a quiet, normal international situation.” And in 1986, he began to forcefully undercut Communist ideology about the “class struggle” and about the Soviet Union’s “internationalist duty” as the leader of world socialism.

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In addition, it also promised a new, extremely expensive arms race in an area in which they were well behind: highly sophisticated technology. At the same time, however, they were becoming distinctly aware that they were in deep trouble in many other areas as well: their previous economic, military, and ideological excesses were catching up with them. A new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, desperate to reduce defense spending,13 worked with Reagan to establish the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces agreement in 1987 that caused Europe to become missile-free. At the same time, he essentially abandoned international communism’s class-struggle ideology that had appeared so threatening to the West, a process that two years later led to the end of the cold war, as discussed in chapter 4.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011
by Steve Coll
Published 23 Feb 2004

From his service’s headquarters in the Lubyanka on Moscow’s Dzerzhinsky Square, Andropov oversaw KGB foreign covert operations, attempted penetrations of the CIA, and campaigned to suppress dissent within the Soviet Union. Ashen-faced, he conformed outwardly to the drab personal norms of collective leadership. Because he also read Plato, led drives against Soviet corruption, and mentored younger reformers such as Mikhail Gorbachev, a few Kremlin watchers in the West saw tiny glimmers of enlightenment in Andropov, at least in comparison to decaying elder statesmen such as foreign minister Andrei Gromyko or defense minister Dimitri Ustinov.1 Yet Andropov’s KGB remained ruthless and murderous at home and abroad. In Third World outposts such as Kabul, his lieutenants tortured and killed with impunity.

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“Inshallah [if it is God’s will], you will know my plans,” bin Laden told his mentor.16 THE ANTI-SOVIET AFGHAN JIHAD was coming to an end, but hardly anyone knew it or understood why. Not bin Laden. Not the CIA. On November 13, 1986, behind the Kremlin’s ramparts, the Soviet Politburo’s inner circle met in secret at the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, the opaque, windy, and ambitious reformer who had taken power twenty months before. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet armed forces chief of staff, explained that the Fortieth Army had so far deployed fifty thousand Soviet soldiers to seal the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, “but they are unable to close all channels through which arms are being smuggled.”

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Two associates of bin Laden later offered a different version while under interrogation: They said a dissident member of the royal family helped him leave the country by arranging for bin Laden to attend an Islamic conference in Pakistan during the spring of 1991. So far as is known, bin Laden never returned to the kingdom.13 VODKA-SOAKED SOVIET HARD-LINERS, including leaders at the KGB, tried and failed to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev on August 19, 1991. Within weeks the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, nemesis of the United States for almost half a century, collapsed as an effective political organization. Russian liberals, Russian nationalists, Baltic nationalists, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks now ruled what remained of the Soviet Union.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

Within hours, East Berliners were dancing atop the hated Wall, smashing it with hammers, and pouring into West Berlin.64 In early December 1991, eleven of the fifteen former Soviet republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Just weeks later, on the 25th of December, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, champion of glasnost and perestroika—“openness” and “restructuring”—resigned his appointed post. The following February in Washington, DC, independent Russia’s leader, Boris Yeltsin, and America’s president, George H. W. Bush, announced that the Cold War was officially over. Consider even a smattering of Soviet economic statistics from 1990–91, depicting a Soviet Union in collapse and a newborn Russia beset by hardship.

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By 1985 the Soviet Union had successfully orbited six space stations in fourteen years, while America had orbited one. In February 1986 the Soviet Union launched its long-lived space station Mir—eighth in its Salyut series but now given a new name, meaning “Peace.” Later in the year Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at a nuclear disarmament summit in Iceland, which might have succeeded but for the unshakable US commitment to Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, unbeknownst to Gorbachev at the time of the summit, the Soviet Union’s own offensive versions of Star Wars were well under way: an orbiting laser cannon, Skif, and an orbiting missile-armed battle station, Kaskad.

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By April 1987, even before the death of Skif, the future seemed to have brightened sufficiently to permit the US secretary of state and the Soviet foreign minister to sign an agreement on sixteen cooperative space-science projects, including several Mars missions.67 In early December 1988, mere months after a couple of Soviet space disasters that had been intended to showcase the USSR as a “reliable and still innovative partner,” Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the UN General Assembly. Besides announcing that his country would unilaterally reduce its armed forces and armaments, he reiterated the Soviet position that “activities in outer space must rule out the appearance of weapons there” and offered a Soviet radar station to serve as an international space facility under UN control.68 Potential space conflict cost too much and imperiled far more.

A Short History of Russia
by Mark Galeotti
Published 1 May 2020

The new general secretary was the ascetic and acerbic Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB political police and one of the few men largely untouched by the prevailing corruption and careerism. He was as determined to bring about change as he was unlucky: within three months of taking office he suffered kidney failure. He lasted only one more year, but his main achievement was rapidly promoting a relatively young, relatively reformist Party official called Mikhail Gorbachev. When Andropov died in 1984, Gorbachev was still not yet in a position to take over, so he adroitly backed the grayest of Party functionaries, Konstantin Chernenko, instead. After all, Chernenko was himself very ill and could be counted on to die soon. This he obligingly did in 1985, allowing Gorbachev to become general secretary.

Losing Earth: A Recent History
by Nathaniel Rich
Published 4 Aug 2018

In March 1988, Wirth joined forty-one other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan pursue an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the global total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming. But a pledge didn’t reduce emissions. Hansen was learning to think more strategically—less like a scientist and more like a politician. Despite Wirth’s efforts, there was as yet no serious national or international plan to limit fossil fuel consumption.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

But he had laid the foundation for modern Dubai, the strange society—cosmopolitan and fundamentalist, authoritarian and libertine—the whole world would come to know. 8 FROM PERESTROIKA TO PETROLGRAD Leningrad, 1985–St. Petersburg, Present Proposed Gazprom tower in architect’s rendering When the reform-minded new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Russia’s historic Window on the West in May 1985, his initial itinerary followed that of any Soviet ruler on an official visit. The new general secretary toured factories, met with faculty at the Polytechnical Institute, and attended a Party meeting at Smolny, the revolutionary headquarters turned city hall.

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A mix of workers and students, the protestors rallied around a handmade torch-bearing “Goddess of Democracy” that looked uncannily like America’s Statue of Liberty—hardly the Western import Deng hoped to encourage with his reforms. Though intra-Party disagreements were not unusual, the public daylight between Deng and Zhao was unprecedented. Escalating the situation was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s long-planned May 15 state visit. “How big is this square?” the USSR’s general secretary asked en route, high over Mongolia, when his advance team reported there were now, a full month after Hu’s death, well over a hundred thousand protestors in Tiananmen. Ironically, it was Soviet urban planners who had helped expand Tiananmen in the 1950s, but Sino-Soviet relations had so soured over the intervening decades that this would be Gorbachev’s first visit to the world’s largest Communist country.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap
by Graham Allison
Published 29 May 2017

When talking among themselves, Kuhn notes, Xi’s team emphasizes that being number one means being first not only in economic terms, but also in defense, science, technology, and culture.35 Making China great again is thus not just a matter of making it rich. Xi means to make it powerful, make it proud, and make the Party, as the primary driver for the entire venture, once again the worthy vanguard of the people. XI’S NIGHTMARE When Xi Jinping has nightmares, the apparition he sees is Mikhail Gorbachev. Shortly after taking power, Xi asked his close colleagues a rhetorical question: “Why did the Soviet Union collapse?” As he never tires of reminding them, “It is a profound lesson for us.” After careful analysis, Xi concluded that Gorbachev made three fatal errors. He relaxed political control of society before he had reformed his country’s economy.

…

As the French ambassador to Germany argued publicly, unification “would give birth to a Europe dominated by Germany, which no one in the East or the West wants.”16 Nonetheless, President Bush and his national security team moved ahead. They insisted, however, that a unified Germany remain inside NATO—not leaving it disarmed or neutral, as the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sought. For Bush, a unified Germany leading European institutions would become a centerpiece in his vision of a “Europe whole and free.”17 As Thatcher and Mitterrand foresaw, Germany’s growing economic strength increasingly gave it the dominant political voice on the Continent. In 1989, German GDP was roughly equal to that of Britain and France; today, it is 40 percent larger.18 When the EC (European Community) became the EU (European Union) and most of its members surrendered their national currencies to create a common euro, the European Central Bank was naturally located in Germany.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

They had that sense of purpose, of strength, and of dignity, which was not there before.” Revolutionary Weather Less than nine months after the Mexico City quake, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, melted down and eventually dragged down an empire with it. In 2006, the man who had been head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, reflected, “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was a historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”

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Managua, Nicaragua 1972 and Mexico City 1985,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 21, no. 1 (March 2003): 3-35. 155 “It is such a shock”: Gioconda Belli, in interview with the author, Santa Monica, California, April 2007. 156 “kleptocracy”: Olson and Gawronski,” “Disasters as Critical Junctures,” 10. 159 “The nuclear meltdown”: Mikhail Gorbachev, “Turning Point at Chernobyl,” http://economistsview.typpepad.com/economistsview/2006/04/gorbachev_chern.html/. 160 “Insurrections by a ‘nature’ that had seemed”: Mark Healey, “The Fragility of the Moment: Politics and Class in the Aftermath of the 1944 Argentine Earthquake,” International Labor and Working Class Journal, no. 62 (Fall 2002): 5. 161 secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover: In John M.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

In 2021 the CCP did something its Soviet counterpart never got to do: it celebrated its centenary. Beijing made no secret of its adherence to an ideological heritage that ran by way of Marx and Engels to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Xi Jinping could hardly have been more emphatic about the need to cleave to this tradition and no clearer in his condemnation of Mikhail Gorbachev for losing hold of the Soviet Union’s ideological compass.70 So the “new” Cold War was really the “old” Cold War revived, the Cold War in Asia, the one that the West had in fact never won. There were, however, two spectacular differences dividing old from new. The first was the economy. China was the threat that it was as the result of the greatest economic boom in world history.

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In fact, America’s entire test system was in disarray. But this did not stop Trump from declaring that South Korea was calling on America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t. All I say is, ‘Be calm.’ Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”52 It was reminiscent not so much of Mikhail Gorbachev responding to Chernobyl as of Saddam Hussein in the face of Shock and Awe. Trump’s delusional state was no doubt special, but he was not alone. In Mexico, populist president AMLO took a no-less-blasé attitude. In 2009 he had campaigned against the swine fever lockdown under President Felipe Calderón.53 Eleven years later he called on Mexicans to remain calm and remember that Covid was not as bad as the flu.54 In Brazil, President Bolsonaro’s approach was characteristically macho.

Pocket Rough Guide Berlin (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 16 Oct 2019

October 3, 1990 The two parts of Berlin are unified as part of the Federal Republic of Germany. 1997 Peter Eisenman’s controversial design for a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is chosen. 1999 Berlin becomes capital of a reunified Germany and the German government and parliament begin their work in Berlin. 2005 Openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit dubs Berlin “poor but sexy”, which becomes a slogan for the city. 2006 The new Hauptbahnhof is opened. 2008 Tempelhof airport is officially closed; the surrounding area is later turned into a public park. 2009 Twenty years since the fall of the Wall is celebrated with a “Festival of Freedom”. Visiting dignitaries include Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton. 2014 Structural work on new Stadtschloss (City Palace) completed; scheduled to open 2019. 2014 Germany beat Argentina 1–0 in the World Cup Final. 2015–16 Berlin takes in a million refugees. 2016 12 people die during a Christmas market terror attack in Berlin. 2018 Over 200,000 people march and protest against the rise of far-right populism in Berlin 2019 On 9 November, Berlin celebrates 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall < Back to Essentials German Being the cosmopolitan city it is, it’s fairly easy to get around Berlin using English.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

Ioseliani and Kitovani had taken over what was left of the Georgian state, but conflict was rife and they weren’t making any progress in bringing order. Just as important, they needed a respectable face to show to the international community to gain legitimacy and access to foreign aid and resources. They hit on the plan to make Eduard Shevardnadze president. Shevardnadze, a native of Georgia, had been Mikhail Gorbachev’s minister of foreign affairs for six years until resigning in December 1990. By 1992 Shevardnadze had become speaker of the Georgian parliament. It was obvious that with his many contacts and immense international experience, he’d be the ideal face for the new nation. The idea of the warlords was simple.

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But now there was a disintegration of not just the Soviet “manipulatory instruments” and the state’s capacity to control society. The newly independent countries were also left without tax systems and many other aspects of modern administrations. All of this didn’t happen at once, of course. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, his plan was to revitalize, not destroy, the Soviet Union. He launched the joint policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). It was mostly perestroika that Gorbachev was interested in, so that he could reconfigure the institutions and incentives of the stagnating Russian economy.

…

Nowhere was this discontent larger than in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States that had been occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Anti-Soviet protests had flared up before, in Hungary in 1956 and in the Prague Spring of 1968, where Havel cut his political teeth, but had been crushed. By January 1990 the Polish Communist Party was voting to disband itself, and by December of the next year Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to declare the Soviet Union extinct. Russia was soon flooded with Western economists and experts to help the new government forge a transition to a market-based liberal democracy. Poland was too, but the two countries ended up on remarkably different paths. The fall in the state’s power brought about by the Soviet collapse had very different effects depending on where a country was relative to the corridor.

What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World
by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
Published 1 Oct 2007

If you look at what he said, it is not really controversial. Maybe you don’t like the tone, but the facts are correct, and there is a background to it. The Russians really have security problems. They were practically destroyed a couple of times in the last century by Germany alone. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev made the quite remarkable concession of allowing the unification of Germany within the NATO military alliance.22 So a country that had practically destroyed Russia twice in that century was allowed to be part of a huge hostile military alliance, always aimed at Russia, of course. It was an incredible gesture by Gorbachev, but there was a quid pro quo.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

Far from challenging the United States for economic supremacy, as Khrushchev had threatened, the Soviet Union had achieved per-capita consumption of around 24 per cent of the American level – a challenge to Turkey, at best.107 At the same time, the shift in superpower relations towards détente and disarmament made the Soviets’ ability to mass-produce missiles a good deal less valuable. High oil prices in the 1970s had given the system a stay of execution; as oil fell in the 1980s the Soviet bloc was left with nothing but hard-currency debts – money borrowed from the very system Khrushchev had promised to ‘bury’. Mikhail Gorbachev, appointed general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, felt there was now no alternative but to reform both the economic and the political system, including the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. With perestroika and glasnost the new watchwords in Moscow, hard-liners in East Berlin were left high and dry – forced into censoring publications and reports not only from the West but from the Soviet Union as well.

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With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. According to one recent account, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that ‘averted Armageddon’.16 But this was not apparent at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA (wrongly) estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 per cent the size of the US economy. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the US stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets’ favour for most of the previous twenty years.

Game Over Press Start to Continue
by David Sheff and Andy Eddy
Published 1 Jan 1993

He was a trusted adviser of leaders in Israel and Canada and a powerful force in opposition to the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major in Britain. He spoke nine languages fluently, and his phone rang incessantly with calls from world leaders. When a secretary told him that the prime minister was on the phone, he asked, “Which one?” Maxwell was trusted by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, but he had been a familiar face in the Kremlin even earlier. He had known and published books by four former Soviet leaders—Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko, and Khrushchev—so there was every reason to believe his boasts about his influence in the U.S.S.R. Although Maxwell’s son Kevin was in charge of Mirrorsoft over Mackonochie, the elder Maxwell had a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch on all aspects of his parent companies, Maxwell Communications Corporation and the Mirror Group.

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Another game, for computers, called “Faces,” was sold through a joint-venture company called ParaGraph to Spectrum Holobyte. “Faces” had scrambled puzzle pieces made of slices of the faces of famous scientists, painters, and politicians. Players unscrambled the falling pieces to create complete portraits. One could end up with a face that combined Mikhail Gorbachev’s bald head, Margaret Thatcher’s eyes, and Ronald Reagan’s chin. “Faces” also had digitized images of cartoon characters and paintings (a winking Mona Lisa, for instance, and a Van Gogh self-portrait). Players could also scan pictures of themselves and insert them into the game. The Los Angeles Times reviewer lauded it: “[It doesn’t] encourage you to destroy worlds, and errors do not result in gory deaths.… While playing, you do your part to improve U.S.

Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2
by William Blum
Published 15 Jan 2003

"Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union."26 Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the fabric of the Soviet civilian economy and society even more than it did in the United States, this had been going on for 40 years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest hint of impending doom. Gorbachev's close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan administration's higher military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire" rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position, responded: It played no role.

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And the corollary: there was for many years a close correlation between the amicability of US-Soviet relations and the number of Jews allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union.28 Softness produced softness. If there's anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to, both the beneficial ones and those questionable, it is of course Mikhail Gorbachev and the activists he inspired. It should be remembered that Reagan was in office for over four years before Gorbachev came to power, and Thatcher for six years, but in that period of time nothing of any significance in the way of Soviet reform took place despite Reagan's and Thatcher's unremitting malice toward the communist state.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

More recently, Antanas Mockus’s inventive and playful approach to city planning has made Bogotá a city of influence beyond its size and power.9 Palermo’s Leoluca Orlando, noted crime fighter and champion of culture, won the 1994 German Best Actor Award for a television film. Most notorious of all is Yury Luzhkov, known for his long tenure in Moscow starting in 1977 as a city councillor and then as deputy mayor (1987) and mayor from 1991 to 2010. Luzhkov’s urban career reached from Leonid Brezhnev through Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, all the way to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, making him a Russian legend. Indeed, too legendary for his own good, since his longevity and independence made him such an irksome expression of Moscow’s urban autonomy, Medvedev (with Putin possibly calling the shots, and the putative corruption of Luzhkov’s wife in the news) felt compelled to oust him in 2010.

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You couldn’t really be an ideologue and govern Moscow, even before the Soviet Union fell. When I met Mayor Luzhkov in the early 1990s at an international conference he sponsored, I was struck by how different he seemed from the Soviet political types I had known—including even Georgy Shakhnazarov, the president of the Soviet Political Science Association and eventually a Mikhail Gorbachev adviser. Luzhkov was plainspoken, while Soviet politicians were circumspect and correct in the name of deviousness. He talked about governance as a challenge in solving problems rather than an excuse to argue ideology. He was a powerful personality rather than a prominent politician, a quality closely associated with mayors.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

His second term was tarnished by the Iran–Contra affair, an arms-for-hostages deal with Iran to funnel money toward anti-communist insurgencies in Central America. Though he initially denied knowing about it, Reagan later announced that it had been a mistake. It was, however, during his second term as president that Reagan forged a diplomatic relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, chairman of the Soviet Union. This was the context in which Reagan gave the following speech at the Berlin Wall, on the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin, in which he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the wall. The West German government requested that the president’s schedule be adjusted to allow him to visit Berlin on his way back from an economic summit in Venice.

…

He inaugurates the idea that the war has the noble purpose of strengthening the commitment to democracy. At a remove of twenty centuries, it is astonishing how similar David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson sound amid the thunder of the Great War, and then again what echoes ring from the resounding rhetoric of Winston Churchill in the summer of 1940. By the time Ronald Reagan implores Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, democratic politics has become not just the purpose of the war but the method by which it is fought. The aim is always the same. It is, at the final and in the finest hours, to create, through the expedient and unfortunate necessity of war, a land fit for heroes. 3 NATION: THROUGH POLITICS THE NATION IS DEFINED Imagined Communities A nation has to be spoken into existence.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Its ancient leaders in the 1970s and 1980s hung on as long as they could, with some of the last ones—Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov in particular—becoming “dead men walking.” In Andropov’s last months of life in 1985, the only organ of his body that seemed to be functioning properly was his brain. Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who succeeded Andropov in 1985, had demonstrated an uncanny ability to interpret the wishes of bosses who could barely issue orders anymore, an ability that helped him to win their favor and to position himself to succeed them as premier of the Soviet Union and the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.4 Gorbachev was a party insider, steadily and cleverly climbing through the ranks.

…

But the most important event driving politics in America in the 1990s arguably was not internal but external: the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. We thus need to end this account of the triumph of the neoliberal order by circling back to the point at which we began, with one more set of reflections on the magnitude of the changes set in motion by the Soviet reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev. Fancy, for a moment, an alternative history for eastern and central Europe during this time. Imagine that Gorbachev had been a different man, more like Deng Xiaoping in China, a right-wing communist reformer rather than a left-wing one. This right-wing version of Gorbachev, whom we might call “alt-Gorbachev,” would still have embraced glasnost and perestroika in 1985; but he would have repudiated the former in 1989 and 1990, once it became clear that a continued commitment to democracy would lead to the destruction of the Communist Party’s power and then to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The Rough Guide to Berlin
by Rough Guides

Things kick off with Otto von Bismarck and Karl Marx, followed by Adolf Hitler sitting wild-eyed in a bunker, with Anne Frank and anti-Nazi campaigner Sophie Scholl close by to provide a kinder face for the era. Local political heroes and villains also make their appearances: John F. Kennedy; West German statesman Willy Brandt; East German leader Erich Honecker; Mikhail Gorbachev. All these waxworks feel pretty true to life; not so the laughably awkward renditions of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel. From the entertainment sections there’s more local interest in the form of Marlene Dietrich and Bertolt Brecht, though it’s the aggressive stance of former Germany goalkeeper Oliver Kahn that makes the greatest impression.

…

In West Berlin, the elections of spring 1989 swept the CDU administration from power, and an SPD/Alternative Liste coalition took over, with Walter Momper as mayor. In Kreuzberg, demonstrations against what many regarded as an Alternative Liste sellout were put down with unwarranted force, sparking running street battles. When, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader and began campaigns for glasnost and perestroika, their initial impact on East Germany was slight. The SED regarded them with deep suspicion, so while Poland and Hungary embarked on the road to democracy, Erich Honecker declared that the Berlin Wall would stand for another fifty or one hundred years if necessary.

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story
by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Peter Petre
Published 30 Sep 2012

Two years earlier, in 2007, he’d been so impressed by California’s climate change initiative that he’d invited me to speak at the opening session of the United Nations. When I stepped to the podium that fall, I was almost overwhelmed to realize that I was standing where John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, and Mikhail Gorbachev had all addressed the UN before me. The occasion gave California a world stage—and an opportunity to contribute to a crucial international conversation. Now, two years later, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was meant to be the most important meeting on global warming since the completion of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

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I was glad to have a busy schedule after we separated because otherwise I would have felt lost. I kept working and stayed on the move. By the summer, I’d appeared at a series of post-governorship speaking engagements across the northern United States and Canada. I went to the Xingu River in Brazil with Jim Cameron; to London for Mikhail Gorbachev’s eightieth birthday party; to Washington, DC, for a summit on immigration; and to Cannes to receive the Legion d’Honneur medal and promote new projects. Yet while I was as busy as ever, none of it felt the way it should. What had made my career fun for more than thirty years was sharing it with Maria.

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Every time he said my weight training was garbage, that I should do something useful and go out and chop wood. Every time he disapproved of me or embarrassed me, it put fuel on the fire in my belly. It drove me and motivated me. 8. Change takes big balls. While on a trade mission to Moscow during my last year as governor, I took a little time out to visit former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev at his home. We’d become friends over the years and I’d given a speech for him and sat with him at his eightieth birthday party in London a few months before. Gorbachev’s daughter Irina made lunch for us and several friends from the Gorbachev Institute. We ate for at least two and a half hours.

London Review of Books
by London Review of Books
Published 14 Dec 2017

And then: ‘The motion is passed’ or ‘The motion is rejected.’ The Congress of People’s Deputies, the new parliament of the Soviet Union, was in session and we were hearing its elected members voting freely, unpredictably, without fear. The voice – strong, lively – belonged to the man in the chair, Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember leaning back against the window, my heart suddenly too big for my chest. So it was real. So this democracy was actually taking place, at the core of the empire, and a whole planet – rusted to its axis for generations – was beginning to rotate again. Anything could happen now. But what actually happened was that the stove burst, flooding the corridor with boiling water and smoking cinders.

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 7 Apr 2008

In August, when the Soviets invaded with tanks, DubCek urged his people not to resist, despite the fact that the Czech army was considered the best in the Warsaw Pact. When the world saw the Soviet Union invade one of its closest allies, and saw its tanks stared down by unarmed students, its defeat had already begun. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, years later, after his country had collapsed, agreed that nothing was ever the same after the 1968 invasion. Gorbachev was part of a delegation that visited Czechoslovakia in 1969 to try to win over Communist youth. He encountered hostility everywhere. Often party officials seemed afraid to be in contact with the Soviet delegation, not afraid of violence but afraid to lose all standing with Czechoslovakians.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin
Published 23 Dec 2008

The country had desperately mobilized a range of substitutes during the war—from oil imports from the United States to charcoal-burning engines for its trucks. Shortly after the war, Stalin interrogated his petroleum minister, Nikolai Baibakov (who subsequently was to be in charge of the Soviet economy for two decades—until 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev replaced him). Mispronouncing Baibakov's name, as he always did, Stalin demanded to know what the Soviet Union was going to do in the light of its very bad oil position. Its oil fields were seriously damaged and heavily depleted, with little promise for the future. How could the economy be reconstructed without oil?

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"The Doctor is one of the greatest actors in the world," was the acid comment of one of the many men who had mistakenly thought himself Hammer's heir apparent. Hammer renewed his contacts with the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev and ended up as a go-between for five Soviet General Secretaries and seven U.S. Presidents. His access to the Kremlin was unique. He was virtually the only person who could tell Mikhail Gorbachev firsthand about Lenin, who had died a decade before Gorbachev's birth. As late as 1990, at age ninety-two, Hammer was still the active chairman of Occidental, and loyal stockholders continued to sing his praises. He was indeed in the line of the great buccaneer- creators of oil: Rockefeller, Samuel and Deterding, Gulbenkian, Getty and Mattei.

…

But, bananas or not, Soviet officials could read their balance of trade accounts, and the loss in terms of hard currency earnings from oil and gas, if continued, could be devastating for the plans to reform and revive the stagnant Soviet economy that were just beginning to be formulated under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union promised to contribute a 100,000-barrel-per-day cutback to OPEC's efforts. The pledge was vague enough and the job of tracking Soviet exports sufficiently difficult that the OPEC countries could never be sure that the Russians were really as good as their word. But in the immediate turmoil, the symbolism was important.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman and Jeff Riggenbach Ph.
Published 1 Apr 2013

If you were alert back then, this refresher may be unnecessary, even laughable. If you were not alert then, this may just be laughable. But it also may help to clarify references in the book about things of that moment. In 1985: The United States population is 240 million. The Cold War is still on, though Mikhail Gorbachev has just become the Soviet leader. Ronald Reagan is president. Other major political figures include Walter “Fritz” Mondale, Democratic presidential nominee the year before; Geraldine Ferraro, his vice-presidential running mate; and presidential hopefuls/Senators Gary Hart and John Glenn (the latter a former astronaut).

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
by Emanuel Derman
Published 13 Oct 2011

The world and the markets silently beg for a Churchill, and society throws them Chamberlains. That’s the way of human affairs. But occasionally there comes that wonderful moment when people who are in a position to make a difference cease to behave mechanically. I think of Mandela and de Klerk, Vaclav Havel, and Mikhail Gorbachev, men who, rather than fulfilling their preprogrammed destinies, could imagine others as others experience themselves, men who broke the cycle of karma, and so got one step ahead of fate and altered the status quo. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen sometimes. Appendix ESCAPING BONDAGE The title of part 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics is “Of Human Bondage, or The Strength of the Emotions.”

On Power and Ideology
by Noam Chomsky
Published 7 Jul 2015

The answer is straightforward: little changed, except that earlier policies were pursued more intensively. Consider NATO. According to doctrine, NATO was established to protect Western Europe (and the world) from the Russian hordes. What happened, then, when the Russian hordes disappeared? Answer: NATO expanded to the East, in violation of verbal agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, reaching right to the borders of Russia in ways that are by now raising a serious threat of confrontation. The official role of NATO was also changed. Its mandate became control over the global energy system, sea lanes, and pipelines, while it serves in effect as a U.S.-run intervention force.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 14 Sep 2015

Then he made a joke. “Okay,” he said, “if I ever come here, I’ll ask for your help.” Lisa Bronson just smiled. “Everyone started to laugh,” Alibekov recalled, “including me.” Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov returned to Moscow with the Soviet delegation. Just a few days later, on December 25, 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. On New Year’s Eve, the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its iconic hammer and sickle beneath a gold star, was taken down from the flagpole at the Kremlin. The tricolored flag of the newly formed Russian Federation was raised in its place. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. Two weeks later, Dr.

…

With confirmation in place, it was now time to tell President George H. W. Bush about the Soviets’ prodigious, illegal biological weapons program. The wall had been down for only a few months, and from the perspective of the Pentagon, it was a precarious time as far as international security was concerned. There was a growing worry that President Mikhail Gorbachev was losing control of the Russian military. With this in mind, in the winter of 1990, President Bush decided it was best to keep the Soviets’ biological weapons program a secret. To reveal it, Bush decided, would make Gorbachev appear weak. Gorbachev was being hailed internationally as a reformer.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 30 Dec 2003

It was the end of heroic Russia: a country widely admired because it had bravely dared to stand alone and build the first socialist society, because it was the big protector in the fraternity of socialist countries, because it had sacrificed millions to rid Europe of fascism. It was no longer viewed as benign. It was the bully who crushed small countries. After the fall of the Soviets, Dubek wrote that the Soviet Union had been doomed by one essential flaw: “The system inhibited change.” The downfall took longer than most people predicted. In 2002 Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, told his long-standing friend, former Dubek government official Zdenk Mlyná: The suppression of the Prague Spring, which was an attempt to arrive at a new understanding of Socialism, also engendered a very harsh reaction in the Soviet Union, leading to a frontal assault against all forms of free-thinking.

…

The New York Times, December 14, 1968. 374 eleven different configurations, Langguth, Our Vietnam, 530. 375 14,589 American servicemen . . . the highest casualties of the entire war. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, 726. 376 “the ideology of reform Communism.” Mlynár, Nightfrost in Prague, 232. 377 “The system inhibited change.” Dubcek, Hope Dies Last, 165. 377 The suppression . . . profound stagnation. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynár, Conversations with Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 65. 378 I wanted to create a democracy . . . the other half feels successful. Jacek Kuro´n, interviewed June 2001. 378 “We have passed . . . relationships among our people.” The New York Times, December 16, 1968. 379 “more powerful than he could ever be.”

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

In its strictly historical aspect it sought to instil two cardinal dogmas—the primacy of ‘socio-economic forces’ and the benign nature of Russia’s expansion. It was greatly boosted by the Soviet defeat of Germany in 1941–5, and was still being taught as gospel to tens of millions of European students and schoolchildren in the late 1980s. Right at the end of communism’s career, the General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, revived the slogan of ‘a common European home’.102 It was seized on by many foreign commentators and widely welcomed; but Gorbachev never had time to explain what he meant. He was dictator of an empire from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka—a peninsula as remote, and as European, as neighbouring Alaska.

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Bourgeois 1971 Willy Brandt 1921 Karl Branting 1974 Sean Macbride Christian Lange 1976 Elizabeth Williams 1922 Fridtjof Nansen Mairead Corrigan 1925 J. Austen Chamberlain 1979 Mother Teresa 1926 Aristide Briand 1982 Alva Myrdal Gustav Streseman 1983 Lech Wałęsa 1927 F. E. Buisson 1986 Elie Wiesel Ludwig Ouidde 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev Of all the recipients, only two, both Germans, were made to suffer for their support of peace. Ludwig Ouidde (1858–1941) had been jailed for opposing German rearmament. Carl von Ossetzky (1889–1939), leader of the German peace movement, died in a Nazi concentration camp. Mackinder’s ideas were destined to be taken very seriously in Germany, as they were, in the subsequent era of air power, in the USA.

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‘Europe has two lungs,’ declared a Slavonic Pope; ‘it will never breathe easily until it uses both of them.’1 Europe’s wasted years fall neatly into three periods. They began in the immediate post-war era (1945–8), when Allied unity was lost. They continued through four decades of the Cold War (1948–89); and they drew to a close with the astonishing reign in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91). Overall, they may be said to have begun on VE Day, 9 May 1945, and to have ended with the final disband-ment of the Soviet Union in December 1991. By that time, almost all of Europe’s peoples were free to determine their own destiny. The End of the Grand Alliance, 1945–1948 The division of Europe was implicit in the state of affairs at war’s end.

Buyology
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 14 Jul 2008

Yet when we see supermodels, no matter how glamorous and seductive they may be to the human eye, we intrinsically feel that whatever they claim about the product is phony. They’re not telling a story; they’re acting in one. If you need more evidence that unglamorous people can sell products, consider that Mikhail Gorbachev, hardly anyone’s idea of a glamour-puss, shows up in the latest Louis Vuitton commercial—and also appears in a Russian Pizza Hut ad along with his granddaughter.16 Indeed, what we’re beginning to witness in the advertising world today is a fascinating marriage between the world of the airbrushed supermodel and the world of the ordinary consumer—a blurry union between perfect and not so perfect.

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World
by Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller
Published 3 Feb 2015

They were young and idealistic, and they wanted all or nothing. Rather than negotiate, they announced a round of even more radical tactics designed to regain momentum and reengage the masses in their cause: they would go on a hunger strike. The strike began on May 13. The timing wasn’t incidental, as the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was scheduled to land in Beijing two days later on a visit that was sure to include the city’s epicenter, Tiananmen Square. And again, it was soon obvious that the government was deeply interested in compromise: the state-run media continued to hold its nose and cover the hunger strike favorably, censorship restrictions were loosened, and a handful of intellectuals were given permission to express their critical views in a large national newspaper.

Comedy Writing Workbook
by Gene Perret
Published 1 Jan 1990

The following workouts will help you practise finding the relationships that will aid in your comedy writing. 44 COMEDY WRITING WORKBOOK = WORKOUT 4A = "That Goes With This" This workout will be practice in searching out similar ideas to relate to your basic premise. Below are the two basic ideas that you will be working on: 1. Mikhail Gorbachev visiting New York City in December of 1988. He travelled around the city extensively, visiting many tourist attractions and attending official meetings. He travelled, though, in a motorcade of 49 cars. That's your premise—the size of that motorcade. • * * • • 2. Some years ago Queen Elizabeth II visited California and was scheduled to visit then President Reagan's Santa Barbara ranch and then enjoy some horse' back riding with the President.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World
by Ian Bremmer
Published 30 Apr 2012

In fact, there are many ways in which central governments could lose much of their power, especially to local-level power brokers. The subtlest form of this trend might be a willingness by midlevel officials or local governments to ignore central government rules, plans, and policies and to substitute their own. Mikhail Gorbachev’s earliest efforts to reform the Soviet state came to almost nothing, in part because officials within the bureaucracy, anxious to protect the privileges that the system provided them, simply ignored many orders from above. The system itself fought back against efforts to change it. Gorbachev then turned to a policy known as glasnost (openness) to bypass much of the bureaucracy and appeal directly for public support for his plans.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg
Published 31 Aug 2016

They disseminated critical literature underground with the help of photocopiers, and challenged oppression publicly. As resistance grew, what had been open secrets became public facts. People already knew that their governments were oppressive and bankrupt, but now they learned that everybody else knew as well. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of a stagnating Soviet Union in 1985, he encouraged reform and raised the hope that the Soviets might not respond militarily if the satellite states chose their own path, as they had done in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. This bred hope. Nationwide strikes in Poland in 1988, and the support of the Catholic Church, forced the government to legalize Solidarity and accept partly free elections in June 1989.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell
Published 13 Apr 2020

A screen flickered to life in front of us and began to play a television documentary about the Chernobyl accident. We watched in silence as we progressed from the margins of the city to the countryside. Every so often, Igor demonstrated his familiarity with the documentary by reciting lines of dialogue along with the film. At one point, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on-screen to deliver a monologue on the terrifying timescale of the accident’s aftereffects. His data entry tasks now complete, Igor spoke along in unison with Gorbachev. “How many years will this continue to go on?” he intoned. “Eight hundred years! Yes! Until the second Jesus is born!”

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 1 Jul 2012

describe it as a motivational seminar, but that phrase – with its suggestion of minor-league life coaches giving speeches in dingy hotel ballrooms – hardly captures the scale and grandiosity of the thing. Staged roughly once a month, in cities across north America, it sits at the summit of the global industry of positive thinking, and boasts an impressive roster of celebrity speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev and Rudy Giuliani are among the regulars, as are General Colin Powell and, somewhat incongruously, William Shatner. Should it ever occur to you that a formerly prominent figure in world politics (or William Shatner) has been keeping an inexplicably low profile in recent months, there’s a good chance you’ll find him or her at Get Motivated!

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

It was the beginning of that moment of sweet delusion, between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when the good guys had won and the bad guys had lost and Germany got to be one country again and everything was going to be okay. But at the time, the Germans’ neighbors were terrified. The French, British, and Soviets thought German reunification could bring back the aggressive, expansionist Germany that had destroyed Europe less than fifty years earlier. “Help me to prevent German unification,” Mikhail Gorbachev told François Mitterrand, the president of France, when the wall came down. “Otherwise I will be replaced by a soldier; otherwise, you will bear the responsibility for war.” When Mitterrand met with Margaret Thatcher, she pulled out a map showing territories in Eastern Europe that had shifted from Germany to Poland after World War II.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

In the past, when an enemy of a great power invaded a neutral country, the great power would express its displeasure on the battlefield. In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States expressed its displeasure by withdrawing its team from the Moscow Summer Olympics. The Cold War, to everyone’s surprise, ended without a shot in the late 1980s shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power. It was followed by the peaceful tear-down of the Berlin Wall and then by the mostly peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union. • Zero is the number of times that any of the great powers have fought each other since 1953 (or perhaps even 1945, since many political scientists don’t admit China to the club of great powers until after the Korean War).

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Though several times the leaders began a perilous ascent, with each rung they climbed they became increasingly acrophobic, and always sought a way to gingerly step back down.177 And for all the shoe-pounding bluster of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, its leadership spared the world another cataclysm when Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the Soviet bloc, and then the Soviet Union itself, to go out of existence—what the historian Timothy Garton Ash has called a “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force” and a “luminous example of the importance of the individual in history.” This last remark reminds us that historical contingency works both ways.

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Not only was it becoming ludicrous for a modern economy to do without photocopiers, fax machines, and personal computers (to say nothing of the nascent Internet), but it was impossible for the country’s rulers to keep scientists and policy wonks from learning about the ideas in the increasingly prosperous West, or to keep the postwar generation from learning about rock music, blue jeans, and other perquisites of personal freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev was a man of cosmopolitan tastes, and he installed in his administration many analysts who had traveled and studied in the West. The Soviet leadership made a verbal commitment to human rights in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and a cross-border network of human rights activists were trying to get the populace to hold them to it.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire
by Wikileaks
Published 24 Aug 2015

For instance, the United States objected to Russia’s rollback of democratic reforms: circumscribing journalists, murdering dissidents, and seizing radio stations, as well as Vladimir Putin’s plan to abolish the election of governors and instead empower the Kremlin to appoint them. Russia, meanwhile, objected to Nato’s granting of membership to countries of the former Eastern Bloc—Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, as well as the three Baltic states. After all, Mikhail Gorbachev believed that, in exchange for Russia accepting the reunification of Germany, NATO would not expand to the east, which would pose a geopolitical threat to Russia and lessen its sphere of influence. Nor was Russia pleased when President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to continue development of a US missile defense system, including deployment in the former Eastern Bloc territories of Poland and the Czech Republic.

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In 1983 President Ronald Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, presciently ridiculed as “Star Wars” at the time because it sounded like as much of a fantasy as it does to this day. Patriot missiles were deployed in the Middle East during the first Gulf War and, while they achieved little success, the idea of missile defense, at least against smaller nuclear arsenals, caught on. At the Reykjavík summit in 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed eliminating half of all strategic (as opposed to tactical, or battlefield) nuclear weapons. In exchange, he asked that Reagan refrain from implementing missile defense for the next ten years. Reagan’s team responded with an offer to eliminate all ballistic missiles within the same time span, while retaining the right to missile defense thereafter.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

Consequently the land already belonged to the nation and could legally be distributed in any form the government chose. In Britain, nineteen years was the usual term for a lease, and by retaining ownership, the government would benefit from any increase in the value of its new territory. In 1990, when President Mikhail Gorbachev started to introduce a market economy to the Soviet Union, thirty of America’s most distinguished economists wrote an open letter strongly recommending him not to sell off the state’s land, because in the long term it was more economically efficient to rent or lease it. Their argument was precisely the same as Jefferson’s: leasing the land would allow future generations to enjoy a rising income from its growing value, while the sale of it would give a small gain but allow speculators to make the largest profit.

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The costs of the huge sovkhozi in terms of wages, machinery, and fertilizer absorbed more than a quarter of all government expenditure, equivalent to thirty-three billion dollars in 1981, and the purchase of American, Canadian, and Argentine wheat drained the Soviet treasury of almost eight hundred million dollars in 1972 and more than two billion in 1980. It was the reverse of the usual formula for economic development. Instead of rural revenues financing industrialization, the Soviet Union was using its industrial surplus to subsidize its agriculture. The result was what Mikhail Gorbachev would call “the era of stagnation” when the headlong growth of the socialist economy ground to a halt. It was clear that the Marxist-Leninist solution had failed. Yet in the battle for the allegiance of the world’s two billion peasants, the alternative was no longer Ladejinsky’s redistribution of property to the tiller of the soil.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

Rather than a failed four-year experiment, neoliberalism thus cemented the neoliberal turn in Britain. In the United States, the economy came roaring back in time to win reelection for Ronald Reagan in 1984—plus, he was superb at being a head-of-state-type president, even if rather bad and underqualified as a policy-analyst-type president. His wife, Nancy, persuaded him to see Mikhail Gorbachev as a potential friend in his second term. And it was the end of the Cold War that was the wind beneath neoliberalism’s wings in the United States. The hopes and claims at the start of the neoliberal turn in 1980 had been that the post–World War II golden-age pace of economic growth in the global north could be restored by governments and societies turning (at least partway) to serve the imperatives of the market, rather than the social democratic practice of managing, supplementing, and controlling the market economy.

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Much shorter is Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 16. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 7. 17. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, New York: Penguin, 2005. 6. Roaring Twenties 1. As proposed by the Soviet Union’s general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his address “Europe as a Common Home,” July 6, 1989, transcript at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, formerly the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/gorbachev-speech-7-6-89_e3ccb87237.pdf. 2. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013 [1942]. 3.

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
by Norman Davies
Published 30 Sep 2009

Linda Monument in front of the Long Herman tower in Tallinn (copyright © RIA Novosti/TopFoto) 79. Red Army soldiers occupying Tallinn, June 1940 (private collection) 80. Volunteers of the Latvian Legion parade in Talinn, 1943 (SV-Bilderdienst) 81. The Baltic Way Protest, August 1989 (ullstein bild/Nowosti) 82. Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, 1991 (copyright © RIA Novosti/TopFoto) List of Figures 1. Carolingians and Bosonids 2. The Burgundian succession 3. Early rulers of Aragon: the House of Ramiro 4. The House of Trastámara 5. The Jagiellons 6. The early Radziwiłłs 7. Hohenzollerns and Jagiellons 8. The later Hohenzollerns, 1701–1918 9.

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Reprisals were severe, but nonconformism never dried up. Throughout those long decades, it was illegal to wave the Estonian colours of blue, white and black; it was illegal to sing the pre-war national anthem; and it was treasonable to talk in public about independence. Above all, it was unwise to dream. When the young, dynamic and affable Mikhail Gorbachev stepped onto the world scene in March 1985 as the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, no one thought that the Soviet Union’s funeral was approaching. Gorbachev came to save the USSR, not to bury it. Western politicians, and the Western public, were enchanted by him. His determination to end the Cold War naturally played well, while the slogans of glasnost (often taken, wrongly, to mean ‘openness’) and perestroika (‘reconstruction’) were universally applauded.

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The forces of the Third Reich occupied Estonia from July 1941 to September 1944. CCCP 81. The Baltic Chain, 23 August 1989, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: two million protesters link hands over the 350 miles from Estonia to Latvia and Lithuania. 82. Moscow, August 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev, secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party and president of the USSR, is publicly berated by Boris Yeltsin, president of the RSFSR (Soviet Russia). Fifteen Soviet republics, including Russia, were starting out on their road to sovereign independence, and the Soviet Union was about to vanish.

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe
by Norman Davies
Published 27 Sep 2011

Linda Monument in front of the Long Herman tower in Tallinn (copyright © RIA Novosti/TopFoto) 79. Red Army soldiers occupying Tallinn, June 1940 (private collection) 80. Volunteers of the Latvian Legion parade in Talinn, 1943 (SV-Bilderdienst) 81. The Baltic Way Protest, August 1989 (ullstein bild/Nowosti) 82. Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, 1991 (copyright © RIA Novosti/TopFoto) List of Figures 1. Carolingians and Bosonids 2. The Burgundian succession 3. Early rulers of Aragon: the House of Ramiro 4. The House of Trastámara 5. The Jagiellons 6. The early Radziwiłłs 7. Hohenzollerns and Jagiellons 8. The later Hohenzollerns, 1701–1918 9.

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Reprisals were severe, but nonconformism never dried up. Throughout those long decades, it was illegal to wave the Estonian colours of blue, white and black; it was illegal to sing the pre-war national anthem; and it was treasonable to talk in public about independence. Above all, it was unwise to dream. When the young, dynamic and affable Mikhail Gorbachev stepped onto the world scene in March 1985 as the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, no one thought that the Soviet Union’s funeral was approaching. Gorbachev came to save the USSR, not to bury it. Western politicians, and the Western public, were enchanted by him. His determination to end the Cold War naturally played well, while the slogans of glasnost (often taken, wrongly, to mean ‘openness’) and perestroika (‘reconstruction’) were universally applauded.

…

The forces of the Third Reich occupied Estonia from July 1941 to September 1944. 81. The Baltic Chain, 23 August 1989, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi–Soviet Pact: two million protesters link hands over the 350 miles from Estonia to Latvia and Lithuania. 82. Moscow, August 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev, secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party and president of the USSR, is publicly berated by Boris Yeltsin, president of the RSFSR (Soviet Russia). Fifteen Soviet republics, including Russia, were starting out on their road to sovereign independence, and the Soviet Union was about to vanish.

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 27 Aug 2007

It was impossible to provide a more definitive estimate fifteen years before the fact because the future was not yet certain. It never is. Intermediate and Immediate Warning By the early 1980s, the faltering Soviet economy was a given, the assumed context within which the intelligence community viewed Soviet political and military developments. For example, in 1985, as Mikhail Gorbachev took control, the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet domestic scene 2990-7 ch04 berkowitz 34 7/23/07 12:09 PM Page 34 bruce berkowitz encapsulated the fundamental weaknesses in the Soviet state. It did not yet say that the conditions for collapse were present, but it explained how such a path was possible: The growth of the Soviet economy has been systematically decelerating since the 1950s as a consequence of dwindling supplies of new labor, the increasing cost of raw material inputs, and the constraints on factor productivity improvement imposed by the rigidities of the planning and management system. . . .

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
by James Meek
Published 18 Aug 2014

.* But at the end of 1990, the triumph of marketism seemed to hang in the balance. Reagan and Thatcher had relinquished the stage to less fervent, less charismatic successors. The man who’d introduced the market economy to China, Deng Xiaoping, had been blamed by traditional communists for fostering the Tiananmen Square protests, and was in disgrace. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, the great hope of free marketeers, was facing a similar backlash from hardliners, and the Baltic countries’ hopes of escape from the USSR looked bleak. Saddam Hussein, dictator of semi-socialist Iraq, had invaded semi-capitalist Kuwait. Yet the following year conviction began to grow among the marketeers that the final defeat of centrally planned, communitarian government was at hand, the sense that seemed to confirm such ideas as America having ‘won’ the Cold War, and the ‘end of history’.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter
Published 16 Oct 2013

Due in part to his collaboration with foreign scientists, including d’Herelle, and for pursuing a woman who was also admired by Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin’s chief of secret police, Eliava was pronounced an “enemy of the people” and executed in 1937.24 The Eliava Institute survived without its founder and became one of the largest units developing therapeutic phage, at its peak producing several tons a day. In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, restored Eliava’s name during a reassessment of the victims of the Great Purge. By the middle of the 1930s, the hype and hope that phage therapy would end bacterial diseases had failed to materialize, and any evidence of its efficacy had been clouded by the lack of standardization of materials.25 During that decade the American Medical Association issued withering critiques of the method,26 but lying as they did at the borderline of life, phages continued to fascinate basic researchers.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
by Christian Rudder
Published 8 Sep 2014

My friend Justin was Morris’s casting director, so he got me on the list. There was no guarantee that I’d end up in the final cut of the short, but I could do the interview on-camera and see how it went. Having an in, I got scheduled the same day as the biggest names: Donald Trump, Walter Cronkite, Iggy Pop, Al Sharpton, Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump and Gorbachev were back to back, and somewhere out there there’s a picture of the two of them, with me in the middle, photobombing before photobombing was a thing. I say “somewhere” because right after the flash, Trump snapped his fingers, and his bodyguard took Justin’s camera. For his favorite movie, Trump picked King Kong, because he of course likes apes who try to “conquer New York.”

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone
by Mark Goulston M. D. and Keith Ferrazzi
Published 31 Aug 2009

At that instant, instead of trying to get the better of each other, you “get” each other and that breakthrough can lead to cooperation, collaboration, and effective communication. The Cold War, in fact, may have ended on just such an empathic tipping point. In a now-legendary moment, President Ronald Reagan’s talks with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to be at a standstill when Reagan looked behind his adversary‘s stubborn face to see a leader who truly loved his people. In a moment of brilliant simplicity, he invited Gorbachev to “Call me Ron” (as opposed to “Let’s keep fighting president-to-president, digging our heels in and getting nowhere”).

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

Of Saddam Hussein, he said on the 2016 campaign trail, “He was a bad guy—really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over.”42 Interviewed in 1990 by Playboy magazine, Trump condemned Mikhail Gorbachev as insufficiently brutal, unlike the rulers of communist China. Q: What were your other impressions of the Soviet Union? Trump: I was very unimpressed. Their system is a disaster. What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

The supply-side reforms of UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan were in full swing, and the divisive miners' strike in the UK had just ended with the closure of most of the nation's coal mines. The US introduced the Tax Reform Act of 1986, designed to simplify the federal income tax code and broaden the tax base. Meanwhile, international events were also in flux. Mikhail Gorbachev had just (in March 1985) become leader of the Soviet Union following the death of former leader Konstantin Chernenko. During a speech in Leningrad in May 1985, President Gorbachev admitted to the problems in the economy and poor living standards; he was the first Soviet leader to do so. This was followed by a series of policy initiatives, which included Glasnost – allowing more freedom of information – and Perestroika – political and economic reform; these were to prove seminal and more influential than seemed obvious at the time.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
by Tim Marshall
Published 8 Mar 2018

Most of us were in our thirties before we ever met anyone from ‘over there’ because it was difficult to get there – and nigh on impossible for them to get ‘here’. Many people behind the Iron Curtain lived in a system where they needed a permit to travel from one city to another within their own country, never mind cross an international border to the West. For twenty-eight years it was just the way it was. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Slowly he began loosening the chains around people’s lives. The word ‘perestroika’ began to be used, meaning ‘restructuring’, but also signifying ‘listening’. Within this came the idea of ‘glasnost’, or openness. In a thousand small ways society and politics opened up and people listened to each other.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
by Peter Pomerantsev
Published 29 Jul 2019

Tuning in became necessary for sanity and survival. It would take another two weeks before the Soviet media made any official announcement. By then any remaining faith in them was shot: you couldn’t trust them to tell you what was in your milk, your meat, your bread, your water. In 1987 the new general secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted that the lack of truth surrounding Chernobyl had been a disaster.18 He promised to give new freedom to Soviet media. He removed restrictions on foreign books, films, video cassettes, on access to historical records and to Chernobyl itself. He called the politics ‘glasnost’ – literally ‘giving voice’.

Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism
by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin
Published 1 Nov 2007

In one noted case, Joseph Begun, a Jewish mathematician who taught an underground Hebrew class, was fired from his job, then convicted for not working and exiled to Siberia. (Begun later emigrated to Israel and, in sweet irony, later taught at a Jewish summer camp outside Moscow, which had formerly been a KGB center. The irony goes deeper: at this camp, KGB officers had plotted the failed putsch against President Mikhail Gorbachev. When Begun told this story in 1999, he noted that one KGB officer was then languishing in the very prison cell Begun had once occupied.) Government-inspired antisemitism, coupled with renewed Jewish pride after the Six-Day War, led to a large migration of Soviet Jews, many of whom risked their lives to emigrate.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

I think back to how I ended up here in the supposed center of the financial universe at the mercy of the market gods. I started as an undergrad with an eye toward law school, expecting to be some sort of litigator. But this was 1990, and the world was changing. Only two and a half years after President Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate imploring Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” the wall had fallen, and with it, the Soviet Union’s credibility. The Evil Empire was teetering like a Jenga tower, and people were transfixed on what the world would look like once it finally imploded. Three hundred million people freed from the binds of communism, countries reasserting their autonomy, new frontiers, and new markets.

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence
by Christopher Andrew
Published 27 Jun 2018

Of the first group of eighteen Soviet Fulbright scholars selected to study in the US in 1958, half were KGB or GRU officers operating under student cover; the remainder ‘could be counted on to cooperate’ with them. Four of the eighteen went to Columbia. Two (including Kalugin) were KGB, one was GRU, and the fourth, Alexander Yakovlev, later a Politburo member under Mikhail Gorbachev, became known as the ‘godfather of glasnost’. Probably like the other three Fulbright scholars at Columbia, Kalugin was initially almost overcome by the experience of living in New York: In the first few weeks, I walked ceaselessly around Manhattan, overwhelmed by its power and beauty and bustle.

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Unaware that British blood donors are unpaid, the Centre instructed the London residency in 1983 to monitor the prices paid to them, in the belief that any increase might indicate preparations for war. The Centre also suspected that Church leaders and heads of major banks might have been secretly informed of plans for a nuclear first strike, and ordered the residency to investigate.105 There is no better evidence of the extent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy after he became General Secretary in March 1985 than his dissatisfaction with the bias of the KGB’s political reporting. In December 1985 Viktor Chebrikov, KGB Chairman since 1982, summoned a meeting of the KGB leadership to discuss a stern memorandum from Gorbachev on ‘the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies’ – a damning indictment of its previous political correctness.

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Korchnoi flew into a rage when a Soviet ‘parapsychologist’, Vladimir Zukhar, with (according to the New York Times correspondent) ‘eyes supposedly like burning coals’, took a seat near the front of the spectators. Karpov eventually won 6-5.110 Only when the vast apparatus of Soviet social control began to be dismantled under Mikhail Gorbachev did the full extent of the KGB’s importance to the survival of the USSR retrospectively become clear. The manifesto of the hard line leaders of the August 1991 coup, of which the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was the chief organizer, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state: ‘Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population . . .

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

Are Political Scientists Better Than Pundits? The disintegration of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc occurred at a remarkably fast pace—and all things considered, in a remarkably orderly way.* On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall—an applause line that seemed as audacious as John F. Kennedy’s pledge to send a man to the moon. Reagan was prescient; less than two years later, the wall had fallen. On November 16, 1988, the parliament of the Republic of Estonia, a nation about the size of the state of Maine, declared its independence from the mighty USSR.

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One such method was put forward by Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian-born mathematical geophysicist who is now in his late eighties and teaches at UCLA. Keilis-Borok had done much to advance the theory of how earthquakes formed and first achieved notoriety in 1986 when, at a summit meeting in Reykjavík with Mikhail Gorbachev, President Reagan was handed a slip of paper predicting a major earthquake in the United States within the next five years, an event later interpreted to be the Loma Prieta quake that struck San Francisco in 1989.46 In 2004, Keilis-Borok and his team claimed to have made a “major breakthrough” in earthquake prediction.47 By identifying patterns from smaller earthquakes in a given region, they said, they were able to predict large ones.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Published 1 Jan 2000

The only thing the attendees have in common is that they are all successful. These meetings serve as meritocratic Versailles, exclusive communities for the educated aristocracy, to gather and chat about their various lecture fees. Except instead of Lord So-and-So conversing with Duke Such-and-Such, at these meetings Mikhail Gorbachev will be in the corner conferring with Ted Turner, Elie Wiesel will be lecturing Richard Dreyfuss, and George Steiner will be lost in conversation with Nancy Kassebaum Baker. These institutions are run by the new consecrators of social prestige, foundation officials. Program officers are like the hostesses of the French salons, great themselves for their ability to recognize success.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
by Tim Marshall
Published 10 Oct 2016

In response, most of the Communist states of Europe—under Russian leadership—formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defense and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight, by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust. President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as a “major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; and Albania in 2009.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 26 Mar 2014

Bush and Barack Obama has managed to bring the term “gulag” back into circulation,43 Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, like Nixon and the Watergate tapes, in retrospect lend the term “glasnost” a certain appeal. Glasnost—­openness, transparency, availability to public speech—did not become a familiar term in the West until the era of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, although it was long used by authors and producers of samizdat, self-­made publications—typed carbon paper duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates, etc.—which circulated semi-­privately in the Soviet Union as a medium of dissent.44 It can be applied in a narrow sense to the exposing of the Pentagon’s machinations and Nixonian malfeasance.

Them: Adventures With Extremists
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Jan 2001

Their photograph albums were there also, along with some vases and statuettes. There were ugly paintings of Nicolae Ceauescu standing victoriously before the corpses of bears. There were backgammon sets and dusty, factory-built tea sets that had never been used – gifts from Yasser Arafat and Kim Il-sung and Mikhail Gorbachev. The truth was, Mr Ru Ru and I concluded, the stuff being auctioned was tatty and disappointing. It would be worth almost nothing if it wasn’t for the Ceauescu connections. It looked like a Ceauescu car boot sale rather than the spread of overwhelming riches I had envisaged as I drove up here from Bucharest.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall
by Peter Millar
Published 1 Oct 2009

I had already leapt to the computer to enter the same Snap codes as before – without asking London for fresh authorisation – with Robert still babbling excitedly in my ear: ‘Eto Gorbachev, Peter, Eto Gorbachev!!’ It’s Gorbachev! It was too. But even as I typed the six bells and the brief formulaic line: ‘Mikhail Gorbachev elected Soviet leader – official’, I had no idea how important those six words were going to prove. Nor had the rest of the world. 8 Back to Blighty, Back to Berlin The Gorbachev effect was still no more than two hazily understood words – glasnost and perestroika – by the time my spell in Moscow came to a truncated end.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

The internet was supposed to change politics forever, but every new app seems to expose us to new risks. But we’ve actually just come through the era of real uncertainties—a kind of interregnum. It was a twenty-five-year stretch between the political order of the Cold War and the beginning of something new. In 1991 a group of hard-line Communist leaders tested Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union. Dedicated citizens wouldn’t give up their cause and kept up their acts of civil disobedience. Boris Yeltsin made an impassioned plea from atop a tank in front of Russia’s parliament buildings, and the hard-liners lost. Yet that was also the year that Tim Berners-Lee published the first text on a webpage and demonstrated how large amounts of content could be made widely available over digital networks.

Toast
by Stross, Charles
Published 1 Jan 2002

This is not the 21st century we were promised: instead of our flying cars and food pills—or the more prosaic but believable “long boom” pushed by WIRED’s panglossian technophiles, we hit the buffers with a crash and the wreckage of the 20th century is still crumpling around us. The 20th century was a remarkable era. Historian Eric Hobsbawm dated it as running from June 28th, 1914 (when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, raising the curtain on the First World War) until December 25th, 1991 (when Mikhail Gorbachev formally dissolved the Soviet Union). But that diagnosis was carried out in the 1990s, back when it was possible for conservative political analyst Francis Fukuyama to publish a book titled The End of History without being laughed out of town and pelted with rotten fruit. It is seductively tempting in 2005 to say that the 20th century really ended on September 11th, 2001, with an iconic act of violence that may well lead to long-term consequences as horrific as the start of the First World War.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
by David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Published 14 Jun 2009

Those who grew up with George Orwell’s novel with that year as its title looked ahead to 1984 as a symbol of everything that could go wrong with society – and with the hope that the world might be different from that experienced by Big Brother and Winston Smith. In the event, there were certainly convulsions enough – the British Miners’ Strike, the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev and the arrival in the UK of cruise missiles. There was the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and the start of the countdown towards the Big Bang deregulation in the City of London, and the wild worldwide speculation that we have become used to since. There was no one Big Brother, but there was – in a sense – a series of them.

Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star
by Tracey Thorn
Published 7 Feb 2013

And in their wisdom they selected Everything But The Girl and our natural musical allies, reggae band Misty in Roots. Also on the trip with us was Sean O’Hagan from the NME, and I’m indebted to the piece he later wrote in the paper for any clear recollections of the trip at all. To say the experience was a strange one would be an almost criminal understatement. Mikhail Gorbachev had only been in power for four months, and it was too early for his glasnost policy to have yielded any significant or noticeable changes. The country may have been poised on the brink of sweeping and radical reforms, but to our eyes it still seemed to be operating in an almost parodically oppressive manner.

An Edible History of Humanity
by Tom Standage
Published 30 Jun 2009

But the Soviet leaders assumed that oil prices would remain high indefinitely, and therefore they did not build up their foreign-currency reserves before the oil price fell sharply in 1985–86. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s borrowing increased. The Soviet leaders were all too aware of the danger of relying on their Cold War adversaries for food. But they had little choice. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, began to introduce economic reforms, but to little avail as infighting paralyzed the regime. Soon all of the Soviet Union’s oil revenue was being consumed by interest payments; and poor global grain harvests in 1989–90 drove up prices, in particular of wheat.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

‘I’m new to this … er … scene,’ I mumble. He calms himself, now pausing between every word as if he is explaining simple calculus to a schoolkid: ‘We. All. Know. Who. Don’t you? Kohl and Gorbachev.’ In July 1990, the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl travelled to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and seal off one of the most important deals in the history of the twentieth century: the reunification of Germany. ‘How old are you?’ he asks after staring at me a few seconds. ‘Twenty-three,’ I reply without hesitation. ‘Well, you will see it all then. I’m forty-five and even I will still have to live through this.’

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
by Alex von Tunzelmann
Published 7 Jul 2021

‘Third prize went to a statue of Lenin reading Pushkin; second prize, to a statue of Pushkin reading Lenin; and the first prize was awarded to a statue of Lenin!’19 The Soviet leadership knew that this was getting a bit daft. Under the leadership of Yuri Andropov in 1983, new monuments were banned except with ‘exceptional’ permission from Moscow. Just three years later, though, Mikhail Gorbachev loosened these regulations again. Gorbachev hoped to legitimize his reforming programme by connecting it back to the founder of the Soviet Union. He was often photographed laying wreaths at Lenin statues and memorials.20 In 1987, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote ‘Monuments Still Not Built’, asserting that ‘There can be no rebuilding without rebuilding memory.’

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

Soviet technocrats were remarkably successful considering the enormity of their task, but the inefficiencies of the system fueled popular resentment. Back in the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville had argued that the most dangerous time for a bad government was when it tried to mend its ways. Mikhail Gorbachev’s years in office revealed the truth of the claim. His attempts to renovate the system only undermined the coercion that held it together. With hindsight we can see that both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals to carry out sweeping democratic transformations was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution and a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

The Authoritarians
by Robert Altemeyer
Published 2 Jan 2007

For example these churches strongly advocate a traditional family structure of father-as-head, mother as subservient to her husband and caretaker of the husband’s begotten, and kids as subservient, period. The authoritarian followers who fill a lot of the pews in these churches strongly agree. And they want everybody’s family to be like that. (A word of advice, guys: check with your wives first.) Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev (Thanks so much, Mikhail!) I can show you how thoroughly some high RWAs sop up the teachings of another set of authorities, their government. As soon as Gorbachev lifted the restraints on doing psychological research in the Soviet Union an acquaintance of mine, Andre Kamenshikov, administered a survey to students at Moscow State University with the same freedom that western researchers take for granted.

From Beirut to Jerusalem
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 1 Jan 1989

Instead, it was his role as a symbol, and some unexpected emotional chemistry within the soul of the Palestinian community under Israeli occupation, that would bring him back to political life. The way the Palestinian issue was shunted aside by King Hussein and the other Arab leaders in Amman, the way Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev ignored it a few weeks later at their summit meeting in Washington, the way Israeli leaders were boasting that no one cared about the PLO any longer, were taken as direct insults by many West Bankers and Gazans. After all, Arafat and the PLO were the symbols of their national aspirations, their only symbols on the world stage; if they were being marginalized by the Arabs and the Great Powers, this meant that all Palestinian aspirations were being marginalized—possibly for good.

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According to A.D.T.’s tabulations, from December 1987, when the intifada erupted, through February 1988, when it peaked, the story of the Palestinian demonstrations and the Israeli responses occupied a total of 347 minutes of evening news time on the three major American networks combined. That, according to A.D.T., was almost 100 minutes more than the second most popular story during the same time period, the December 1987 Washington superpower summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which merited only 249 minutes, and it was almost 200 minutes more than the third most popular story, the 1988 New Hampshire presidential primary (139 minutes). Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s entire campaign for August, September, and October 1988 totaled only 268 minutes on the three major American networks.

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War
by Benn Steil
Published 13 Feb 2018

Before the month was out, the chancellor would, with no advance clearing abroad, announce a “Ten Point Program” for unification in the Bundestag. French President François Mitterrand, who had made it a priority to keep in lockstep with his German counterpart, was shocked and offended. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was furious; he would give Federal Republic foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher a tongue-lashing in Moscow a week later. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned Kohl that “reunification [would] open a Pandora’s box of border claims right through Central Europe” and “risk[ed] undermining Gorbachev’s position,” on which the West depended for democratization in the East.

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Chuev (1993:77). 10 Moorhouse (2014:17); Montefiore (2003:206). 11 Byrnes (1947:278–79). 12 Roberts (2011:3–4). 13 Bidault (1965 [1967]:40). 14 Churchill I (1948:330). 15 Novikov (1989). 16 Pogue IV (1987:175). 17 Bidault (1965 [1967]:144); Cray (1990 [2000]:600). 18 Cray (1990 [2000]:600–602). 19 Gimbel (1968:112). 20 Harrington (2012:27). See also Harbutt (1986) and Trachtenberg (1999:vii–viii, 15–55). 21 Reynolds (2006:270). A committee of demographers appointed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 used census and military records to put the number of deaths from the war at approximately 26.6 million; this was out of a prewar population of 196.7 million (13.5 percent). Source: Ellman and Maksudov (1994). 22 Chuev (1993:60). 23 Plokhy (2010:111, 257). Bohlen minutes, “Second Plenary Meeting, February 5, 1945, 4 PM, Livadia Palace,” in FRUS: Conferences at Malta and Yalta, III: 621; Churchill I (1948:308); “From Ivan Maisky’s Diary,” in Rzheshevskii (2004:498). 24 Zubok (2007:14). 25 See the estimates in Kindleberger (1991:77–80) and Maier (1991:18). 26 Reynolds (2006:45). 27 Murphy, memorandum, “Meeting of the Economic Subcommittee,” July 20, 1945, in FRUS: The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), II: 141–42. 28 Isaacson and Thomas (1986 [2012]:291); Harriman to Stettinius, April 4, 1945, in FRUS, 1945, V: 817–20. 29 Harrington (2012:32). 30 Isaacson and Thomas (1986 [2012]:307).

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life
by Pam Grout
Published 14 May 2007

What the 24,300-ton vessel does offer is an 8,000-volume library, nine classrooms, a computer lab, a student union, a campus bookstore, a swimming pool, a fitness center, a spa, and a health clinic. But the best perks are the interport lecturers. Over the years, students at sea have been treated to talks by Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Indira Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Mother Teresa, and Fidel Castro, who one year met with students for eight entire hours. Desmond Tutu, a frequent interport lecturer and big fan of the floating campus for global studies, even signed on to be a guest lecturer for the entire spring semester voyage of 2007.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 23 Feb 2016

A 2014 study in the Lancet tracked 151,000 adults across three Russian cities for over a decade and concluded that up to 25 percent of all Russian men die before the age of 55, with liver disease and alcohol poisoning the main causes of death. Drinking and alcohol-related morbidity are linked to political volatility, too. In 1985, then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, cut back on nationwide vodka production and passed a law prohibiting stores from selling liquor before noon. Consumption and overall death rates both dropped. When communism fell, vodka became available again, and rates of consumption and alcohol-related deaths rose accordingly. Russian women aren’t teetotalers by any means, but the average life expectancy for Russian men today is around 64, the lowest of any country in the world outside African nations.

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?
by Gary Younge
Published 27 Jun 2011

viii. 1991: Leningrad I rose, in a state of deep excitement, to the sound of a rumbling trolley bus and flakes of snow that looked as big as my palm. When I told people that, after Paris, I was going to study in Leningrad, they would purse their lips and inhale deeply. All the news reports claimed that Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to democratize and modernize the Soviet Union was causing mayhem; there were food shortages, rationing and chaos. I couldn’t wait. While I had never been particularly interested in the politics of the Soviet Union, I had always been fascinated by the place, and now I felt I was in a race between me and events.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

This excruciating moment of vulnerability occurred in the summer of 1983, when, according to Weiss’s immediate NSC superior, “the two blocs were closer to hot war than at any time since the 1962 missile crisis.”52 Fortunately, the hardliner Yuri Andropov would eventually be replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Within the decade, glasnost and perestroika would follow—partly, at least, because of the intelligence roles played by an American patriot and a Soviet traitor. Very soon after Vetrov’s death, Gorbachev would trade an interest in the development of Siberian energy resources to Western companies.

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
by Charles Seife
Published 27 Oct 2009

Perhaps, though, by pooling their resources and joining together in one great effort, fusion scientists around the world could finally build a working fusion reactor. The idea of an international reactor had been around since the budgets started dropping, but it truly came to life in 1985. At a summit in Geneva, Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reduce tensions between the U.S. and the USSR. Gorbachev suggested to Reagan the possibility of a joint effort to build a fusion reactor. Reagan jumped at the chance, as did France and Japan. Together, the four countries would build an enormous tokamak that would finally achieve ignition and sustained burn.

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad
by Christian Wolmar
Published 4 Aug 2014

Apart from the fact that just one of the major tunnels was ready for use, only a third of the 2,000 miles of track was fully operational and the condition of much of the line was lamentable, with insufficient ballast, rails that were too light and severe speed restrictions. Some other sections could be used by work trains, but the prospect of a through journey on the whole line was several years ahead. Therefore, seven years later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, announced once again that the line was complete, and he stressed that it would form a new link with Japan. The Severomuysky Tunnel, however, was nowhere near finished and there were still other sections that could only accommodate work trains. As a result, it was only under the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin that the line was completed, and a third announcement was made in 2001, although the Severomuysky Tunnel still did not open until two years later.

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New
by Noam Chomsky
Published 7 Apr 2015

We no longer read disquisitions on the curious negativism of the Russians, but rather on the equally curious fact that the world is out of step, as New York Times UN correspondent Richard Bernstein thoughtfully explains.6 Opinion polls in Europe show similar results. A recent classified USIA poll shows that outside of France, European opinion trusts Mikhail Gorbachev on arms control far more than Reagan, by four to one in England and seven to one in Germany.7 The international isolation is of little concern to the Reagan Administration. They have shown a shrewd understanding of the efficacy of violence and intimidation. Like some of their predecessors and models elsewhere in the world, they are well aware that cheap victories over weak and defenseless enemies can be manipulated to arouse jingoist sentiments and popular enthusiasm at home, if the population can be properly terrified by grave threats to its existence; among earlier examples that come to mind are Hitler’s warnings of the encirclement of Germany by hostile states bent on its destruction, the Czech “dagger pointed at the heart of Germany,” the aggressiveness and terror of the Czechs and Poles, and above all, the threat of the international Jewish conspiracy.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

The re-emergence of Russia, India, and especially China, three of the BRICS countries, was central to the rise of developing markets. The Soviet Union, “Upper Volta with rockets,” collapsed under the weight of the unsustainable cost of the Cold War and a corrupt, inefficient central planning system.6 President Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring), demokratizatsiya (democratization), and uskoreniye (acceleration of economic development) failed. Praised by foreigners but unpopular at home, Gorbachev later confessed to having hugely underestimated the depth of the problems. Slowly and painfully, Russia emerged from the detritus, adopting a more market-based economy and elements of democratic government.

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong
by Elizabeth Day
Published 3 Apr 2019

I seemed mature enough to cope. And I, always wanting to make my parents proud, readily agreed that I was. In Russia, a retired teacher agreed to put me up in return for financial compensation. We went in April 1992. Eight months earlier, a failed coup had triggered the end of Communist rule in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as president in December. By the time I arrived on a wobbly Aeroflot flight, Boris Yeltsin was the most powerful man in the country. I knew about Yeltsin from the television footage of him delivering a rousing speech while standing on top of a tank. It wasn’t the most stable political atmosphere in which to launch an unsuspecting adolescent with a suitcase almost as big as she was, and I had no idea what to expect.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy
by Eric O'Neill
Published 1 Mar 2019

Yet for all its successes abroad, the Soviet Union was suffering from serious internal tensions. In the late 1980s, massive independence protests swept across the Caucasus and the Baltic states, and soon the USSR’s constituent republics began to secede. On August 18, 1991, military and government hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup collapsed within days, but the match continued to burn. In December 1991, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation as president. Television audiences across the former USSR watched as Boris Yeltsin lowered the hammer-and-sickle flag from atop the Kremlin for the last time and raised the tricolor flag as president of a newly independent Russian state.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

With these changes, the People’s Republic of China, a country of more than 950 million people in 1978, took its first steps toward joining the capitalist economic order. In a 1985 interview with Time magazine Deng made the remarkable statement, “There are no fundamental contradictions between socialism and a market economy.” Mikhail Gorbachev began openly discussing economic openness and restructuring at about the same time as Deng. In 1985 Gorbachev, then the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gave a notably frank speech in Leningrad acknowledging that the country’s growth was slowing and that too many people remained too poor.

The Challenge for Africa
by Wangari Maathai
Published 6 Apr 2009

That courage, however, also requires a leader (or his backers) who will acknowledge the rights of the people to self-determination and prosperity, and as a result demonstrate leadership that avoids bloodshed or further violence. So although the people of eastern Europe brought down the Berlin Wall, they needed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to send in the tanks. While Nelson Mandela's principled stance led to sanctions against South Africa that brought unbearable pressure upon the apartheid regime, F. W. de Klerk had to concede that the era of apartheid had to come to an end. One of the reasons why success in securing democratic space continues to elude the populace in many African countries is that politicians tend to change with the tide.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

Abdicating his throne Every four years, new king cares for us. I will do everything in my power to drive, build and pursue progress and change. It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past. Mikhail Gorbachev You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Mahatma Gandhi I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy. Marie Curie How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. Niels Bohr Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

That made it increasingly difficult for the Soviets to sustain their military posture in the West, pay the ongoing costs of the war in Afghanistan, and service the foreign debts incurred in the 1970s. Any additional spending would have required a brutal squeeze of the home front. Crushing living standards to support the military was possible—Stalin had done it, after all—but it would have required domestic repression on a scale that Mikhail Gorbachev, who had ascended to the top of the party’s leadership in 1985, was uninterested in, and probably incapable of, imposing. Instead, Gorbachev’s priorities were softening the authoritarianism of his regime and repairing relations with the West. This gave the Central and Eastern Europeans their window of opportunity.3 Germany Restored When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, it was not immediately obvious that the two Germanys would reunite as quickly as they did.

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today
by Jay Barbree
Published 18 Aug 2008

Given the intransigence of Ronald Reagan and his willingness to pursue missile defense—even in spite of objections from allies—SDI, or The Strategic Defense Initiative, finally caused the Soviet rulers to throw up their hands and surrender.” Referring to the money spent on weapons during the four-decade standoff, Soviet chairman Mikhail Gorbachev said, “We all lost the Cold War.” But the United States was still standing when the Soviet Union collapsed on President George H. Bush’s watch, and the weapons of the West had performed well. None had been fired. No one had been killed by nuclear strike. From America’s point of view, given the outcome, the price of the Cold War was priceless—monies well spent for a war we never fought.

China's Good War
by Rana Mitter

The concept of the Great Patriotic War was central to postwar Soviet identity. Although a more nuanced discussion of the war was allowed in some parts of the public sphere, the vast majority of the discourse about it was controlled by the state, at least until the short period of glasnost (openness) under Mikhail Gorbachev. The factors that shaped the development of war memory in the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe also influence the Chinese discourse on the war today, which is partly free and partly constrained. The Second World War has entered Chinese life again, and shows no signs of being dislodged.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

It was 1984, during the first term of Ronald Reagan, who in a speech the previous year had referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Political experts felt that the relations between the two nations were “precariously close to the precipice,” said Tetlock. Then, a year later, everything changed. Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party and ushered in an era of sweeping reforms. In a few short years, fears of nuclear war came to seem absurd. (A colleague even teased Tetlock about the alarmist report that the committee had produced, saying: “So the sky was not falling.”) To Tetlock’s surprise, the experts who had utterly missed the rise of Gorbachev never admitted their failures.

Stealth
by Peter Westwick
Published 22 Nov 2019

A tractor towed the plane out of the hangar, the crowd went wild, the press snapped photos, and then the tractor pushed it back out of sight.45 The Air Force carefully controlled media access, allowing the crowd to see the plane only from the front—but ironically had failed to secure the airspace above the plant. An intrepid Aviation Week editor named Mike Dornheim, himself an amateur pilot, hired a plane and took photos of the B-2 from above, while his competitors on the ground shook their fists at him in vain.46 To some, the rollout celebration seemed a bit forced. By 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy in the Soviet Union had thawed the Cold War, undermining the B-2’s primary justification. A few months before the unveiling, Reagan had visited Moscow and strolled amiably through Red Square with Gorbachev. Inside the Kremlin, a reporter asked Reagan about his famous reference, just five years earlier, to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”; Reagan replied, “I was talking about another time, another era.”47 Meanwhile the B-2 headed toward flight testing, which meant that the test pilots again spent thousands of hours in the simulators, working with the flight-control engineers to iron out the bugs in the fly-by-wire software.

Kissinger: A Biography
by Walter Isaacson
Published 26 Sep 2005

In a 1958 Foreign Affairs piece titled “Missiles and the Western Alliance,” Kissinger argued in favor of the European missile idea. “It represents,” he wrote, “the only means by which Europe can gain a degree of influence over its future.” As it turned out, such a deployment became part of NATO policy and remained that way until the late 1980s. (When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev worked out a deal in 1987 to remove these missiles from Europe, Kissinger was opposed.)19 As he was honing his foreign policy ideas, Kissinger was also building a public visibility unusual for a junior professor. His 1958 article on the Western Alliance led to a story with his picture in the New York Times headlined, “Refusal of Missile Bases Seen as Danger to Europe’s Future.”

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It is hard to hark back to a comparable case of a secretary of state’s maintaining such an aura after leaving office—perhaps Dean Acheson, George Marshall, or Henry Stimson, though they maintained a more discreet style; maybe not since Martin Van Buren, the last secretary to become president. How did Kissinger keep his celebrity so high for so long? Mainly by working at it. Like a trouper to the limelight, he was drawn to the television camera, and news producers found him an irresistible jewel for their shows. When Mikhail Gorbachev visited America at the end of 1988, Kissinger in a two-day period appeared on CNN twice, the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the “CBS Evening News,” the CBS late-news wrap-up, and the “CBS Morning News.” He even agreed to do the weather reports one day in 1991 for the CBS morning show, having confided to anchor Paula Zahn that prognosticating about meteorological rather than geopolitical trends was a secret ambition.

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(COURTESY OF HENRY KISSINGER) With Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, chairman of the insurance underwriters American International Group. Greenberg was a typical client: he valued Kissinger’s advice, liked to travel with him, and became a friend. They went to China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and dined with Deng Xiaoping in the Great Hall of the People. (COURTESY OF HENRY KISSINGER) With Mikhail Gorbachev and Bush, 1990. Kissinger proposed a plan, later derisively dubbed “Yalta II,” to encourage Moscow to loosen its grip on Eastern Europe. Then and afterward, he underestimated the radical change that was occurring. (THE WHITE HOUSE) With Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. In the early 1970s, Kissinger alienated Bush when he was U.N. ambassador and envoy to Beijing, and he crossed swords with Baker when he was Ford’s campaign manager.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

As chapter 17 will relate, President George H. W. Bush lined up strongly with Chancellor Helmut Kohl to achieve democratic Germany’s peaceful unification within NATO and the then European Community. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain hesitated, in part because she did not want to cause trouble for President Mikhail Gorbachev and feared the power of a united Germany. At first, President Francois Mitterrand of France also disliked the prospect of unification. After Germany’s unification, President Bill Clinton’s adviser on Russia, Strobe Talbott, criticized Bush and Secretary Baker for being “primarily concerned with shoring up their fellow conservative Helmut Kohl and thus staying on the good side of a vital ally”; Talbott argued the “disruptive consequences of quick unification” weakened Gorbachev.68 At that time, Talbott ranked helping Gorbachev above keeping alliance commitments and securing a democratic Germany as a partner within the transatlantic security system.

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He was troubled by a Pentagon briefing in 1983 on SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan for all-out nuclear war. He found the deterrence logic of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) to be deeply disturbing, and he struggled to escape its grasp. As Reagan said repeatedly, including at his first meeting with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The administration’s early proposal to eliminate all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range missiles, as part of the dual-track deployment and negotiation, suited Reagan’s logic. Some later analysts believe that proposal was the seed of Reagan’s subsequent move to abolish nuclear arms.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

In East Germany, the decision to alter a solidly analog technology—the Berlin Wall—and allow Berliners to travel back and forth had by late 1989 created a political tide the Communist Party could not withstand. All of this change in the satellite nations was reinforced by the progressive weakening of the Soviet state, caused in part by its futile war in Afghanistan. In addition, change was rapid within Soviet society itself. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invited the growth of a nascent public sphere, Judt writes, by engaging in glasnost, or a policy of openness, thus allowing dissent to be expressed through clubs, meetings, and publications. Glasnost even liberalized what appeared on Soviet television—a far THE GOOGL IZAT I ON OF T HE WORL D 123 more powerful and universal medium than the fax machine.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

In 1937–8, he personally signed 372 orders for mass executions – more than Stalin himself – leading to the murder of more than 43,000 people. Vegetarian, teetotal and a studious collector of first editions (many were dedicated to him by authors he later sent to the Gulag), Molotov was the last surviving Bolshevik. He died, an unrepentant Stalinist, in 1986, just after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the perestroika (restructuring) reforms that would lead, five years later, to the dissolution of the USSR. Why was the speed camera invented? It was designed to speed cars up, not slow them down. A Dutch engineer called Maurice Gatsonides (1911–98) devised the first speed camera.

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
by Ken Jennings
Published 19 Sep 2011

I saw these outlines even after the atlas was closed, afterimages floating in my mind’s eye. The knotty pine paneling in my grandparents’ upstairs bedroom was full of loops and whorls that reminded me of faraway fjords and lagoons. A puddle in a parking lot was Lake Okeechobee or the Black Sea. The first time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev on TV, I remember thinking immediately that his famous birthmark looked just like a map of Thailand.* By the time I was ten, my beloved Hammond atlas was just one of a whole collection of atlases on my bedroom bookshelf. My parents called them my “atli,” though even at the time I was pretty sure that wasn’t the right plural.

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
by Robert Lane Greene
Published 8 Mar 2011

There are many words for “sex,” and Irish, like some other languages, just repeats the verb in a question to reply with “yes”); that the Moken people of Thailand have no word for “when”; that the Inuit had to come up with a word for “twilight” because of global warming, and so on. The problem is that the harm of these myths goes beyond the reputations of those who pass them on. In 1985, Ronald Reagan, about to begin a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, mused about the differences between America and the Soviet Union, saying “I’m no linguist, but I’ve been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for ‘freedom.’ ” There is one, of course: svoboda. Reagan, like Bryson, was dabbling in Whorfianism—in this case, the notion that the Russians had lacked freedom for so long that they did not have a word for it and presumably couldn’t even talk about it.

Rogue States
by Noam Chomsky
Published 9 Jul 2015

For those who wish to understand the nature of the Cold War, and a good deal of modern history, there could hardly be a more instructive moment than when the Cold War came to an end. The first question is: What happened to NATO, which was established to protect Europe from the hordes of the slave state, according to doctrine? Answer: with no more Russian hordes, NATO rapidly expanded. After the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow Germany to be unified and to join NATO, a hostile military alliance and the most powerful in history. An astonishing concession in the light of recent history, when Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia several times. Gorbachev believed that Washington had promised him that NATO would not expand “one inch to the East,” meaning to East Berlin, let alone East Germany.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

Soviet officials knew of these deep and complicated social and economic problems but chose to ignore drunkenness, drugs and workforce absenteeism, which they believed wouldn’t affect the Kremlin. Their solution was to stop publishing Soviet mortality data. When substance abuse became inescapable, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev declared a war on drunkenness and closed liquor shops, viewing the problem as a moral one of personal weakness and irresponsibility. In fact, alcoholism and drugs were a symptom of far deeper structural problems, of policy mistakes such as agricultural collectivization, a dysfunctional command economy and the invasion of Afghanistan.

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich
by Daniel Ammann
Published 12 Oct 2009

He then tells me a story that sounds as if it could have been taken directly from the pages of a spy novel. In the late summer of 1992, Rich received a visitor from Israel whom he had known for quite some time. He introduced a Russian who was interested in doing business with Rich involving a big oil deal. “It seemed very attractive,” Rich explains. Mikhail Gorbachev had just resigned from office in December 1991, and the Soviet Union was officially dissolved on December 25 of the same year. The Communist “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan once described it, had simply ceased to exist. Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian president, immediately introduced a program of economic reform.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Published 14 Sep 2020

* * * • • • AS LAWRENCE PLOTTED IN BEIJING and Hong Kong, in London Margaret Thatcher led her Conservatives to victory and was elected prime minister. It was a fortuitous turn of events for Lawrence. He was Thatcher’s kind of businessman—direct, down to earth, an outsider who liked to think big. After meeting Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, Thatcher famously declared that Gorbachev was someone she could “do business” with. Lawrence was someone she could do business with as well. Thatcher admired the free-market economic policies that drove Hong Kong. She had first visited it two years earlier; it was a model of what she wanted Britain to be—low-regulation, low-tax, secured by the rule of law, and run by honest and efficient British administrators.

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
by Daniel Sokatch
Published 18 Oct 2021

They were buoyed by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union and what appeared to be the triumph of Western-style liberal democracy over totalitarianism. New possibilities for peace seemed to be opening up. . . . THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING Between 1989, when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced that they were free to leave, and 1995, more than 623,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrated to Israel. Hundreds of thousands more arrived in the following years. For the most part, the new arrivals, most of whom were Ashkenazi Jews, were accepted and integrated into Israeli society.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
by Jon Krakauer
Published 25 Aug 2009

At twenty-four he was selected to become a member of the elite national climbing team, which brought him a financial stipend, great prestige, and other benefits both tangible and intangible. In 1989 he climbed Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, as part of a Soviet expedition, and upon returning to his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, was honored as a Soviet Master of Sport by President Mikhail Gorbachev. Due to the upheavals that accompanied the New World Order, this rosy situation was not to last long, however. As Gillman explains, The Soviet Union was breaking up. Two years later Gorbachev quit, and Boukreev—who had recently completed his own ascent of Everest—found his status and privileges vanishing.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 30 Jun 2004

Bush sealed the victory, using quiet, skillful multilateral diplomacy to help the Germans—America’s new “partners in leadership”—win Gorbachev’s assent to their unification. President Bush (Senior) also summarized Europe’s own larger purpose better than any European in a single phrase: “Europe whole and free.” On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev gave the West his final gift, sealing the end of the Soviet Union by his resignation.*6 Just a fortnight earlier, the leaders of the European Community had resolved at the Dutch town of Maastricht to make an economic and monetary union. This was designed to ensure, among other things, that the new, united, sovereign Germany would be firmly held within a warm but close European embrace.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

He also learned the subtler art of using politics and compromising situations, rather than overt force, to unseat and dethrone adversaries—a skill that proved handy during his rapid ascent to his country’s helm upon returning home to the new Russia. Putin saw the Soviet Union crumble as the West, aligned under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), outspent and outcompeted Communism on every level. The Soviets couldn’t keep up with the American economy. Mikhail Gorbachev’s move away from central planning and toward economic restructuring, known as perestroika, combined with increased openness for political and social discussion—glasnost—came too late. Rather than adapt and upgrade Communism’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the Western world, these liberalization efforts brought about the country’s unraveling.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

Yet the party did not view the West as a model to emulate. Partisan democracy saddled with economic stagnation looked to Chinese policy makers very much like the precipice that doomed the impoverished Soviet Union. “If there is one thing the CCP can be relied on never to produce,” observed historian Niall Ferguson, “it is a Chinese Mikhail Gorbachev.”7 In 1989, amid pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, the party unleashed the military. There is no official death toll, but the numbers were certainly in the hundreds, if not thousands. It marked the end of any hopes for an elected government and a gradual transition to democracy. The crackdown stoked division in Washington, DC.

The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age
by Steve Olson
Published 28 Jul 2020

Denied access to Chernobyl, reporters flocked to Richland to draw comparisons with what was happening in the Soviet Union. A few months later the N Reactor shut down for safety upgrades. It never operated again. The Chernobyl accident made a powerful impression on the newly installed Soviet general secretary. If a nuclear accident could cause this much physical damage and health risk, thought Mikhail Gorbachev, what would a nuclear war do? “The accident at Chernobyl showed again what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind,” he said in a speech 18 days after the accident. “The stockpiled nuclear arsenals are fraught with thousands upon thousands of disasters far more horrible than the one at Chernobyl.”

Global Catastrophic Risks
by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Published 2 Jul 2008

Moreover, one can conceive of a plausible scenario in which terrorist groups might take advantage of a coup, political unrest, a revolution, or a period of anarchy to gain control over one or more nuclear weapons. Nuclear assets could change hands, for example, because of a coup instigated by insurgents allied to or cooperating with terrorists. Although the failed coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during August 1991 did not involve terrorists, during the crisis Gorbachev reportedly lost control of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal to his would-be successors when they cut off his communications links (Ferguson and Potter, 2005, p. 59; Pry, 1 999, p. 60). It is also possible that during a period of intense political turmoil, nuclear custodians might desert their posts or otherwise be swept aside by the tide of events.

…

While they did not restore mass murder of Soviet citizens or large-scale slave labour, they squelched public discussion of the Party's 'mistakes'. As the Party leadership aged, however, it became increasingly difficult to find a reliable veteran of the Stalin years to take the helm. The 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was finally appointed General Secretary in 1 985. While it is still unclear what his full intentions were, Gorbachev's moderate liberalization measures snowballed. The Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1 989, and the Soviet Union itself disintegrated in 1991. The end of totalitarianism in Maoist China happened even more quickly.

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War
by Norman Stone
Published 15 Feb 2010

Elizabeth II and Rupert Murdoch, Wapping, February 1985; General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, June 1987 48. and 49. Cold War spin-offs. President Mohammed Najibullah meeting Soviet troops, Kabul, October 1986; Prime Minister Turgut Özal meeting Ronald Reagan, April 1985 50. and 51. The end. The East German leader Egon Krenz about to lose his job, with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, November 1989; Boris Yeltsin earlier in the same year It was of course a racial matter. Crime was associated substantially with non-whites, including the Puerto Ricans. Jonathan Reider, in his well-known study of the white backlash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, said that his interlocutors ‘spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully . . . one police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged.

…

He was packed off to Siberia as a schoolteacher, and the orthodoxy was maintained by one S. P. Trapeznikov, who recycled Lenin on radiant-tomorrow lines. Tarnovsky is said to have died of drink. Curiously enough the Central Asian historians suffered less, and rehabilitated their nations. In 1980 Mikhail Gorbachev was elected to the Politburo, by twenty years its youngest member. There had been signs of a rethink in the system, but at the top level it carried on much as before. The Olympic Games were the last old-fashioned piece of triumphalism and by now Brezhnev was only just capable of doing his job.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

By contrast, in a market economy coordinated by prices, there is no one at the top to issue orders to control or coordinate activities throughout the economy. How an incredibly complex, high-tech economy can operate without any central direction is baffling to many. The last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “How do you see to it that people get food?” The answer was that she didn’t. Prices did that. Moreover, the British people were better fed than people in the Soviet Union, even though the British have not produced enough food to feed themselves in more than a century.

…

Prices play a crucial role in determining how much of each resource gets used where and how the resulting products get transferred to millions of people. Yet this role is seldom understood by the public and it is often disregarded entirely by politicians. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs said that Mikhail Gorbachev “had little understanding of economics,”{14} even though he was at that time the leader of the largest nation on earth. Unfortunately, he was not unique in that regard. The same could be said of many other national leaders around the world, in countries large and small, democratic or undemocratic.

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs , Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker
Published 1 Jun 2011

Arianespace, the French-led European space consortium, was quickly overbooked with launch contracts, and an unlikely new competitor, the Soviet Union, took the first tentative steps toward commercializing its space program by offering the powerful Proton rocket as a launch vehicle. In part, the move was born of desperation. The sweeping political and economic restructuring implemented by the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had introduced free-market forces into the Soviet economy. Industries that had previously enjoyed lavish state subsidies, such as its space program, saw dramatic budget cuts. They were now expected to be self-financing, operating much as free-market enterprises, covering expenses with revenues.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg
Published 5 Apr 2011

Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, except in this case, the Soviet Union stood in for Mexico. Everyone, including the growing Microsoft, lusted after Tetris as though it were the south-of-the-border trove of gold and the game companies were the gringo prospectors. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev set forth new policy decrees that thawed the Cold War with glasnost and perestroika. But doing business within the layers of Soviet culture remained fraught with suspicion and never-ending enigmas, and those shadows of lingering distrust hung over the Computing Centre and Tetris as well. Henk Rogers felt he could beat all the other companies with a trump card—Nintendo.

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia
by Ray Taras
Published 15 Dec 2009

But his analysis identified another factor triggering change: “the combination of substantial levels of economic development and short-term economic crisis or failure was the economic formula most favorable to the transition from authoritarian to democratic government.”23 Many other variables can be cited, of course, for communism’s collapse: the organization of civil society in the east, the revolutionary impact of Lech Wałęsa’s independent trade union Solidarity in Poland, more liberal foreign travel for eastern European citizens, their decreasing fear, Soviet military defeat in Afghanistan, the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, perhaps even the threat of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars antimissile project. But special mention must be given to the 1975 Helsinki Agreement concluded by thirty-five European and North American states. It pledged signatories to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and, against the odds, ended up boxing communist governments in.

The Scientist as Rebel
by Freeman Dyson
Published 1 Jan 2006

For the next fifty years we should attempt to drive the nuclear arms race in reverse gear, to persuade our allies and our enemies that nuclear weapons are more trouble than they are worth. The most effective moves in this direction are unilateral withdrawals of weapons. The move that signaled the historic shift of the arms race into reverse gear was the unilateral withdrawal of land-based and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons by President George Bush in 1991. Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev responded quickly with similarly extensive withdrawals of Soviet weapons. The testing moratorium of 1992 was another effective move in the same direction. To drive the nuclear arms race further in reverse gear, we need to pursue three long-range objectives: worldwide withdrawal and destruction of weapons, complete cessation of nuclear testing, and an open world in which nuclear activities of all countries are to some extent transparent.

50 Psychology Classics
by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Published 14 Oct 2007

Maybe we will abandon the old distinction between “youth” and “maturity” and instead see ourselves as fluid, continually evolving creations instead of having a fixed identity. Gail Sheehy Sheehy is well known for her incisive magazine character profiles, which have included George W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Newt Gingrich, Margaret Thatcher, and Saddam Hussein. A long-time contributing editor to Vanity Fair, she has won a number of awards for her journalism. Passages was on the New York Times bestseller list for three years and was translated into 28 languages. It was named one of the ten most influential books of our time in a Library of Congress survey.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

My first match with Karpov began in September 1984, the “marathon match” that dragged on for five months and forty-eight games before being cancelled by the World Chess Federation (FIDE) after I had narrowed the gap with two consecutive wins. When I finally took the title from Karpov in a new match in 1985, I was twenty-two, Western leaning, and eager to explore my newfound political and economic advantages as world champion. My ascent to the top of chess Olympus also coincided with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to the leadership of the Soviet Union, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika (openness and reform). I exploited the new environment to ask questions. If I won a tournament in France, why should I have to give most of my winnings to the Soviet Sports Committee? Why couldn’t I sign lucrative sponsorship deals with foreign companies the way any other sports star in the world could?

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

Part of the protest was about grotesquely dangerous conditions: the death rate for Soviet miners was fifteen to twenty times higher than it was for their American equivalents, with the local pits claiming the lives of over fifty men every month. But the strike was also provoked by simple deprivation: the miners often had no meat or fruit to eat, and few had access to soap or hot water. After risking their lives each day in the suffocating depths, they couldn’t even wash themselves or rest in a comfortable bed. President Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to appear on national television, acknowledging the justice of the miners’ cause and offering substantial concessions. It was a notable moment in the downfall of the Soviet system. The miners who had walked out and humiliated Gorbachev worked, of all places, in the Don Basin. Sixty years after Peter Palchinsky’s execution, and eighty-eight years after he had initially pointed to the problem of working conditions in the Don coal mines, the Soviet system had still failed to adapt. 8 Beyond Coca-Cola problems The Soviet Union, like poor Phineas Gage, is a grotesquely extreme example.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

His policy is part of a longer Russian history of autocratic leadership that extends back centuries. Russia has always suffered from a schizophrenic relationship with the outside world. A zeal for control from the top has always been at odds with the requirements for more openness. While leaders like Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to open Russia up to new ways of thinking and doing business, most of the czars and Soviet premiers, and now Putin, have wanted to impose control not only over Russian politics but also over Russian society, the Russian economy, even Russian thought. Putin, a former KGB agent, is symptomatic of this trend in Russian history.

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
by Frederik Obermaier
Published 17 Jun 2016

He keeps his two daughters firmly out of the public eye. So we were amazed when, in the course of our Internet research, we stumbled across a rather pixelated black and white photo showing a young, serious-looking Vladimir Putin. The snapshot was taken in 1985 in Leningrad, as St Petersburg was known during the Soviet era. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become general secretary and Vladimir Putin was still a minor, insignificant KGB officer. In the photo, he holds his baby daughter Maria in his arms, and standing next to him is his ex-wife Lyudmila; she has threaded her arm through his and looks happy. Next to Lyudmila stands a young man with longish hair and a steady gaze.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

The location of a diplomatic event is often seen as a reflection of the entire negotiation process. Ideally, it all happens in a neutral territory, where no one can claim any sort of home field advantage. Napoleon I of France and Tsar Alexander I of Russia met on a raft in the middle of a river when they signed the Treaty of Tilsit. President George Bush and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War with a summit held on two ships. Clinton’s meeting with the emperor was coming at an incredibly sensitive time. The United States was in the midst of an ongoing conflict with Japan over a number of trade issues, and, to make matters worse, many Japanese were still furious over a U.S. military-involved rape that had occurred two years earlier in Okinawa.

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible
by Stephen Braun and Douglas Farah
Published 1 Apr 2008

But the following year, he joined a group of young internationalists and headed for Moscow to help Russia’s new leaders on their shaky trek toward the free-market system. Between 1990 and 1992 Wolosky shuttled between Cambridge and Moscow, working with the Moscow City Council on political reforms. He met occasionally with former Communist general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, then in his final months as the first president of Russia, and Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal economist who was overseeing the rush to market reform. Yavlinsky and other Russian economists were still struggling to fulfill the ideals of perestroika, Gorbachev’s effort to restructure the hidebound Communist economy, and some of The United States’ top government and economic experts had joined them.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Published 17 Mar 2020

In the early 1980s, annual consumption of pure alcohol was more than fourteen liters per person per year, almost twice as much as in the United States. Life expectancy had been stagnant for women and falling for men for more than two decades, at a time when life expectancy had been improving in the US and Europe, especially after 1970. Starting in 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a drastic anti-alcohol policy that sharply reduced production, raised prices, and restricted opportunities for consumption. Over the next three years, life expectancy rose by 3.2 years for men and by 1.3 years for women, driven by rapid decreases in mortality from alcohol-related causes (suicides, accidents, and heart disease).

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

He spent years talking to people in the space community, picking the brains of engineers “to see whether I could find anyone who would be competent to build spaceships,” he later recalled. But it just didn’t seem possible. Space, it turned out, was exceedingly difficult—far more so than ballooning, or speedboats or airplanes. Years before, he’d had an opportunity to go to space. Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the Soviet Union, had called to offer Branson what seemed just the sort of opportunity he had made his hallmark—this time, to become the first civilian in space. However, accepting the invitation would cost Branson something like $50 million and require him to spend two years training in Russia.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Early predictions in Tetlock’s research pertained to the future of the Soviet Union. There were experts (usually liberal) who saw Mikhail Gorbachev as an earnest reformer who would be able to change the Soviet Union and keep it intact for a while, and experts (usually conservative) who felt that the Soviet Union was immune to reform, ruinous by its very nature, and losing legitimacy. Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Gorbachev did bring real reform, opening the Soviet Union to the world and empowering citizens.

On Grand Strategy
by John Lewis Gaddis
Published 3 Apr 2018

They not only gave in on Venezuela (where the Americans promptly lost interest and accepted arbitration), but subsequently and more significantly on the Spanish-American War (Britain stayed neutral), on the Philippines (Salisbury supported American, not German, annexation), on a future Panama Canal (Britain relinquished long-held rights in the region), and on Alaska’s boundary (Canada sacrificed for the greater good).10 It may not have been appeasement,11 but it was lubrication: like Mikhail Gorbachev almost a century later, Salisbury set out to deprive an enemy of its enemy.12 As a careful student of history,13 he’d have known of George Canning’s claim, from 1826, to have “called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”14 Self-congratulation wasn’t Salisbury’s style, but he could more credibly own the accomplishment.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 5 Nov 2019

In fact, a radioactive plume was already spreading through the atmosphere that would reach as far as Sweden, with an invisible toll on the health of its victims that still eludes measurement. For weeks after, Moscow-based state news agencies made no mention of the ongoing disaster. Nor did Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl’s ground zero, thousands of people—including countless children—marched down Kiev’s main drag of Khreshchatyk Street.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Kennedy in 1963 said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” signaling his support to all Berliners.1 It was here that West Berlin mayor Richard von Weiszacker in 1985 said that “the German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.” And it was here that US President Ronald Reagan in 1987 asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall2.” But for almost three decades, it was to no avail. Wessies, the inhabitants of West Berlin, could only see the Brandenburg Gate in the distance, and those who had Ossie friends or family in the East-German state of Brandenburg would not see them for decades.

The Future of Fusion Energy
by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball
Published 18 Dec 2018

At these meetings, the different research groups would be assigned “homework” to take back to their institutions and (hopefully) complete before the next meeting. While the project never reached the engineering design phase, it scoped out the potential for such a device and was well received by the next Soviet General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. Figure 7.7:A timeline of the main events in ITER’s history. At the 1985 Geneva Summit, Gorbachev proposed the ITER project to US president Ronald Reagan as a continuation of INTOR. While ITER was similar to INTOR, it had a significantly different organizational structure. The INTOR organization, which was basically a loose confederation of scientists, was too decentralized and weak to effectively manage an actual construction project.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Kennedy in 1963 said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” signaling his support to all Berliners.1 It was here that West Berlin mayor Richard von Weiszacker in 1985 said that “the German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.” And it was here that US President Ronald Reagan in 1987 asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall2.” But for almost three decades, it was to no avail. Wessies, the inhabitants of West Berlin, could only see the Brandenburg Gate in the distance, and those who had Ossie friends or family in the East-German state of Brandenburg would not see them for decades.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
by Tim Marshall
Published 14 Oct 2021

At the same time the Eritrean independence forces were gaining the upper hand against the Ethiopian military and discontent was growing throughout the country. By the end of the 1980s the walls were closing in on the Derg. Eritrean forces repeatedly defeated the Ethiopian army and formed an alliance with militia from the Tigray region, which was calling for autonomy from Addis Ababa. With Mikhail Gorbachev in charge in the Kremlin, military assistance was significantly reduced and the Cubans were heading home. Gorbachev explained glasnost and perestroika (‘openness’ and ‘restructuring’) to Mengistu, but the idea of an open political and economic system was as much of a foreign language to him as was Russian.

Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023

The city’s economic ascent over the last decade meant that almost every household owned a television set. Families were now glued to it. Hong Kong media coverage of the developments resembled America’s twenty-four-hour live news cycle, revolutionized by CNN when it launched in 1980. Hong Kong residents followed every twist and turn: the student walkouts, the hunger strikes, Mikhail Gorbachev’s state visit, the breakdown of talks between protesters and party leaders—and the chilling declaration on May 19 that marked the beginning of the end. Chinese premier Li Peng on that Friday had gathered party apparatchiks for a major announcement. Reading a prepared script, his dark, pronounced eyebrows accentuating his oversized glasses, Li Peng characterized the students as influenced by “very, very few people” who hoped to create turmoil and overthrow the Communist Party.

Nuclear War: A Scenario
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 25 Mar 2024

Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, a majority of which are on ready-for-launch status, with thousands more in reserve, for a total inventory that is roughly the same size as the U.S.’s. It is precisely the effects of this kind of mass extermination plan that Nuclear War: A Scenario is based upon. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned the world in a joint statement in 1985. Decades later, in 2022, President Joe Biden warned Americans that “the prospect of [nuclear] Armageddon” is at a terrifying new high. So here we are now. Teetering at the edge—perhaps even closer than ever before. “Be Prepared for a Nuclear Explosion.”

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
by Ian Morris
Published 11 Oct 2010

Its state-run economy could churn out tanks and Kalashnikovs but not computers or cars (another Soviet joke—“How do you double a Lada’s* value?” The answer: “Fill up the tank”). Dissent was simmering everywhere. The thought of a new arms race terrified the Soviet Empire’s rulers. “We can’t go on living like this,” Mikhail Gorbachev confessed to his wife, Raisa, as they paced their garden in 1985. Gorbachev would, in a few hours, be named premier of the Soviet Union, yet the garden was the only place he could escape his own snooping spies. Like Deng, Gorbachev knew he had to face reality. The explosion of an antiquated nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 revealed that the Soviet Union was not just falling behind but actually falling apart, and Gorbachev threw restructuring (perestroika) and transparency (glasnost’) into high gear—only to rediscover what Marx and Engels had known a century and a half before: liberalization sweeps away all fixed, fast-frozen relations, not just those we dislike.

…

In 1976 the “Gang of Four” (an ultraleftist clique including Mao Zedong’s widow) was accused of inventing this whole episode. 547 “a socialist train”: slogan attributed to the Gang of Four (1976), cited from Spence 1990, p. 651. 548 “During the ‘Cultural Revolution’”: Deng Xiaoping, speech (September 2, 1986), cited from Gittings 2005, p. 103. 548 “How do you double”: cited from “Soviet Cars: Spluttering to a Halt,” The Economist, July 10, 2008. 549 “We can’t go on”: Mikhail Gorbachev, private conversation (1985), cited from Gorbachev 1995, p. 165. 549 “In the Soviet Union”: Gorbachev 1995, p. 490. 549 “dregs of society”: Deng, speech to party leaders and army officers (June 9, 1989), cited from Spence 1990, p. 744. 550 “Our first objective”: Zalmay Khalilzad, Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994–1999, Section IB, cited from http://www/gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm (accessed October 17, 2008). 551 “an official who believes”: Patrick Tyler, New York Times (March 8, 1992), p.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

Knowing that Mitterrand was pressing for a much bigger prize, Kohl resolutely refused to go any further. Britain’s Thatcher had reason to think that she had Bundesbank’s Pöhl and Chancellor Kohl as allies in opposition to monetary union. On December 6, Mitterrand traveled to Kiev hoping that Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, would use his influence to slow the pace of German unification. But Mitterrand came away from the meeting empty-​handed. Overwhelmed by the “flood of events in Eastern Europe,” Gorbachev was in no position to hold back history, and he had little to offer.57 Mitterrand’s frustration showed when, speaking to reporters after meeting the Soviet leader, he “warned West Germany not to push for reunification with East Germany, saying it could upset the delicate balance in Europe and slow integration of the European Community.”58 The French persisted.

…

Bush had good reasons to say he trusted Kohl. Kohl’s generation of Germans had deep democratic roots and a commitment to preserve peace in Europe. Bush followed up on his end of the bargain, and by early 1990, “cooperation between Washington and Bonn switched into high gear.”62 While the bargain with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was not complete before the Strasbourg summit, the path ahead on that matter was clear. The Soviet Union was weak and in desperate need of financial help. In a series of phone calls that began on September 7, 1990, Kohl quite simply bought Gorbachev’s agreement to reunification. After much haggling, Kohl agreed to give the Soviet Union a large financial gift, 12 billion D-​marks without any strings and a 3-​billion-​D-​mark interest-​free loan.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy
by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale
Published 23 May 2011

PALACE COUP: An overthrow of or challenge to a sovereign or other leader by members of the ruling family or group. PATRONAGE SYSTEM: The postelection practice in which loyal supporters of a winning candidate and/or party are rewarded with appointive public offices. PERESTROIKA: Policies instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s that brought about governmental and economic reforms. PERSONAL CONSUMPTION EXPENDITURE: Goods and services that are purchased by a person. POLITBURO: A Communist party’s principal policymaking and executive committee. PONZI SCHEME: An investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

That’s not to say that Russia couldn’t justifiably claim that it is part of Europe as much as it is part of Asia, and that it ought to be included in the European Union. Up to now, however, it has enjoyed only a special partnership status, and few observers think that’s likely to change in the foreseeable future. I broached the subject of membership in the European Union at dinner once with Mikhail Gorbachev. He said that his country was just too big to fit into the EU room, and that instead Russia would likely enjoy an ever-closer partnership with the union, even to the point of being connected in an integrated continental electricity, communication, and transport grid—in effect, becoming part of a single market but not a single political space.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

By the 1980s, the failings of centrally planned economies—clunky industries, perverted incentives, uninterested workers—had become painfully obvious, and even the biggest among them bowed to economic reality. Deng Xiaoping opened up China, and his then 1-billion-person economy began to normalize trade relations with the West. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev pronounced his perestroika (“restructuring”). Economic collapse across a wide range of countries, from the Philippines to Zambia, Mexico, Poland, Chile, Bangladesh, Ghana, Korea, Morocco and others, led them all in search of a better growth model. Import substitution, whereby countries raised trade walls against each other so that they could nurture their own industries at home, proved a failure: the industries could not achieve scale or excellence on the strength of domestic demand alone, nor were they strong enough to compete outside their tariff-padded walls.

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II
by Svetlana Alexievich
Published 1 Jan 1985

*5 In Soviet legal terminology the phrase “without the right of correspondence” usually meant the prisoner had been executed. *6 Golodomor (“holodomor” in Ukrainian) means “death by hunger.” The term refers to the deliberately created famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, which cost many millions of lives. *7 The Soviet acronym for “collective farm.” *8 Gorbachev’s perestroika: The “restructuring” begun in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev (1933–), the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of state until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. *9 The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) is best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about the harsh experiences of German soldiers during World War I.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

I’ve seen Tony Robbins’s infomercials—he claims that there’s always one airing at any given moment—and he strikes me as one of the more extroverted people on earth. But he’s not just any extrovert. He’s the king of self-help, with a client roster that has included President Clinton, Tiger Woods, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Serena Williams, Donna Karan—and 50 million other people. And the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year, by definition reveals our conception of the ideal self, the one we aspire to become if only we follow the seven principles of this and the three laws of that.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

Third, new leaders emerged—political, business, social, community—to propel many developing countries to take advantage of these opportunities and move in new directions. This section explores each in turn. SIX GOOD-BYE COLD WAR, SO LONG COMMUNISM If the owners of socialism have withdrawn from the one-party system, who are the Africans to continue with it? —Frederick Chiluba, chairman of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, December 31, 1989 WHEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV TOOK OVER as General Secretary of the communist Party on March 11, 1985, the Soviet Union was in trouble. Its economy had been declining since the 1970s. Inefficient factories were producing poor-quality products that neither Soviet consumers nor foreigners wanted, worker productivity was falling, and agricultural production could not keep up with growing demand.

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America
by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall
Published 1 Jan 1991

Before the crisis with Iraq, nearly two-thirds o f the American people viewed it as “the most important problem facing this country.” 1 More Americans ranked drugs an “extremely serious threat” to national security than they did any other issue—including terrorism, the Persian G ulf or Middle East conflicts, and the spread o f communism in Central America.2 Now that Mikhail Gorbachev has put a benign face on America’s traditional foe, the United States is beginning to turn the weight o f its power against this new evil, represented above all by Colombia’s cocaine cartels and their corrupt allies, like former Panama dictator Manuel Noriega. Drugs have played a role in American foreign policy since the early part o f the twentieth century.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

From Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 “Decree on the Press,” which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” articles criticizing the Bolsheviks, to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1962 decision to allow the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other indictments of Stalinism, to Leonid Brezhnev’s strangling of political discourse and expulsion of Solzhenitsyn, and on to Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”), the USSR’s censorship policies were mercurial and in many cases arbitrary. Among the outrages, hundreds of dissidents were thrown into mental hospitals and tortured with cruel and bizarre “treatments.” The writer and biologist Zhores Medvedev was accused of suffering from “incipient schizophrenia” and “paranoid delusions of reforming society.”19 His “symptoms” included his work exposing the quack science that led to massive crop failures and famines under Stalin.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

Its dismissal of the “zero-zero” option (under which NATO would dismantle cruise and Pershings if Moscow did the same with its SS-20s) had, according to Kissinger, turned out to be a “stunning victory” for Reagan and Helmut Kohl.40 The leaders of the West prevailed in the face of the most determined and sophisticated propaganda campaign since the fall of Nazi Germany. On December 8, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev went to the White House to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to eliminate shorter and intermediate nuclear weapons, opening the way to the peaceful ending of the Cold War. NATO leaders knew that failure to counter SS-20s would, over time, lead to the Soviet Union winning the Cold War.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The 2007 auction included the chance to sing with rock band Aerosmith (which went for $400,000), three dinner parties prepared by celebrity chefs ($1.3 million), and an inside-track luxury trip to the Beijing Olympics as guests of the NBC television network (thanks to cajoling by comedian Jon Stewart—“For two million dollars you get to stand in front of tanks” and “Let’s show these Communists what we’re made of”—this eventually went for $2.2 million). In London, much the same thing happens at the dinner hosted by ARK, which in 2007 featured a speech by Bill Clinton, music by Madonna and Prince, and an auction that included dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev and a day on the set of the next James Bond movie. In 2007, Robin Hood again “robbed” the rich to help the poor far more effectively, raising $72 million to ARK’s $53 million. Since it was founded in 1988 by hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, Robin Hood has distributed over $500 million to various organizations fighting poverty in New York City.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Corporations such as Huawei, the telecoms giant founded by former People’s Liberation Army engineer Ren Zhengfei, were invited to sell the censorship technology needed to turn Russia’s internet into a mirror of China’s.18 Russian IT experts knew when they had been outclassed, with one telling reporters that, despite hopes domestic manufacturers would fulfil the demand created by sanctions, “We are in fact actively switching to Chinese [technologies].”19 With the tools in place, Russia’s parliament provided the legal basis for a new Great Firewall.20 Legislation was introduced to force internet service providers (ISPs) to store communications records, give security services back doors into encrypted messages and chat apps, and transfer control of all internet exchanges to the Kremlin, creating a tight border around the Russian internet that could be easily policed and monitored.21 This was a stunning transformation, in a matter of decades, of an internet once as free and open as any other country’s – a transformation that had long been a dream of the Kremlin’s, but was achieved only with Chinese assistance and encouragement. * The Soviet Union took its first steps onto the internet in 1990, a year before conservatives in the Communist Party attempted to remove reformist General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup.22 At the start of the decade, the country was lagging far behind the West, which had imposed tight import restrictions on computer equipment, leaving Soviet engineers with only poor imitations of the latest hardware and a rapidly widening technology gap.23 Just as CERN, the European nuclear research organisation, became a key hub for Western technology pioneers, eventually resulting in Tim Berners-Lee inventing the world wide web, Soviet researchers at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow were instrumental in linking the Union to the nascent global internet.24 In the early 1980s, the Institute had acquired a copy of the Unix operating system, and set a team of programmers to adapting it for Russian-speaking users.

Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence
by Yaroslav Trofimov
Published 9 Jan 2024

Russia finally had unity of command—and, in the bald, broad-shouldered general, a recognizable face of its war. A hard-liner among hard-liners, Surovikin was the only Russian commander whose men killed pro-democracy protesters during the failed putsch by Soviet military and intelligence chiefs against President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. Once a badge of shame, it was now a distinction. Russian soldiers in Ukraine “are in secure hands,” Ramzan Kadyrov exulted once Surovikin’s appointment was announced. Yevgeny Prigozhin recalled that in August 1991, he was on the side of the pro-democracy crowds. “We were in the thrall of a profound delusion at the time . . .

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
by Bradley K. Martin
Published 14 Oct 2004

What I saw in 1989 did not give me confidence that major changes would come in timely fashion. In the end, adding up every change that could be detected on that visit produced a list that seemed unimpressive at best and, when compared with the exciting things happening elsewhere in the communist world at the time, downright pitiful. It was the heyday of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, but North Koreans knew little or nothing about Soviet liberalization and restructuring. They did not even know about the popular protests that had been raging next door in China. My guide, a twenty-nine-year-old college English teacher, mentioned that he hoped to go the following September to Beijing to study English and Chinese.

…

A clear sign that Pyongyang’s external partnerships were falling apart had come in the summer of 1990, when South Korean President Roh Tae-woo’s “northern policy” of wooing the Soviet Union and Pyongyang’s other communist allies paid off spectacularly: Roh flew to San Francisco (I was the lone foreign reporter on his plane) for an epochal meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Diplomatic relations followed—and by late 1992, China, the last major communist holdout, would exchange ambassadors with Seoul. With 21 million people to keep reasonably satisfied, the regime had little alternative but to look to the global free-market economy. Belatedly following China’s example, Pyongyang had decided to set up its first free economic zones.

…

Frank noted that strength stood for the workers and peasants and knowledge for the intellectuals—the three groups represented in the hammer-sickle-writing brush emblem on Pyongyang’s Juche Tower. “But ‘money’ is a new component,” he wrote. “It stands for those who excel in economic activities.” Frank found it “remarkable that the leveling of the ideological battlefield has begun so early. Kim Jong-il may be no Mikhail Gorbachev, nor a Deng Xiaoping, but the evidence makes it hard to believe he is a stubborn opponent of reform.” At the 2003 parliamentary budget session came an announcement of another initiative, issuance of People’s Life Bonds. “Why would a state like North Korea care about collecting large quantities of its own currency?”

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

And it was a company that took full advantage of its impeccable political connections to ride all the way to the top of the bull market. Named by Fortune magazine as America’s Most Innovative Company for six consecutive years (1996-2001), that company was Enron. In November 2001, Alan Greenspan received a prestigious award, adding his name to a roll of honour that included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Nelson Mandela. The award was the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Greenspan had certainly earned his accolade. From February 1995 until June 1999 he had raised US interest rates only once. Traders had begun to speak of the ‘Greenspan put’ because having him at the Fed was like having a ‘put’ option on the stock market (an option but not an obligation to sell stocks at a good price in the future).

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 4 Oct 2011

The one bit someone did translate was a warning that flashed before the station aired The Simpsons, advising parents that the show was “antisocial,” not appropriate for kids. Midway through that month, however, that television became the center of my life. On Monday, August 19, I watched with astonishment the coverage of Russia’s August Putsch, when hard-line Communists tried to wrest control of the nation from the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Tanks were in the streets. Two years after Tiananmen, it felt inevitable that something dramatic, and tragic, was going to happen. Again. I sat staring at the TV for most of the day. I pestered people to interpret the commentary for me. I annoyed the bartender by not drinking as I consumed the free TV.

Warnings
by Richard A. Clarke
Published 10 Apr 2017

ROBOCK’S WARNING It is hard to know precisely what the political effects of the nuclear-winter theory were, but those who were the leaders of the U.S. and USSR at the time later admitted that it had helped prompt them to act. Ronald Reagan was the U.S. President at the time and was widely thought to be eager for a fight with the Soviet Union. Yet after reading about the nuclear-winter theory, Reagan met with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Iceland and proposed the abolition of nuclear weapons. The Russian leader, who also had a growing concern about a nuclear winter, agreed in principle, but suggested that the two countries start by limiting the deployment of new weapons and then later reducing their stockpiles. In the years that followed, interest in the nuclear winter theory diminished.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry
by Steven Rattner
Published 19 Sep 2010

They're structural challenges, and they require new and farsighted solutions." Hiring Lazard reflected his perceptiveness. Although the move angered some members who mistrusted Wall Street, Gettelfinger knew the union had to be ready in the event GM's problems spiraled out of control. I left thinking of what Margaret Thatcher once said of Mikhail Gorbachev: "We can do business together." From Solidarity House we drove to GM's fabled Tech Center in suburban Warren. A car with a news photographer flanked us, his camera clicking away. More interested in architecture than in cars, I knew that the Tech Center had been designed by the great architect Eero Saarinen in the late 1940s and was known around the world as an icon of modernism.

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon
by Colin Burgess and Kate Doolan
Published 14 Apr 2003

There's absolutely no reference to it on his tombstone, yet both these men were in the first cosmonaut detachment—the equivalent to America's Mercury 7. Pavel Belyayev's grave in the famous Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow is still pointed out to tourists as that of a pioneering cosmonaut, but they are usually more interested in the monuments of other famous Russians such as Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev's wife, Raisa. As was the case in the Soviet era, the plaque-marked graves of the five cosmonauts in the Kremlin Wall are still shielded from the public by dozens of policemen, and in a way, Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Komarov, and Vladislav Volkov are less approachable now than they were after they first flew in space.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
by Simon Singh
Published 1 Jan 1999

Rather than flee, the Zimmermanns decided to stay and fight the battle at home, becoming front-line antinuclear activists-they educated political candidates on issues of military policy, and were arrested at the Nevada nuclear testing grounds, alongside Carl Sagan and four hundred other protesters. A few years later, in 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev became head of state of the Soviet Union, heralding perestroika, glasnost and a reduction in tension between East and West. Zimmermann’s fears began to subside, but he did not lose his passion for political activism, he merely channeled it in a different direction. He began to focus his attentions on the digital revolution and the necessity for encryption: Cryptography used to be an obscure science, of little relevance to everyday life.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Carlos Slim, who bought his first share when he was twelve, started to make serious money straight out of college, when he was one of Los Casabolseros, or Stock Market Boys, a group of aggressive young men who traded shares on the Mexican stock market and played dominoes together after the market closed. Many of the Russian oligarchs first ventured into commerce while they were students taking advantage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s tentative perestroika reforms to open businesses as diverse as window washing and computer programming. The result is a super-elite whose members have been working to join it for most of their conscious lives—if not since nursery school, certainly since high school, when the competition for those elite college places begins in earnest.

It's Our Turn to Eat
by Michela Wrong
Published 9 Apr 2009

History suggests that sclerotic systems are not transformed by untainted outsiders, but by those within, and usually by those who have been within the system so long they are associated with its worst abuses, rising thereby to the positions of power that make it possible to bring about change. Mikhail Gorbachev was such a figure in the Soviet Union – a seemingly loyal party stalwart who turned radical once he had the means to see his novel vision through. On the surface, there was little reason to view Kibaki, who had played the Kenyan system to the hilt as both vice president and finance minister, as a likely champion of reform.

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption
by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins
Published 1 Jan 2006

It was this that propelled Witt from targeting U.S. domestic taxes onto the international stage. Just seven months after Witt became its executive director, the Tax Foundation “organized the substantive part of” the U.S.-USSR Conference on Trade and Bilateral Economic Relations, held in Moscow in December 1991. The conference was attended by both Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. American delegates included Ambassador Robert Strauss, Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury John Robson, as well as numerous corporate CEOs invited by the Tax Foundation. This conference marked the start of Witt’s new direction.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
by Mark Hertsgaard
Published 15 Jan 2011

I wrote a lot about the arms race in the 1980s, and there were times the facts left me pretty depressed. Yet humanity ended up dodging the nuclear bullet, at least for the time being, and it did so thanks to what at the time seemed rather unlikely developments. Who would have guessed that a radical reformer like Mikhail Gorbachev would somehow rise to the top of the repressive Soviet system and make peace with Ronald Reagan, a right-wing zealot who never met a weapons system he didn't like? It's a useful reminder: history is full of surprises, and sometimes it really is darkest just before the dawn. But this line of thinking brings only so much consolation, I'm sorry to say, for there is a fundamental difference between the climate crisis and the nuclear arms race.

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia
by Steve Coll
Published 29 Mar 2009

Whatever one’s view of this specific charge, it did seem that, at the least, the American government wanted to do something near the minimum necessary to follow up on the crash. Their geopolitical equations in Pakistan were changing rapidly. Benazir Bhutto had become prime minister in late 1988. Democracy had been restored. The Soviets had pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev was moving ahead with his revolutionary reforms in Moscow. Nobody wanted to wander around the cold war graveyard, digging up corpses. Nobody in the American government wanted even to talk about Zia or the crash. This attitude just made the Pakistanis, and now me, more suspicious. Early in 1990, I had dinner with some Pakistani acquaintances in the establishment, as the local elite calls itself.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 15 Mar 2020

“They wanted to snap [pictures of] Miky with the three of us. It was quite a sight. And Chairman Lee [wrote] articles about the importance of design in the JoongAng [Samsung’s newspaper] while we were there.” Dining in a private room in the hotel, where Samsung had hosted former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev the previous night, Peter Arnell and Gordon Bruce got acquainted. They were asked to work together on a two-pronged strategy to build both Samsung’s products and brand. Though their relationship was cordial on the surface, tensions between the marketer and the product designer would stretch its bonds.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

“And Moscow is silent.”40 In the estimation of the BBC’s Chris Bowlby, “That phrase, ‘Moscow is silent’ has haunted this man ever since.”41 By all accounts, 1989 indelibly shaped Russia’s president. For the people of East Germany, the fall of the wall was a triumph; for Putin, it was a tragedy. As he saw it, Mikhail Gorbachev, with his talk of glasnost and perestroika, had betrayed the USSR. Putin drove home to Leningrad with his wife and a twenty-year-old washing machine, contemplating a new career as a taxi driver.42 Soon, even Leningrad itself would revert to its prerevolutionary name of St. Petersburg. Journalist Masha Gessen says that Putin “found himself in a country that had changed in ways that he didn’t understand and didn’t want to accept.”43 To ensure that the state would never again let him down, Putin became the state.

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
by Iain Gately
Published 27 Oct 2001

Further, the crumbling Soviet system could no longer keep Russians supplied with state manufactured cigarettes, which led to protests in Moscow in August 1990. Realizing his glasnost programme might lose its authority if the workers could not be supplied with something as simple and essential as cigarettes, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to issue emergency orders to American manufacturers for billions of cigarettes, which were paid for with diamonds, oil and gold. When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR dissolved into a dozen separate states, the tobacco multinationals moved into these new and promising markets. In many cases they established joint ventures with the old state manufacturers, but when local tastes and investment policies permitted, they manufactured their Western brands and encouraged their importation, so that these tokens of unrestrained capitalism were soon common in the heartlands of communist ideology.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

Beijing’s recent relapse toward censorship shows that its leadership class considers clinging to power more important than consent of the governed—China is staging a “Great Leap Backward” in which “dissent is not permissible,” The Atlantic said in 2016. China will grow much stronger if it becomes a democracy rather than stays mired in its current amalgam model of economic freedom without political freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, said in 2016 that the next step for Russia should be switching to democracy, “not in the future but right now.” We’d like to think Gorbachev made this statement for moral reasons. Maybe he was looking at economic data. THE GUNS OF AUGUST THAT sounded in 1914 matched the autocracies of Germany, Bulgaria, and the old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires against the democracies of the United Kingdom, French Third Republic, Canada, United States, Australia, Italy, and Japan, with monarchist Russia and Serbia as wild cards.

Hedgehogging
by Barton Biggs
Published 3 Jan 2005

In addition, he was a superb speaker with “this most wonderful voice.” She was very fond of him, she said. Did I know how ccc_biggs_ch06_63-79.qxd 11/29/05 11:11 AM Page 77 The Roadshow Grind 77 he was? Did Nancy still feed him dinner every night? She liked Nancy a lot, too. Of course, I had no idea whether Nancy still fed the President every evening. Mikhail Gorbachev also was impressive. He was not like the elderly, wooden Russian apparatchiks Thatcher had known. He smiled, laughed, spoke well, and was a sharp debater.They became friends, almost confidantes. Then came the surprise. She had very high regard for Raisa Gorbachev as well, who was smart and well-informed.When the Gorbachevs came to Chequers for a weekend, Lady T found her in the library reading Hobbes’s Leviathan.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
by Paul Morland
Published 10 Jan 2019

Russia, always ambiguously partly in, partly out of Europe, was a late but rapid adopter of the European demographic transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and after 1945 once again the human tide turned east. 7 Russia and the Eastern Bloc from 1945 The Demography of Cold War Defeat On 11 March 1985, hours after the death of Party secretary Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union elected Mikhail Gorbachev Chernenko’s successor at what was, by Soviet standards, the tender age of fifty-four. Chernenko had held the position for only a year, inheriting it in a state of terminal illness from Yuri Andropov at whose funeral he could barely even raise a salute (and at which, according to Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher’s doctor was able to forecast the date of Chernenko’s own demise to within a few weeks).1 As Gorbachev surveyed his realm he was, as he put it later, ‘immediately faced with an avalanche of problems’.2 The USSR may well have been one of only two global superpowers, a nuclear power, the largest country on earth by surface area, and the centre of a socialist camp stretching from Germany to Vietnam, but signs of severe ill health were showing.

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission
by Steve Gibson
Published 2 Mar 2012

As I crossed the bridge for the last time I was content that the Mission’s long and significant involvement with the Cold War had provided a most positive contribution to bringing about its end and that I had been part of it. If any one person played a more than average hand in unravelling the spiral of mutually assured destruction and brinkmanship, then for my money, it was probably Mikhail Gorbachev and indirectly running a close second was Willy Brandt. Undoubtedly it was Gorbachev who decided enough was enough in all the satellite states of the Soviet Union, not just East Germany. It was Gorbachev who stood up to Honecker and the other satellite states and pulled the rug from under their feet.

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
by Richard McGregor
Published 8 Jun 2010

Economic policy was fixated on a fight between hardliners, who saw the crackdown as a chance to reassert old-fashioned state controls, and the liberalizers, under Deng Xiaoping, who were plotting to grab back the initiative to entrench market reforms. Many intellectuals remained bitter and sullen about the brutality used to suppress dissent and the punishment meted out for involvement in the protests. Rolling over the whole system were the shock waves of the gradual dismemberment of the Soviet bloc. Just prior to the Beijing gathering, Mikhail Gorbachev had been deposed in a military coup, to great initial glee in China, and then annoyance when he was restored shakily to power a few days later. In Chinese eyes, Gorbachev more than anyone was responsible for undermining the global communist cause. His political reforms had not only fatally weakened the Communist Party at home in the Soviet Union.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite
by Jake Bernstein
Published 14 Oct 2019

Situated north of Iran on the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan once formed a strategic part of the Soviet Union. In 1969, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev appointed Heydar Aliyev, a top KGB official, to the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party. Aliyev would stay in power for two decades until Mikhail Gorbachev removed him over corruption allegations. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Azerbaijan gained its independence and became an oil-rich republic. After its first president was deposed in a coup, Aliyev slipped back into power. In October 2003, two months after his death, his son Ilham Aliyev won the election to replace him.

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
by Casey Michel
Published 23 Nov 2021

Economic stagnation and a flailing war in Afghanistan melted into restive nationalism that the Soviet Union had never quite been able to quell. In the late 1980s, instead of launching a career as a Soviet metal-man, Kolomoisky watched a world he thought he knew begin to shift and collapse under his feet. As economic restrictions relaxed by the turn of the 1990s, part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s doomed attempts at Soviet restructuring, Kolomoisky took full advantage of the new capitalistic opportunities. Alongside a pair of friends, Gennadiy Bogolyubov and Oleksiy Martynov, he launched an office equipment firm, shuttling between Moscow and Dnipropetrovsk and searching out new customers across the country.8 But that country hardly lasted much longer.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

It was a rare political intervention for the FT but Darling had done nothing to deserve demotion. A Balls promotion, by contrast, would have been too clubby by half. FRIDAY, 5 JUNE Evgeny Lebedev, the youthful owner of the Evening Standard, has invited Victoria and me to a dinner in honour of Mikhail Gorbachev at the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV died before embarking on a planned crusade. Lebedev snr is also present, a former KGB agent turned businessman whom I met in Moscow last year. His public persona is a reformist Putin critic, but who knows? The Lebedevs have long been supporters of the Gorbachev charity for leukaemia research, and the black-bearded Evgeny – who might easily have stepped out of a Chekhov novel – is a new star on London’s social scene.

The Defence of the Realm
by Christopher Andrew
Published 2 Aug 2010

He hopes to meet Scargill again to continue to try to exert influence on him.’64 On 10 December the Security Service received intelligence that in early November the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank had attempted to transfer the equivalent of almost US$1.2 million to the NUM via banks in Switzerland and London, but had abandoned the attempt after the Swiss bank began to suspect a Soviet money-laundering operation. The report gave Mrs Thatcher the opportunity a week later to raise the question of Soviet financial support to the NUM, without compromising Oleg Gordievsky, during her talks in London with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet heir apparent.65 Gorbachev ‘claimed to be unaware’ that financial support was being given. Subsequent intelligence reports to the Prime Minister indicated that, on the contrary, Gorbachev ‘was among those who authorised payment’.66 By early January 71,000 of the 187,000 miners were back at work.

…

A marginal lessening of East–West tension was evident even at Andropov’s funeral, attended by Mrs Thatcher and other Western dignitaries. The Soviet ambassador in London, Viktor Popov, told a meeting of embassy and residency staff that Mrs Thatcher had gone out of her way to charm her hosts. In March Nikolai Vladimirovich Shishlin, a senior foreign affairs specialist in the Central Committee (and later an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev), addressed the staff of the London embassy and KGB residency on current international problems. Gordievsky reported to his case officer that Shishlin made no mention of the supposed threat of surprise nuclear attack which had been the residency’s chief preoccupation for the past three years.

…

The Prime Minister emphasized her concern for Gordievsky as an individual – not just as an ‘intelligence egg layer’.96 Gordievsky expressed his warm appreciation when the Prime Minister’s concern was reported to him by his case officer.97 The insights into Soviet policy provided by Gordievsky’s intelligence were of particular importance to Mrs Thatcher in December 1984 during the visit to Britain of Mikhail Gorbachev, heir apparent to the ailing Konstantin Chernenko, at the head of a delegation from the Supreme Soviet – a visit which proved to be a turning point in Soviet–British relations. To assist Gordievsky in writing briefs during the visit which would impress both Gorbachev and the Centre, his case officer showed him the brief prepared by the FCO for Sir Geoffrey Howe.

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 27 Nov 2006

The Soviet Union repaid the compliment by featuring him in Leningrad’s Cathedral, after it was converted into the Museum of Atheism, as a wicked exploiter of the gullibility of the masses by soaking them of their savings to pay for his churches. He evolved into a freeway evangelist with a sunnier disposition, taking a more ecumenical view than most of his peers. He dropped the paranoia and started meeting popes and rabbis and communists. There is even an image of a bemused Mikhail Gorbachev at the Crystal Cathedral. Schuller was ready to hire Philip Johnson, an unabashed homosexual, and Richard Meier, who is a Jew. ‘Don’t call yourself a Dutch Reform, or a Methodist Church,’ he once advised tyro pastors and ministers planning their first move into the exploding and churchless new suburbs of southern California.

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security
by Deborah D. Avant
Published 17 Oct 2010

Hillman-Smith and Smith, “Conservation Crises and Potential Solutions.” They recommended that the Game Ranger’s Association of Africa (or some other body) explore a mobile training force, in conjunction with the United Nations African Crisis Initiative or the International Green Cross. The International Green Cross was formed under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1993. As of now, it operates as an international network to transform values, encourage dialogue, and reconcile trade-offs between the environment and economic development. See http://www.gci.ch/. “Project Proposal: An anti-poaching training programme by the Game Rangers Association of Africa for guards in Garamba National Park, D.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

If the Czech Republic had been independent after World War II, it would probably today be a rich European state. Poland, whose modern territory includes much of German Prussia, Hungary, for long joined in empire with Austria, and Slovenia are today the most promising Eastern European econom1es. Russia itself is the largest new state. Experience here is not encour- { 288} John Kay aging. Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet system failed: it proved impossible to introduce economic pluralism without undermining political centralism. And all structures of economic and political authority depended on that centralization. The combination of pluralism in economic matters with centralism in political affairs has been more successfully achieved in China.

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
by Andrew Smith
Published 3 Apr 2006

A couple of weeks later, Armstrong will make me smile by confiding via e-mail that he was “very disappointed” with his performance, because a light on the lectern was broken, making it hard to see his notes. The delivery was thus “below my usual standards, though I’m told I ‘got away with it.’ ” Even so, I’ll marvel again six months later when someone sends me Accountancy Age magazine’s review of a business convention in Manchester, at which the ex-astronaut replaced Mikhail Gorbachev (urgent business in Kazakhstan) as the star speaker. The key part reads: “Having paid £250 [$475] a head for the pleasure [of hearing Armstrong speak], delegates at the North West Business Convention would not unreasonably have expected the great man to reminisce about his time on the Moon – ‘No, it wasn’t faked in a TV studio in Houston,’ etc.

The Rough Guide to Prague
by Humphreys, Rob

The Jazz Section of the Musicians’ Union, who disseminated “subversive” Western pop music (such as pirate copies of “Live Aid”), highlighted the ludicrously harsh nature of the regime when they were arrested and imprisoned in the mid-1980s. Pop concerts, religious pilgrimages and, of course, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion all caused regular confrontations between the security forces and certain sections of the population. Yet still, a mass movement like Poland’s Solidarity failed to emerge. With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, the KSČ was put in an extremely awkward position, as it tried desperately to separate perestroika from comparisons with the reforms of the Prague Spring. Husák and his cronies had prided themselves on being second only to Honecker’s GDR as the most stable and orthodox of the Soviet satellites – now the font of orthodoxy, the Soviet Union, was turning against them.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
by Daniel Gardner
Published 23 Jun 2009

These weapons were pointed at each other. They could be launched at any moment. Annihilation would come with nothing more than a few minutes’ notice and, in 1985, it increasingly looked like it would. The Cold War had been getting hotter since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, and we know now that Gorbachev and Reagan later met and steadily reduced tensions, that the Cold War ended peacefully, and the Soviet Union dissolved within a few years. But in 1985, that was all in the black void of the future. In 1985, what actually happened would have seemed wildly improbable—which is why almost no one predicted anything like it.

1946: The Making of the Modern World
by Victor Sebestyen
Published 30 Sep 2014

Russia, in the words of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, would again become ‘half prison, half barracks’ as it had been before the war.2 Soviet troops, in particular, had cherished high hopes of peace, quiet and some longed-for prosperity when they returned from the Front. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who later became the father of glasnost and perestroika as one of the chief reformist advisors to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was twice seriously wounded; once so badly that he carried a limp for the rest of his life. He was awarded the Red Army’s highest honours, but when he returned home, despite the propaganda surrounding Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, he could see the harsh conditions that actually prevailed: trainloads of prisoners of war being sent to Siberia, malnourished children, and the return of lengthy jail sentences for minor offences.

ZeroZeroZero
by Roberto Saviano
Published 4 Apr 2013

It’s essential to understanding where our modern world begins, its birth pains, its principal path. What we experience today, the economy that regulates our lives, is determined more by what Félix Gallardo, El Padrino, and Pablo Escobar, El Magico, decided and did in the eighties than by anything Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided or did. Or at least that’s how I see it. Various testimonies relate that in 1989 El Padrino convened all the most powerful Mexican drug lords in a resort in Acapulco. While the world was preparing for the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the past of the cold war, iron curtains, and insuperable borders was being buried, the future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

As a method of ramping up the production of basic goods, such as steel and wheat, collectivism proved pretty effective. But once the Communist economies moved beyond the stage of industrialization, they couldn’t deal with the variegated demands of a consumer-driven society. Innovation was lacking, and information about consumer preferences got lost, or was ignored. Even after the Soviet government, under Mikhail Gorbachev, freed up some prices, shortages and surpluses were endemic, which confirmed Hayek’s argument that attempts to create market socialism would founder. In their 1990 book, The Turning Point: Revitalizing the Soviet Economy, Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov recall what happened when the government in Moscow increased the price it would pay for moleskins, prompting hunters to supply more of them: “State purchases increased, and now all the distribution centers are filled with these pelts.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses. Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home.

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

The Thatcherite revolution in fighting the miners, the GLC, and being strong on defence had combined with aspirational politics over home ownership to make Labour look irrelevant in the modern world where things were changing incredibly quickly. Ronald Reagan had been replaced as US president by George H. W. Bush, but this was of secondary importance to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union who, from 1985, launched glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) within the USSR that slowly but surely spread to the East European states under Soviet influence. In 1989, the last Russian troops left Afghanistan and Poland was ready to allow elections. By April 1989, this fever of liberalism had spread to China and Gorbachev became the first Soviet leader to visit China since the 1960s.

The Profiteers
by Sally Denton

America was back in the bomb-making business, but this time with Bechtel, not the government, running the enterprise. “After initial US and Russian moves to reduce arsenals, dismantle weapons, secure fissile material, and downblend enriched uranium for civilian use, the heroic steps initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War have been followed with only timid efforts to rethink the purpose of nuclear weapons in US national security policy,” wrote Kennette Benedict. Bechtel promised to improve efficiency and security at both labs, and formed two for-profit limited liability corporations. LANS, LLC, would operate the Los Alamos National Security lab—the massive, secret site in northern New Mexico—while LLNS, LLC, would manage its sister site, Lawrence Livermore National Security, in Berkeley, California.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

For example, the uprisings that swept Eastern European countries in 1989 ended peacefully in most cases after the elites simply and quickly gave in and the armed forces and police stood down—choosing not to exercise their overwhelming firepower. Such outcomes often depend on the perception of legitimacy of the protesters (in that particular case, the decisive role was that of then-Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, who signaled that he was not likely to support military intervention). Given the importance of changing minds and attracting attention to the power of a social movement, it is unsurprising that many governments have turned to media control and censorship. Even in more democratic capitalist societies, movements that threaten the interests of corporations or advertisers can find themselves left out of news coverage, a subtler form of censorship.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 31 Mar 2009

Vladimir Putin, that hardheaded product of the Soviet security apparatus, decks himself in symbols of religion in much the same way as Russian czars once did: he never takes off his baptismal cross, maintains a small chapel next door to his office in the Kremlin and has made regular visits to churches. 22 The KGB’s successor, the FSB, has its own Orthodox church opposite its headquarters, complete with rare icons presented by the Patriarch. One poll in 2006—fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet regime—discovered that 84 percent of the Russian population believed in God while only 16 percent considered themselves atheists .23 Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev has shown signs that he is a Christian: after spending half an hour with his daughter Irina praying at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, the last Soviet leader confessed that “St. Francis is, for me, the alter Christus, the other Christ. His story fascinates me and has played a fundamental role in my life.”

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

As Iraq expended its energy on warfare and Iran consolidated its revolution in theocratic isolation, Saudi Arabia raised its profile as the world’s largest oil producer and a pillar of regional security, bringing together Arab Gulf monarchies in 1981 to form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which aimed at achieving a single market, unified military force, and common currency with its petromonarchy neighbors. In 1985, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan formed the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) to promote greater cross-border trade and investment. By 1985, the drain of the Afghanistan war and economic hardship at home forced the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev to undertake a concerted reform program toward greater political, economic, and social openness (perestroika and glasnost), establishing détente with the United States and abandoning its policy of overt interference in Communist Eastern European nations. Grassroots revolutions spread in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Soviet client states, each prevailing eventually.

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution
by Richard Whittle
Published 15 Sep 2014

Over the three decades since those experiments, the idea of weaponizing UAVs had been pursued by a number of people, including Abe Karem with one concept for his Amber, and Neal and Linden Blue with the first General Atomics kit plane Predator in the 1980s. But after 1987 the very legality of arming drones became questionable, at least for the United States and the Soviet Union. On December 8 of that year, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which required both nations to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,300 miles). Missiles launched from the sea or air were outside the pact, which defined a ground-launched cruise missile as “an unmanned, self-propelled vehicle that sustains flight through the use of aerodynamic lift over most of its flight path” and “a weapon-delivery vehicle.”

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
by Matthew Sweet
Published 13 Feb 2018

It fell to the obedient Warren Hamerman to relay LaRouche’s response to the FBI and the wider world. “I will not submit passively to arrest,” said the statement, “but in such a scenario I will defend myself.” It sounded like a threat of armed resistance. LaRouche went on to accuse the KGB of masterminding the operation against him. “Mikhail Gorbachev,” he declared, “has demanded my head.” Nobody, however, was much interested in LaRouche’s head. They wanted his bank statements, account books, and dud promissory notes. LaRouche meekly withdrew his threat of violence. For three days, the police, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service searched the mansion and the offices of Executive Intelligence Review in downtown Leesburg, looking for evidence of wrongdoing.

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World
by Tom Burgis
Published 7 Sep 2020

In the old tsars’ capital, soon once more to be called St Petersburg, Peter and Vinay had arranged to teach English to journalists. They lodged in a hotel and, clean-living Canadians both, resisted the manager’s ceaseless attempts to introduce prostitutes to their beds. The journalists kept Peter abreast of events when, while he was away on a trip to Paris, communist hardliners attempted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. He returned the following year, and this time his students taught him Russian. Back in Canada, he started training to be a lawyer. Deploying his gift for polite persuasion, he secured Canadian government funding to examine aspects of the Russian legal system. At spring break, when other students would go to Florida, he would go to Russia and take five professors with him.

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

For Serbia, the origins of inflation lay in international sanctions. The Soviet collapse also quickly produced a narrative of Russian victimization, as the result of the implementation of a Cold War strategy of Russia’s enemies that worked together with a supposedly treasonous Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev that “sold out” to the West. The Serbian and Russian explanations of inflation and economic vulnerability look like very close echoes of the constant refrain both of Weimar’s leaders and of the increasingly radical opposition to the “system,” namely that it was the foreign powers or the international order that had created the inflation through the impossibly large reparations bill.

I You We Them
by Dan Gretton

And it felt important to be emissaries from Britain – to be showing that at least some spirit of internationalism still survived the meanness of the political climate there. We began to conceptualise a line running from London to Kassel and then on into what was then East Germany, part of the Warsaw Pact, the target of our nuclear weapons, and the site of Soviet nuclear weapons. Mikhail Gorbachev had begun the process of glasnost but the terror of ‘mutally assured destruction’ was still the political orthodoxy, and President Reagan remained in power. We called the line ‘West-Linie-Ost’ and drew it onto maps in the most detailed way, coming up with a walk between Kassel and London that would embody our commitment to the links we’d created with the FIU.

…

Walking from Morning till Night 29 December 2003, Berlin As we walk south from our hotel, we’re reflecting on the remarkable, peaceful transition that Germany has made since Reunification, and how challenging it is when you’ve lived through years like we have to fully understand their historical significance. J. reminds me of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s famous reflection on the political genius of Mikhail Gorbachev in peacefully dismantling a totalitarian regime: ‘Any cretin can throw a bomb.8 It is 1,000 times more difficult to defuse one.’ Into Oranienburger Strasse, with J. telling me about the scandals that only emerged later of the corporations that were involved directly in the negotiations about Reunification in 1991.

Farewell
by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud
Published 14 Apr 2011

World peace would have crumbled overnight had the president of the United States been matched by an equally stubborn and entrenched Kremlin leader, and the Soviet gerontocracy contained many such characters. Shaken, the communist regime under Yuri Andropov’s leadership kept trying to revamp its façade, but would not change a thing in substance. After Andropov’s death, the degradation of the international climate brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power. Being a flexible politician, Gorbachev eventually cooperated with the West to find a solution allowing the world to survive. The rest is history. Therefore, it is tempting to think that without Farewell’s solitary action—whose motivations were miles away from reshaping the world—perestroika and the end of the Cold War could very well have occurred ten, fifteen, or even twenty years later, assuming that world peace could wait that long.

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 2 Jan 2000

In April, the head of the U.S. delegation to the ICA announced that the government had not yet decided whether it would renew membership in the agreement when it expired in September 1989. Rumors of the ICA’s possible demise, then hopeful reports that a new agreement was near, sent coffee prices reeling up and down throughout the rest of 1988 and early 1989, but they sank gradually as Brazil and the United States squared off over tourist coffee and selectivity. With reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin and the Sandinistas recently voted out of power in Nicaragua, cold war fears no longer provided a compelling reason for the United States to support the agreement. Brazil’s economy now relied more on the export of soybeans, oranges, weapons, mahogany, and ballpoint pens than coffee.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

The Soviet Union, it turned out, could not. Its economy, controlled by bureaucracies, not markets, and profoundly corrupt, was in far worse shape than American intelligence estimated. The top-down Soviet government was paralyzed in the early 1980s by the deaths of three general secretaries in quick succession. But when Mikhail Gorbachev took over in 1985, he tried both to negotiate with the United States to reduce the Soviet Union’s defense expenditures, and to loosen controls on Soviet economy and society so that the country could become more productive and use the new possibilities created by the microprocessor more effectively.

The Rights of the People
by David K. Shipler
Published 18 Apr 2011

In the end, he did more than destroy buildings and kill nearly 3,000 people. He traumatized the nation and provoked Americans into damaging their own moral enterprise, at least for a time. Government officials never show fear, but they feel it, as they often confess in later memoirs and interviews. Sometimes it’s for a good cause, as during Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization of the Soviet system. “Fear” was the word that one of his closest colleagues, Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, used when I asked what he had been feeling at the time. I thought he might say pride or exhilaration, but no, he had feared the unknown consequences of their uncharted path.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

Eighty-three-year-old Birgit Rausing, worth $11 billion thanks to her husband’s Swedish packaging company Tetra Laval but living quietly in Switzerland, probably is not. Colombian rock star Shakira is one. All but a tiny handful of the world’s most famous movie stars are not. Mukesh Ambani—chief executive of India’s Reliance Industries and one of the world’s richest men—is certainly one, as is his billionaire brother Anil. Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Carlos Menem, and Mahathir bin Mohammad were members of the group but aren’t any longer. But former leaders like Lee Kuan Yew, Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, who have maintained their international influence, certainly are. Osama bin Laden is one. Cherie Blair, Tony Blair’s accomplished wife, probably was but now, with Blair no longer the British prime minister, no longer is.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide
by Joshua S. Goldstein
Published 15 Sep 2011

I reached down and scooped up two fragments with remnants of purple graffiti on them—one to keep and one for my colleague at the University of Southern California, Jim Rosenau, one of the few international relations professors to have foreseen transformational change in the international system. Ten days earlier, presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush met on a boat in Malta, tossed about in stormy seas, to officially end the 73 Cold War after forty years. And with the end of the superpower standoff, the UN Security Council suddenly got a fresh wind, and started to operate as intended. Suddenly peacekeeping was not held hostage to opposing superpower interests in civil wars.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

No sooner had that opportunity been lost than Scargill suff ered his worst publicity so far when the Sunday Times revealed that Roger Windsor, chief executive of the NUM, had been in Libya, apparently soliciting money from Colonel Gaddafi. It was not the only tale of money from dubious foreign sources going to the NUM. In December 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was soon to become head of the Soviet Communist Party, visited Britain and was chided by Thatcher over intelligence reports that the USSR was secretly funding the strike. In fact, some Soviet money was sent to the International Miners’ Organisation run from France by Alain Simon, a Communist ally of Scargill.

All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

Bush’s first term), and real-estate tycoon George Argyros (ambassador to Spain during George W. Bush’s first term). David Rockefeller, during his tenure64 as head of the Chase Bank, functioned as a sort of ambassador at large for foreign policy, crisscrossing the world on diplomatic missions, including meetings with Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev. His involvement in foreign policy dates back to the late 1940s, when he joined the Council on Foreign Relations (a body that had been partly funded by his father). “Part of the reward if you are loyal, helpful, bright, and capable is a good position overseas,” says Michael Huffington, whose father was ambassador to Austria during the first Bush administration.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia. There is a story (probably apocryphal, like most good stories) that when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to resuscitate the moribund Soviet economy, he sent one of his chief aids to London to find out what Thatcherism was all about, and how a capitalist system actually functioned. The hosts took their Soviet visitor on a tour of the City, of the London stock exchange and of the London School of Economics, where he had lengthy talks with bank managers, entrepreneurs and professors.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

The roots of Iceland’s woes go back a quarter of a century. In 1986 the world’s two superpowers met on this chilly rock in the Northern Atlantic. The Reykjavik summit proved to be a historic staging post on the way to the worldwide financial crisis, a staging post at which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, representing the West and the Soviet Union, met as equals. But they were not equal. Cold War had turned to economic freeze for the Russians and to hot boom for the United States and Europe. The summit witnessed the birth of a hyperpower, yes, but also the beginning of a hyperbubble, as, in a mood of triumphalism, borrowing, debt and deregulation all swelled to unsustainable dimensions – hence the scale of the subsequent financial calamity.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism
by Anatol Lieven
Published 3 May 2010

Because America is in the general evangelical view the world's leading Christian nation, the implications for American power are also clear: "Our goal is world domination under Christ's lordship, a 'world takeover' if you will....We are the shapers of world history."116 These beliefs play their part in fueling the tendency of the American Right to implacable nationalist moral absolutism, with a succession of foreign leaders, from Hitler to Saddam Hussein, identified as Antichrist or Antichrist's servant. (Earlier, of course, the Vatican often had played this role.) Because Satan is supposed to be deceitful and alluring, these leaders do not even have to be actively hostile. In these circles, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was widely identified with Antichrist precisely because of his popularity in the West. Both millenarian belief itself and the tendency of its American exponents to link it to hard-line U.S. foreign and security policies were given a tremendous boost by the Cold War and the much wider image of the Soviet Union as an "empire of evil."

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

The best they could offer was to spend any growth dividend more wisely than the Conservatives would – and to leave capitalist reform to one side unless ‘market failure’ could be proved unambiguously. To prove market failure to that degree would in effect become a prohibition on all but the most obviously necessary action. New Labour did not grow up in a vacuum. Christmas Eve 1991 had seen Mikhail Gorbachev dissolve the Soviet Union. Then, at the end of January 1992, veteran leader Deng Xiao Ping embarked on his famous tour of southern China, during which he told his countrymen that they must redouble their efforts at market reform and open themselves up to foreign investment if China were to grow.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

By 2018, India was no longer the country with the most people living in poverty (Nigeria took its place).28 Russia and Eastern Europe China was not the only communist country that tried to reform in the 1980s. Russians were aware that their standard of living was below that of the West and there was much cynicism about economic management; the running joke was “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. A new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerged in 1985 with ideas to change the system. The key words were perestroika, for economic reform, and glasnost, for transparency in government. Gorbachev was a committed communist who believed the system could be saved. As it turned out, reform seemed only to undermine the regime’s legitimacy, and a fall in oil prices weakened the economy’s main source of strength.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

ABOUT THE AUTHOR © NANCY WARNER RICHARD RHODES is the author or editor of twenty-six works of fiction, history, memoir, and theater, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in History; Arsenals of Folly, about the last years of the Cold War; and The Twilight of the Bombs, about the post–Cold War challenges of nuclear weapons and international policy. Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense About Energy assessed the development of and prospects for nuclear energy at the turn of the millennium. His play, Reykjavik, about the 1986 summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, has been read and performed nationwide. Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series.

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
by Thomas Rid

Last October, a Soviet newspaper alleged that the AIDS virus may have been the result of Pentagon or CIA experiments.42 Service A would continue to push the campaign, at home and abroad, for at least six more months. But the KGB’s cameo on CBS Evening News would prove the peak of Operation DENVER. The Russian government would soon officially disavow the AIDS active measure. On October 23, 1987, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz met with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet head of state. Shultz reportedly told Gorbachev that Moscow was peddling “bum dope” on AIDS.43 Three days later, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution, by a margin of 42–8, to unite all countries in the fight against AIDS.44 The resolution was co-sponsored by the United States and the USSR, and recognized that a naturally occurring virus was the cause of the disease.

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer
Published 30 Apr 2018

Actual negotiations would take place directly between Israeli and Arab delegations later on. The Bush administration also promised that it wouldn’t support an independent Palestinian state or force Israel to directly negotiate with the PLO. The conference opening, on October 30, was officially hosted by President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Arab delegations were led by foreign ministers. Shamir didn’t want to entrust his foreign minister with representing Israel. Until his appointment a year earlier, Levy had been Sharon’s ally, pressuring Shamir from the right. As foreign minister he had shifted to the center, favoring an acceptance of the US demands.

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World
by Andrew Lambert
Published 1 Oct 2018

Labour disputes are rising, and there is no democratic outlet for popular discontent. The Chinese leadership must be aware that only a liberalised market, upheld by the rule of law and democratic accountability, can generate the type of sustainable growth that China needs. However, they also realise that, as Mikhail Gorbachev discovered, once those doors have been opened they cannot be shut, and the one-party state will be among the first victims. The ‘Western’ liberal capitalist economic model, created by seapower states, seems likely to outlast continental totalitarian alternatives. The looming crisis, more existential than economic, suggests that China remains a vast empire, dominated by domestic concerns, one where maritime economic activity has always been marginal.

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky
by Oleg Gordievsky
Published 13 Apr 2015

He told me he would keep in touch by letter to let me know how our joint campaign was going. Then, in a fascinating aside, he said that everyone at the Centre had been thinking about the future of the KGB and of the nation, and he spoke with warmth of a new, up-and-coming politician called Mikhail Gorbachev, who was planning a visit to Britain for the end of the year. The KGB, said Gribin, had come to the conclusion that Gorbachev was the best bet for the future, and that it would do all it could to help him — though in the subtlest way, without revealing its allegiance. ‘That’s why, when he goes to London, we shall ask you to send us the best possible briefing,’ Gribin confided.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

Reagan spent much of his first term denouncing the Soviets’ “Evil Empire,” deploying Pershing missiles in West Germany and England, and promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative, a Rube Goldberg boondoggle that proposed to shoot down incoming missiles in outer space. But in 1985, Reagan began yielding to the diplomatic charms of Mikhail Gorbachev as well as the citizen diplomacy of the nuclear freeze movement and came within an ace of abolishing nuclear weapons outright. Gorbachev must have known what had happened on September 26, 1983, when a Soviet early warning system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for five incoming Minuteman missiles.

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War
by Robert Fisk
Published 1 Jan 1990

.* The most powerful analysis of the period is contained in Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, a book of great detail and even greater anger which concludes that ‘as long as the United States remains committed to an Israeli Sparta as a strategic asset … the prospects are for further tragedy: repression, terrorism, war, and possibly even a conflict that will engage the superpowers …’† Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy in Moscow suggests that this last grim prognosis may be exaggerated. But since these books were published, the political crisis in the Levant has grown ever darker. The Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank must finally have convinced those Israelis who wanted to destroy the PLO in Lebanon of the futility of the 1982 invasion; and the Islamic revolution unleashed in Lebanon by Israel’s catastrophic adventure created a climate so ferocious that no Westerner could go on living in the country without fear of assassination or abduction.

…

Further east, freed from the burden of his titanic war against Iran, Saddam Hussein took upon himself the leadership of the Arab world, inspiring fear among most of his Arab neighbours, and contempt in Syria. And, fatefully for Lebanon, he decided to give political and military support to General Aoun. The revolution inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev initiated another of those historical repetitions which are visited upon the Middle East. Just as the Holocaust helped to create the state of Israel, so Gorbachev’s abandonment of communism—and the policies continued by his successors in the new Russia—revived Jewish hopes of a new, greater Israel under an increasingly right-wing Israeli government.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
by Peter Baker
Published 21 Oct 2013

In Congress during the 1980s, he compiled one of the most conservative voting records; when the Washington Post referred to him as a moderate, Cheney instructed an aide to call for a correction. As defense secretary for George H. W. Bush, he was deeply suspicious of the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. After all this, Cheney scoffed at the notion that he was any different than he had been as a young man. “I didn’t change,” he said. “The world changed.” Having participated in doomsday war-game scenarios in the 1980s mapping out the consequences of catastrophic attack, Cheney had long nursed dark views about the world’s dangers, views that seemed ratified on September 11.

…

Rice stiffened, worried the answer might be too effusive, but said nothing. Back in Washington, Cheney and his staff were even more disturbed. The vice president saw Russia as simply a weaker version of the Soviet Union, a view that traced back to the fight over Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Ford White House, and the skepticism about Mikhail Gorbachev in the first Bush administration. Every time Cheney saw Putin, he privately told people, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB.” The president’s soul-gazing comment provoked disbelief. “A lot of us were kind of rolling our eyes about that,” Eric Edelman, Cheney’s deputy national security adviser, said later.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

But stimulating sustained economic growth required that individuals use their talent and ideas, and this could never be done with a Soviet-style economic system. The rulers of the Soviet Union would have had to abandon extractive economic institutions, but such a move would have jeopardized their political power. Indeed, when Mikhail Gorbachev started to move away from extractive economic institutions after 1987, the power of the Communist Party crumbled, and with it, the Soviet Union. THE SOVIET UNION was able to generate rapid growth even under extractive institutions because the Bolsheviks built a powerful centralized state and used it to allocate resources toward industry.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War led directly to the reforms of Alexander II, including the abolition of serfdom, while its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War made possible the liberal reforms of Stolypin and the period of economic growth from 1905 to 1914.9 Perhaps the most recent example of defensive modernization was the initial phase of Mikhail Gorbachev’s own perestroika. It is quite clear from his speeches and those of other senior Soviet officials that one of the chief reasons that they initially considered undertaking a fundamental reform of the Soviet economy was their realization that an unreformed Soviet Union was going to have serious problems remaining competitive, economically and militarily, into the twenty-first century.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century
by Tom Bower
Published 1 Jan 2009

To win the gamble, the politicians combined with BP’s John Browne, Exxon’s Lee Raymond and Ken Derr of Chevron to display utter indifference to Russia’s gradual collapse. Chapter Six The Booty Hunters THE INTRODUCTION OF DEMOCRACY wrecked Russia’s oil industry. To secure political popularity in 1989 for “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” — openness and reform — Mikhail Gorbachev had diverted investment from industry to food and consumer goods. Blessed by reopened borders, free discussion in the media and the waning of the KGB, few in Moscow noticed the crumbling wreckage spreading across the oilfields in western Siberia, an area of 550,000 square miles, nearly the size of Alaska.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

But then it turned out she employed an astrologer to schedule Reagan’s important trips and meetings. “She feels there’s nothing wrong in talking to her,” Mrs. Reagan’s spokesperson said of the astrologer. According to the astrologer, “Air Force One didn’t take off without permission. [Nancy] set the time for summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, presidential debates with Carter and Mondale…the timing of all the President’s trips abroad, of his press conferences, his State of the Union addresses.” “Good God,” George H. W. Bush said when he learned of this operational voodoo near the end of his vice-presidency, “I had no idea.” Not so cute was a president of the United States expecting apocalyptic biblical prophecies to be fulfilled soon.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn
by Daniel Gordis
Published 17 Oct 2016

The man who became the public face of Soviet immigrants was the now iconic former Soviet Jewish “refusenik” Natan Sharansky. After having applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, Sharansky was imprisoned for nine years on trumped-up charges of having spied for the American Defense Intelligence Agency. After U.S. president Reagan finally placed great pressure on Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, Sharansky was released from prison. He immigrated to Israel, where he became an internationally acclaimed human rights activist and a Jewish symbol of courage. In 1996, he founded a political party named Yisrael Ba-Aliyah (a name that can mean both “Israel Making Aliyah” or “Israel on the Rise”) that catered primarily to the needs of Russians, leading him to a prominent place in the Knesset.

Alcohol: A History
by Rod Phillips
Published 14 Oct 2014

The death rates for men over forty increased by 20 to 25 percent between 1965 and 1989, and death rates for women over fifty also rose, though more modestly. Alcohol was not the sole cause of these changes—smoking and poor health services were also implicated—but it is considered to have been a major contributor. When the Soviet Union’s last premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, assumed power in 1985, he inherited an antialcohol campaign that showed some signs of early success—small reductions in consumption and in alcohol-related crime—and he made it one of the priorities of his administration. Fending off occasional radical proposals for total prohibition, Gorbachev supported a complex of policies that both encouraged and coerced.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

Watson’s book had a profound effect on the fourteen-year-old Urnov, especially the “incomparable taste of having discovered a secret.” After one reading, any other career plans were canceled. He was hooked on DNA. Urnov enrolled at Moscow State University in 1985, studying biology the year that Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Glasnost was instituted in Urnov’s freshman year, perestroika in his sophomore year. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 also had a major effect on him. By the time he graduated, the Soviet Union had essentially fallen apart. Going west would no longer mean being smuggled in a suitcase or emigrating via Israel.

Culture and Imperialism
by Edward W. Said
Published 29 May 1994

The technocrats, in contrast, as Lyotard says in Postmodern Condition,53 are principally competent to solve local problems, not to ask the big questions set by the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, and there are also the carefully accredited policy experts who serve the security managers who have guided international affairs. With the virtual exhaustion of grand systems and total theories (the Cold War, the Bretton Woods entente, Soviet and Chinese collectivized economies, Third World anti-imperialist nationalism), we enter a new period of vast uncertainty. This is what Mikhail Gorbachev so powerfully represented until he was succeeded by the far less uncertain Boris Yeltsin. Perestroika and glasnost, the key words associated with Gorbachev’s reforms, expressed dissatisfaction with the past and, at most, vague hopes about the future, but they were neither theories nor visions.

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy
by Rory Cormac
Published 14 Jun 2018

SIS also allegedly worked with both the Pakistanis and the CIA to launch guerrilla attacks OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 236 Age of I llusions into neighbouring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, from where the Soviet troops in Afghanistan received supplies.34 Towards the end of the decade, Mikhail Gorbachev, the new leader in the Kremlin, began withdrawing troops. The last left Afghanistan in 1989. Britain not only feared Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan, but played close attention to activity in Latin America. In 1986, Iran-Contra, in which America sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages but then used the proceeds to illegally fund the Nicaraguan resistance, erupted into the biggest covert action scandal of the decade.

Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country
by Simon Winder
Published 22 Apr 2019

Following the Revolutionary historical twists and turns that first killed them and then, generations later, made them – after the collapse of communism – into Orthodox saints, there are now icons in the church to St Nicolas and St Alexandra the Passion Bearers, a striking leg-up for the former spa guests. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev visited Wiesbaden and at his request a Russian sculptor created a statue of Dostoyevsky, which now decorates the gardens by the casino. As with the business executives chewing over how to achieve year-on-year growth in the Dostojewski-Saal, this statue revels in the sheer rhino-hided gall of spa towns – one of the nineteenth century’s greatest writers went to all the trouble of writing a novel to warn the world that Wiesbaden is a pullulating, verminous trough and this is blandly converted into yet another tribute to the town’s star-power.

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire
by Dale van Atta
Published 14 Aug 2019

Air Force to lift wounded soldiers into military aircraft after the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and the opportunity to cater all the flights for Pope John Paul II and his entourage during his 1987 tour of the United States. There were also the acquisitions of several competitors’ kitchens. And in 1989 In-Flite won the first joint-venture contract between the Soviet Union and a Western food-service company, catering Aeroflot flights out of Moscow. The deal was widely hailed as a significant milestone of Mikhail Gorbachev’s nascent glasnost strategy. Marriott was able to hold its position as the world’s largest airline caterer. Thus, even though Bill’s hotel empire was growing rapidly during the 1980s, the company’s most ubiquitous “advertisements” were the hundreds of In-Flite trucks emblazoned with Marriott’s logo loading food carts onto airplanes at airports across America.

The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
by Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman
Published 14 Oct 2023

Today the Watson Institute is one of the world’s leading centers of its kind, pursuing Watson’s charge “to promote a just and peaceful world through research, teaching, and public engagement.”41 In 1987, at age seventy-three, he made plans to return to Russia. Since 1979, he had sought Soviet government approval to re-create his old Lend-Lease air-ferry route across Siberia, as a small reminder of the past amity between the nations. His request was stalled in the Russian bureaucracy. Then reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and US-Soviet relations improved. A senior Soviet official came to Watson at a meeting in the spring of 1987: “‘Tom, you can do it.’”42 He had just six weeks to prepare. He flew out of Westchester County airport on July 5. Inscribed on the nose of Watson’s Learjet 55: “ALSIB 1942–1987,” standing for the Alaska–Siberia ferry route.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

But then it turned out she employed an astrologer to schedule Reagan’s important trips and meetings. “She feels there’s nothing wrong in talking to her,” Mrs. Reagan’s spokesperson said of the astrologer. According to the astrologer, “Air Force One didn’t take off without permission. [Nancy] set the time for summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, presidential debates with Carter and Mondale…the timing of all the President’s trips abroad, of his press conferences, his State of the Union addresses.” “Good God,” George H. W. Bush said when he learned of this operational voodoo near the end of his vice-presidency, “I had no idea.” Not so cute was a president of the United States expecting apocalyptic biblical prophecies to be fulfilled soon.

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
by Rachel Hewitt
Published 6 Jul 2011

Perhaps most importantly of all, the Military Survey sparked in William Roy the dream of making a complete and accurate national map of the entire British Isles. But this was an ambition that would not begin to be realised for almost half a century. 1 In 1987, after being bought by a Japanese actor, Milton-Lockhart was dismantled stone by stone. Once Mikhail Gorbachev had granted special permission, it was shipped in thirty containers on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan, where the mansion was reconstructed in woodland about a hundred miles from Tokyo. Renamed ‘Lockheart Castle’, it now hosts luxury boutiques and weddings. 2 Map scales can also be written as fractions to describe the ratio between the distance on paper and the distance on the ground.

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World
by Sinclair McKay
Published 22 Aug 2022

This added a layer of needless anguish to the grief of Dr Muschol’s family, who had to wait years before they received official confirmation of their loss.19 But this was also the action of a government and security service which had ossified as the world around them changed; and as the Soviet Union ushered in the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, and his realistic assessments of a rigid, buckling, ever more bankrupt system, so the regime in East Berlin became an oppressive authoritarian anachronism, outside the general flow of time. Erich Honecker was an unyielding hardliner increasingly at odds with the liberalizing reforms – including the glasnost (openness, or a certain freedom of expression) being promoted in Russia by Gorbachev.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance
Published 8 May 2023

Worden and other SDI advocates, however, felt that the program provided much-needed leverage. To that end, Worden wrote a paper that outlined the technical feasibility of Star Wars and placed it in National Review, which Reagan always read cover to cover. Worden is convinced that the paper helped sway Reagan toward backing SDI during the Reykjavík summit in 1986 with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. “It was my major contribution to ending the Cold War,” he said. * For example, he was one of SpaceX’s main detractors in Congress. * His sisters tried to stop the proceedings by calling the police and telling them that Weston intended to commit suicide. * They even named it Area 51

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

The very same Arab Muslim world that produced Nasser and bin Laden, so consumed with lashing out to overcome their humiliation, also produced Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba and Dubai under Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who chose instead to dig deep, embrace change, learn from the other, and build out. The very same Latin America that produced the dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela produced the dynamic democratic president Ernesto Zedillo in Mexico. The very same Russia that produced Putin produced Mikhail Gorbachev, with his relatively more liberal vision for his country. The very same Southeast Asia that produced the genocidal Pol Pot in Cambodia produced the builder Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. Embracing Diversity As for embracing diversity, it is more vital than ever today for creating resilience in a changing environment.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

CEO Forum that Ratan Tata and William Harrison chaired consisted of ten CEOs from India and ten from the United States.As an advisory body to the prime minister and the U.S. president, our focus was on improving ties between India and the United States. We offered inputs on everything from FDI to trade relations and energy concerns. t The fact that official Soviet statistics greatly exaggerated levels of growth became clear only in the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s government reported growth rates that were “close to zero.” u Opinions differ on how much was compromise and how much of this was from industrialists who were true believers. Historians such as Baldev Raj Nayar have argued that the industrialists coauthoring the plan, including the Tatas, truly believed that state-led capitalism was “the only option” if India was to go from a desperately poor to a developed country.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

Los Cee-Ca-Go Boys For a quarter of a century, the Berlin Wall symbolized the difference between the free markets of the West and the socialist economies of the East. On June 12, 1987, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate to commemorate the 750th anniversary of Berlin, U.S. President Ronald Reagan issued a challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Tear down this wall!” On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. At the fall of the Wall, when asked “Who won?”, Western political scientists cited the triumph of capitalism over socialism. The economists’ response was “Chicago.”

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Published 26 Sep 2006

When they got back to the city, they disbanded. IN 1986 BIN LADEN BROUGHT his wives and children to Peshawar, where they joined the small but growing community of Arabs responding to Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s fatwa. It was clear by then that the Afghans were winning the war. Admitting that Afghanistan was “a bleeding wound,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, offered a timetable for the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops. That was also the year that the American-made Stinger, the hand-fired missile that proved so deadly for Russian aircraft, was introduced, decisively tipping the balance in favor of the mujahideen.

Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Carolyn Bain and Alexis Averbuck
Published 31 Mar 2015

Until now, Höfn has been one of the most isolated towns in Iceland. 1975 The third in a series of 'cod wars' takes place between Iceland and the UK. These disputes over fishing rights in the North Atlantic flare up in the 1950s and 1970s, as Iceland expands its territorial waters. 1986 The beginning of the end of the Cold War? General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan agree to meet at a summit in Höfði House, Reykjavík. 2006 The controversial US military base at Keflavík closes down after 45 years in service; the government also approves the resumption of commercial whaling. 2008 The worldwide financial downturn hits Iceland particularly hard, precipitating the worst national banking crisis ever when all three of the country’s major banks collapse. 2009 Iceland formally applies for EU membership – a contentious issue among the population.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Note from Tim: My friend Cal Fussman (TW: @calfussman, calfussman.com) is a New York Times best-selling author and writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known as a primary writer of the “What I Learned” feature. He’s interviewed dozens of shapers of modern culture including Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Ali, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, among others. Cal also has breakfast with Larry King nearly every morning in L.A. Since Larry can be hard to nail down and I was dying to have him in this book, Cal was kind enough to interview him in my stead. We also wanted to focus on some of Larry’s stories, so you’ll notice that the format and questions are different.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
Published 24 Jun 2021

Their planes can now conduct air reconnaissance over China.”19 Deng was clear that this assessment necessitated “the development of its relations with the United States.” He then delivered the key point: “how can China not feel that the greatest threat comes from the Soviet Union?” This assessment of the Soviet threat was not simply for Bush’s benefit. When the Soviet Union’s leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing a few months later, Deng conveyed this same assessment of the Soviet threat directly to him.20 Although Beijing at times sought improved ties with the Soviet Union and stressed its interest in an “independent” foreign policy in the early 1980s, it clearly leaned heavily toward Washington.21 China cooperated closely with the United States on security matters, and its military and doctrinal texts still focused primarily on the possibility of war with the Soviet Union and not the distant United States.22 When the American journalist Mike Wallace asked Deng during an interview in 1986 why China’s ties with capitalist America were superior to its ties with Soviet communists, Deng did not dispute Wallace’s assessment.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth
by Frederick Kempe
Published 30 Apr 2011

In the pages that follow are clues and cautions that are particularly timely during the first term of another young and relatively inexperienced commander in chief, President Barack Obama, who, like Kennedy, came to the White House with a foreign policy agenda aimed at engaging our adversaries more skillfully and understanding more reliably what lurks beneath seemingly intractable conflicts in order that we can better solve them. I know something of such issues and challenges myself from our days dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when I served as national security advisor in President George H. W. Bush’s White House. The two U.S. presidents who dealt with Gorbachev, Bush and Ronald Reagan, were very different men. However, both understood that nothing was more important in trying to end the Cold War than the ways in which they engaged their Soviet counterpart.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
by Neil Sheehan
Published 21 Sep 2009

Although no one could have foreseen it when Bernard Schriever assembled his small band at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood in the summer of 1954, their greatest achievement and that of all those who were to labor with them was to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions. Time was the only solution. A nuclear war was certainly not the answer. And until the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempts at reform hastened the collapse, the leaders of the Soviet state regarded the post-Second World War status quo as nonnegotiable. But they could not evade the cumulative effects of time. The Soviet society that Joseph Stalin fashioned was not sustainable. The three pillars of the state—the Communist Party, the military, and the secret police—were costly to maintain.

Bali & Lombok Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Kalibukbuk This is ground zero for nightlife. There's a good range of restaurants, beachside cafes, bars where you can get a pizza and maybe hear some music, or fun places that defy description. oGlobal Village KafeCAFE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0362-41928; Jl Raya Lovina, Kalibukbuk; mains from 15,000Rp; h8am-10pm; W) Che Guevara, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela are just some of the figures depicted in paintings lining the walls of this artsy cafe. The baked goods, fruit drinks, pizzas, breakfasts and much more are excellent. It has a welcoming, mellow vibe. There's free book and DVD exchanges plus a selection of local handicrafts.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

While Diener et al. agree with some of Easterlin's findings on the negative impact on rising aspirations, they find that income correlates with happiness when it leads to greater optimism about the future. Chapter 21. Trajectories to Our Future 1. Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968). 2. Some notable members of the Club of Rome have included prominent statesmen such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Václav Havel, and Pierre Trudeau. See http://www.clubofrome.org/membership/ (accessed June 24, 2016). Debora MacKenzie, “Doomsday Book,” New Scientist, no. 2846 (2012): 38–41; Graham M. Turner, “A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 Years of Reality,” Global Environmental Change 18 (2008): 397–411; Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), Kindle edition, locations 408–13. 3.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Although Lockheed got a prime contract, it was the first sign that the mighty boost that the Reagan years brought to Sunnyvale’s fortunes would soon fade away.27 Yet the Valley did not leave the foreign-policy spotlight as the Reagan era came to a close. In the early summer of 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev came to Stanford for an event that sounded like a call-and-response to Reagan’s speech in Moscow two years earlier. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the West had won the Cold War. But “let us not wrangle over who won it,” Gorbachev told the large campus crowd gathered in the cavernous Memorial Auditorium.

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017
by Ian Black
Published 2 Nov 2017

Bush’s description of the participants as ‘reluctant and uneasy players’ was an understatement.30 Preparations went smoothly, except for a tense spat over whether the Spanish hosts would agree to remove an enormous oil painting of Charles V killing Moors from the summit venue, the Palacio Real, the spectacular residence of King Juan Carlos.31 Starting on 31 October 1991, the conference was a dramatic and ceremonial event that attracted intense media coverage and provided some arresting images over three days. Presidents Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev both made weighty speeches invoking the momentous global changes of the preceding months. ‘Let no one mistake the magnitude of this challenge,’ said Bush. ‘The struggle we seek to end has a long and painful history. Every life lost – every outrage, every act of violence – is etched deep in the hearts and history of the people of this region.’

Understanding Power
by Noam Chomsky
Published 26 Jul 2010

If you don’t have the illusions, then you don’t get burnt out by the failure—and the way we overcome the illusions is by developing our own institutions, where we can learn from experiences like this. For instance, if we see a big organizing effort where everybody signs the petitions and some people try to introduce the isssue into the ’84 Democratic Party platform, and it has absolutely no effect, and a year later Mikhail Gorbachev [Soviet leader] declares a unilateral nuclear test freeze and still there’s no effect—well, we should be learning something. 4 Then we should be carrying on to the next step. But that wasn’t the reaction of the nuclear freeze organizers. The reaction among the organizers wasn’t, “Well, we obviously misunderstood the way things work”—it was, “We did the right thing, but we partially failed: we convinced the population, but we didn’t manage to convince the elites, so now let’s convince the elites.”

Lonely Planet Norway (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet and Donna Wheeler
Published 1 Apr 2015

It is unclear why Nobel chose Norway to administer the Peace Prize, but whatever the reason, it is a committee of five Norwegians, appointed for six-year terms by the Norwegian storting (parliament), that chooses the winner each year. Their meetings, held in a room of the Nobel Institute ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ) that is decorated with the pictures of winners past, from Mother Teresa (1979) to Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) and Al Gore (2007), are closed-door affairs presided over by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland. Meetings are also attended by the institute's director, Geir Lundestad. Appointed director in 1990, Lundestad filled us in on some prize history. What's the difference between being nominated and short-listed for the Peace Prize?

Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Published 6 Sep 2021

Part XII DEPARTURES Chapter 32 SPECIAL YEARS In some cultures a birthmark on the forehead is said to signal a person’s inability to foresee the consequences of his or her actions. If there was ever an example to give credence to this superstition it might be the large, port-wine-stain birthmark on the forehead of Mikhail Gorbachev, the half-Russian, half-Ukrainian son of peasants who became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. The young, tall Gorbachev convinced much of his country that ambitious reform would usher in brighter times, and he began to do things no other Soviet leader had done before. He took high-profile, televised trips across the country.

Lonely Planet Iceland
by Lonely Planet

Until now, Höfn has been one of the most isolated towns in Iceland. 1975 The third in a series of 'cod wars' takes place between Iceland and the UK. These disputes over fishing rights in the North Atlantic flare up in the 1950s and 1970s, as Iceland expands its territorial waters. 1986 The beginning of the end of the Cold War? General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan agree to meet at a summit in Höfði House, Reykjavík. 2006 The controversial US military base at Keflavík closes down after 45 years in service; the government also approves the resumption of commercial whaling. 2008 The worldwide financial downturn hits Iceland particularly hard, precipitating the worst national banking crisis ever when all three of the country’s major banks collapse. 2009 Iceland formally applies for EU membership – a contentious issue among the population.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

The 1980s had been a decade of reversals for Moscow, which saw a crash in oil prices and thus its export earnings, squeezing imports of basic goods as well as the technology needed to modernize production; at the same time Reagan threatened it with a new arms race, even as it strained to spend more than twice what the US did on defence as a share of GDP, with half its per capita income. In this context, the arrival of a younger, idealistic reformer in the Kremlin, pledged to economic and political liberalization and dialogue, should have been music to the ears of the Economist. Not so: wary of Mikhail Gorbachev, it enjoined Reagan and his ‘overcautious’ understudy George Bush Sr. not to compromise with him, even as his chaotic management of glasnost and perestroika set the disintegration of the Soviet system in motion. If the paper greeted all signs of this with glee – ‘we just sat back and enjoyed the ride’, according to Pennant-Rea – it also brought a characteristic ferociousness to its coverage of events, closing out the Cold War as it had waged it.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

In December 1962 Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State (and a considerable Anglophile), famously told the young soldiers at West Point, the premier US military academy, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’.128 (‘Always a conceited ass,’ wrote Macmillan in his diary,129 commenting later to a friend that Acheson was ‘a nice man, but a kind of American caricature of an Englishman, and always overstates his case’.130) Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl did the same some forty-seven years later at a conference to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall when, speaking of his old antagonist Margaret Thatcher in the company of Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Senior, he declared: Thatcher says the European Parliament should have no power because Westminster cannot surrender a single bit of its sovereignty. Her ideas are pre-Churchillian. She thinks the postwar era isn’t over yet. She believes that history has been unjust. Germany is so rich and Britain has to fight for its survival.

GCHQ
by Richard Aldrich
Published 10 Jun 2010

This was paid for on a three-way split between the British, the Americans and the Germans, with the French joining soon after.58 In September 1987 Peter Marychurch suggested the Swedish FRA join as a ‘sleeping partner’, since Sigdasys was saving costs for everyone by eliminating overlap.59 The Americans continued to be impressed by the BND’s aggressive and expanding global sigint programme, for example its cooperation with the code-breaking agency in Taiwan.60 Sadly, Odom’s desire to give more sigint to NATO’s front-line divisions was twenty years too late. By 1986 the new Russian Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, was beginning to transform world affairs. In the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence, Gorbachev was welcomed with cautious optimism. Observers were not only watching him but also the ‘exceptionally able’ Russian Ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, who was a natural diplomat.61 Meanwhile, the Middle East and Africa were becoming more important to NSA, which was anxiously watching the conflict in Angola between the Marxist regime and rebel forces of Joseph Savimbi, who received support from both South Africa and the CIA.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

Broad relinquishment would require a totalitarian system to implement, and a totalitarian brave new world is unlikely because of the democratizing impact of increasingly powerful decentralized electronic and photonic communication. The advent of worldwide, decentralized communication epitomized by the Internet and cell phones has been a pervasive democratizing force. It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information.26 The movement toward democracy and capitalism and the attendant economic growth that characterized the 1990s were all fueled by the accelerating force of these person-to-person communication technologies.

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Published 15 Oct 2009

Petersburg in a more leisurely manner. With the northern sky still light well after 10:00 p.m., the thirteen directors and their spouses rode gondolas along the city’s storied canals. On Sunday, the board flew down to Moscow for the second part of the meeting, gathering at the Ritz-Carlton, on the edge of Red Square. Mikhail Gorbachev was the speaker at their dinner that evening. Power in Russia was still very much in the hands of Vladimir Putin, even though Dmitry Medvedev had recently been elected to succeed him. Many foreign investors feared that Russia’s commitment to open and free markets was quickly fading, particularly in light of the power grabs in the energy industry.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

Furthermore, the United Kingdom was asked by Caribbean nations to take part in an invasion of Grenada and refused. London told Washington of its opposition to military action: Margaret Thatcher expressed the gravest concern to Reagan, by telephone, before the invasion went ahead anyway.16 Mrs Thatcher was quick to recognize that the new Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev (from 1985) wanted change and helped thereby to bring a sudden and peaceful end to the Cold War in 1989. Yet this had potentially dangerous consequences for her. One of her concerns was that the United Kingdom would have to get rid of its nuclear weapons as a result of a US–Soviet deal. Mrs Thatcher was roused to fury by Ronald Reagan: ‘He nearly gave away the store,’ she told Boxing Day guests at Chequers, by which she meant he had nearly given away the nuclear weapons the United Kingdom oversaw.17 This had the merit of exposing the repeated argument that the United Kingdom had nuclear weapons in order to trade them away, the idea that the British state was fully in favour of multilateral nuclear disarmament.

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
by Adam Tooze
Published 13 Nov 2014

Balfour described it as an event unparalleled in world history. This was no exaggeration. Never before had an empire of Britain’s stature so explicitly and consciously conceded superiority in such a crucial dimension of global power. It deserves to stand as an early twentieth-century precursor to Mikhail Gorbachev’s retreat from the escalation of the Cold War in the 1980s. But was the Washington Conference also a disastrous miscalculation?19 The Entente between Britain and the US was underpinned, despite many squabbles, by a shared interest in the status quo in the Atlantic. By contrast, the gamble taken in the Pacific was dramatic.

The Rough Guide to Poland
by Rough Guides
Published 18 Sep 2018

After a devastating wave of strikes in 1988 Jaruzelski finally admitted defeat and called for a “courageous turnaround” by the Party, accepting the need for talks with Solidarity and the prospect of real power sharing – an option of political capitulation only made possible by the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as secretary general in the Kremlin. 1989–2005: the new Poland The round-table talks ran from February to April 1989, government representatives ultimately agreeing to the opposition’s demands for the legalization of Solidarity, the establishment of an independent press and the promise of what were termed “semi-free” elections.

Lonely Planet Poland
by Lonely Planet

In October 1982 the government formally dissolved Solidarity and released Wałęsa from detention, but the trade union continued underground on a much smaller scale, enjoying widespread sympathy and support. In July 1984 a limited amnesty was announced and some members of the political opposition were released from prison. But further arrests continued, following every public protest, and it was not until 1986 that all political prisoners were freed. The Gorbachev Impact The election of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader in the Soviet Union in 1985, and his glasnost and perestroika programmes, gave an important stimulus to democratic reforms throughout Central and Eastern Europe. By early 1989, Jaruzelski had softened his position and allowed the opposition to challenge for parliamentary seats. These ‘semifree’ elections – semifree in the sense that regardless of the outcome, the communists were guaranteed a number of seats – were held in June 1989, and Solidarity succeeded in getting an overwhelming majority of its candidates elected to the Senate, the upper house of parliament.

This Sceptred Isle
by Christopher Lee
Published 19 Jan 2012

1401 First Lollard Martyr 1403 Percy’s Revolt; Henry Percy killed at Shrewsbury 1406 James I of Scots 1409 Owen Glyndŵr 1411 Foundation of Guildhall in London 1413 Henry V 1415 Agincourt 1420 Treaty of Troyes; Paston Letters 1422 Henry VI 1429 Joan of Arc at Orléans 1437 James II of Scots 1450 Cade’s Rebellion 1453 End of Hundred Years War; Gutenberg Bible 1455 Wars of the Roses begin 1460 James III of Scots 1461 Edward IV c.1474 Caxton prints first book in English 1483 Richard III 1485 Henry VII; founding of the Yeomen of the Guard 1488 James IV of Scots 1492 Christopher Columbus reaches America 1509 Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon 1513 James V of Scots 1519 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 1527 Henry VIII fails in attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon 1533 Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn; Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury 1536 Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour; Wales annexed to England 1540 Henry VIII marries and divorces Anne of Cleves; marries Catherine Howard 1540 Henry VIII, King of Ireland 1542 Mary, Queen of Scots 1547 Edward VI 1549 First Book of Common Prayer 1553 Mary I 1556 Cranmer executed 1558 Elizabeth I 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots returns to Scotland from France 1562 British slave trade starts 1567 James VI, King of Scotland 1571 First anti-Catholic Penal Law 1580 Drake’s circumnavigation 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots executed 1596 Robert Cecil, Secretary of State 1600 British East India Company incorporated 1601 Essex executed 1603 James I 1603 Ralegh treason trial and imprisonment 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible 1616 Death of William Shakespeare 1618 Ralegh executed; Thirty Years War starts 1625 Charles I 1632 Lord Baltimore granted patent for the settlement of Maryland 1641 The Grand Remonstrance issued 1642 Civil War starts; Battle of Edgehill 1643 Battle of Newbury 1644 Battle of Marston Moor 1645 New Model Army established 1649 Charles I executed; massacres at Wexford and Drogheda 1651 Charles II crowned at Scone; Hobbes’ Leviathan published 1655 Jamaica captured 1658 Cromwell dies 1660 Charles II; Declaration of Breda; Pepys begins his diary 1662 The Royal Society; Boyle’s Law 1666 Fire of London 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company 1673 Test Act 1678 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress 1685 James II 1689 William III and Mary II 1690 Battle of the Boyne 1692 Massacre of Glencoe 1694 Bank of England 1695 Bank of Scotland 1702 Queen Anne 1704 Battle of Blenheim; capture of Gibraltar 1707 Union with Scotland 1714 George I 1719 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1722 Walpole, first Prime Minister 1727 George II 1740 War of Austrian Succession; Arne composes ‘Rule Britannia’ 1742 Handel’s Messiah 1746 Battle of Culloden 1751 Clive captures Arcot 1755 Dr Johnson’s Dictionary 1756 Seven Years War 1759 General Wolfe dies at Battle of Quebec 1760 George III 1765 Stamp Act; Hargreaves’ spinning jenny 1767 Revd Laurence Stone’s Tristram Shandy 1768 Royal Academy of Arts founded 1772 Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Bengal 1773 Boston Tea Party 1774 Priestley isolates oxygen 1775 American Revolution – Lexington and Concord 1776 American Declaration of Independence 1779 Captain Cook killed in Hawaii 1780 Gordon Riots; Epsom Derby 1781 Battle of Yorktown 1783 Pitt the Younger PM 1788 Regency Crisis 1789 French Revolution 1792 Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man 1799 Napoleon 1801 Union with Ireland 1805 Trafalgar 1807 Abolition of Slave Trade Act 1815 Waterloo 1820 George IV 1828 University of London founded 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act 1830 William IV 1832 First Reform Act 1833 Abolition of slavery in British colonies Act 1834 Houses of Parliament burned down 1836 Births, Marriages & Deaths Act 1837 Queen Victoria 1838 Public Records Office founded 1839 Bed Chamber Crisis; Opium War 1840 Prince Albert; Treaty of Waitangi 1843 Joule’s First Law 1844 Rochdale Pioneers; first telegraph line in England 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws 1847 Marks and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto 1849 Punjab conquered 1850 Public libraries; Tennyson, Poet Laureate 1854 Crimean War; British Medical Association founded 1855 Daily Telegraph founded; Palmerston PM 1857 Sepoy Rebellion (Indian Mutiny); Trollope’s Barchester Towers 1858 Canning, first Viceroy of India 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species 1861 Prince Albert dies; American Civil War 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated 1867 Second Reform Act; first bicycle 1868 TUC 1869 Suez Canal opened; Cutty Sark launched 1870 Death of Dickens 1876 Victoria made Empress of India 1880 Gladstone PM 1881 First Boer War 1884 Third Reform Act 1885 Gordon dies at Khartoum 1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 1891 Elementary school fees abolished 1895 Salisbury PM 1896 Daily Mail founded 1898 Omdurman 1899 Second Boer War 1900 Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius 1901 Edward VII 1903 Suffragettes 1904 Entente Cordiale 1908 Borstal opened 1909 Old Age Pensions 1910 George V 1914 Irish Home Rule; First World War 1916 Lloyd George PM 1918 RAF formed from Royal Flying Corps; Marie Stopes 1919 John Maynard Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace 1920 Black and Tans; Anglican Church in Wales disestablished 1921 Irish Free State 1922 Bonar Law PM 1923 Baldwin PM 1924 First Labour Government (MacDonald PM); Baldwin PM; Lenin dies 1925 Britain joins Gold standard 1926 General Strike 1928 Women over twenty-one given vote 1929 The Depression; MacDonald PM 1931 National Government; Statute of Westminster 1932 British Union of Fascists 1933 Hitler 1935 Baldwin PM 1936 Edward VIII; George VI; Spanish Civil War 1937 Chamberlain PM 1938 Austria annexed by Germany; Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 1939 Second World War 1940 Battle of Britain; Dunkirk; Churchill PM 1942 Beveridge Report; fall of Singapore and Rangoon 1944 Butler Education Act; Normandy allied landings 1945 Attlee PM; Germany and Japan surrender 1946 UN founded; National Insurance Act; National Health Service 1947 India Independence; Pakistan formed 1948 Railways nationalized; Berlin Airlift; Ceylon (Sri Lanka) independence 1949 NATO; Irish Independence; Korean War 1951 Churchill PM 1952 Elizabeth II 1955 Eden PM; Cyprus Emergency 1956 Suez Crisis 1957 Macmillan PM 1958 Life Peerages; EEC 1959 Vietnam War; Fidel Castro 1960 Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech 1963 Douglas-Home PM; De Gaulle veto on UK EEC membership; Kennedy assassination 1964 Wilson PM 1965 Southern Rhodesia UDI 1967 Pound devalued 1969 Open University; Northern Ireland Troubles; Robin Knox-Johnston first solo, non-stop sailing circumnavigation 1970 Heath PM 1971 Decimal currency in UK 1972 Bloody Sunday, Northern Ireland 1973 Britain in EEC; VAT 1974 Wilson PM 1976 Callaghan PM; first Concorde passenger flight 1979 Thatcher PM; Rhodesian Settlement 1982 Falklands War 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev; Global warming – British report hole in ozone layer 1986 Chernobyl; Reagan–Gorbachev Zero missile summit 1987 Wall Street Crash 1988 Lockerbie 1989 Berlin Wall down 1990 John Major PM; Iraq invades Kuwait 1991 Gulf War; Helen Sharman first Briton in space; Tim Berners-Lee first website; collapse of Soviet Communism 1992 Maastricht Treaty 1994 Church of England Ordination of Women; Channel Tunnel opens 1995 British forces to Sarajevo 1996 Dolly the Sheep clone 1997 Blair PM; Diana Princess of Wales dies; Hong Kong returns to China 1998 Rolls-Royce sold to BMW; Good Friday Agreement 1999 Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections 2001 Terrorist attacks on New York 2002 Elizabeth the Queen Mother dies 2003 Second Gulf War 2004 Asian Tsunami 2005 Freedom of Information Act; Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles wed; terrorist attacks on London 2006 Queen’s eightieth birthday 2007 Ministry of Justice created; Brown PM 2008 Northern Rock collapse 2009 Market crash; banks partly nationalized; MPs expenses scandal 2010 Cameron PM.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

History is replete with weapons that were touted as war-winners that were eventually abandoned because they had little effect.106 Could nuclear weapons go the way of the Gustav Gun? In the late 1950s a movement arose to Ban the Bomb, and over the decades it escaped its founding circle of beatniks and eccentric professors and has gone mainstream. Global Zero, as the goal is now called, was broached in 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who famously mused, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” In 2007 a bipartisan quartet of defense realists (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry) wrote an op-ed called “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” with the backing of fourteen other former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State and Defense.107 In 2009 Barack Obama gave a historic speech in Prague in which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” an aspiration that helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize.108 It was echoed by his Russian counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev (though not so much by either one’s successor).

How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1997

Bookmakers are willing to make up inscrutable numbers such as that the odds that Michael Jackson and LaToya Jackson are the same person are 500 to 1, or that the odds that circles in cornfields emanate from Phobos (one of the moons of Mars) are 1,000 to 1. I once saw a tabloid headline announcing that the chances that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist are one in eight trillion. Are these statements true? False? Approximately true? How could we tell? A colleague tells me that there is a ninety-five percent chance he will show up at my talk. He doesn’t come. Was he lying? You may be thinking: granted, a single-event probability is just subjective confidence, but isn’t it rational to calibrate confidence by relative frequency?

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 26 Aug 2015

The muscular ambition of the US at this time was partly fired by the profound geopolitical changes witnessed in the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had come down not long before the invasion of Kuwait, and in the months after the defeat of Iraq the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. On Christmas Day 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union and announced the dissolution of the USSR into fifteen independent states. The world was seeing ‘changes of almost biblical proportions’, President Bush told Congress a few weeks later. ‘By the grace of God, America [has] won the Cold War.’11 In Russia itself, transition sparked a furious battle for control that ended in a constitutional crisis and the deposition of the old guard after army tanks had shelled the White House in Moscow, the seat of the Russian government, in 1993.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
by Max Boot
Published 9 Jan 2018

Having been born in 1908 when aviation and automobile travel were still in their infancy, in a pre–World War I age when the Romanovs were presiding over an empire that was crumbling beneath their feet, he had lived into an era where television and jet travel had become humdrum, and one in which Mikhail Gorbachev was presiding over the dissolution of a second Russian empire in under a century. Coming into the world only a decade after the American victory in the Spanish-American War—that “splendid little war,” in Secretary of State John Hay’s words—he had witnessed the agonies of two world wars followed by a stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

New SS20 missiles were being deployed by the Russians, targeted on cities and military bases across Western Europe. In response, Nato was planning a new generation of American Pershing and Cruise missiles to be sited in Europe, including in Britain. In the late winter of 1979 Russian troops had begun arriving in Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev was an obscure candidate member of the Politburo, twenty-eighth in the pecking order, working on agricultural planning, and glasnost was a word no one in the West had heard of. Poland’s free trade union movement Solidarity was being crushed by a military dictator. Western politics echoed with arguments over weapons systems, disarmament strategies and the need to stand up to the Soviet threat.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

This was the playbook. The Soviets, who shared the American elite’s understanding of capitalist politicians as mere lackeys for the ruling class, knew what was going on. Meeting with George Shultz, by then the secretary of state, in advance of his first sit-down with President Reagan, an apparently fed-up Mikhail Gorbachev produced a copy of the giant Hoover tome and waved it in Shultz’s face. “Don’t tell me that! We know what you think!” said the new general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. “We have read this book and watched all its programs become adopted by the Reagan Administration.”10 Anderson uses the anecdote to lead off his memoir—a good one for him, no doubt—but the confused reaction he writes for Shultz is silly: Of course Shultz knew about the book.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk
Published 2 Jan 2005

Less than twenty-four hours before he was to enter the eighteenth-century folly of the Palacio Real for the opening of the conference, here was the American president breezily handing responsibility for the future to the peoples who inhabit what in Bush-speak was now repeatedly called “that troubled corner of the world.” Those who wished to revisit history, of course, remembered another palace and another peace conference in which victors had shared out the spoils of the conquered. The Palacio Real in Madrid was not Versailles, but there were some distinct parallels. Mikhail Gorbachev was there, the “loser” in the Cold War, a smiling, compliant figure, agreeing demurely with all of the American president’s remarks. It was the future of Gorbachev’s former Arab allies that would be under discussion in this Bourbon mansion. No one could dispute the difference in scale. More than 10,000 delegates attended the Paris peace conference of 1919.

…

American diplomats in Madrid, however, noted George Bush’s refusal to comment on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land and which, for the Arabs, were the touchstone of any peace treaty. He would not talk of “land for peace,” nor would the obedient Mikhail Gorbachev. The man who in 1990–91 sent half a million soldiers to enforce a UN Security Council Resolution—which called for another Middle East army, Iraq’s, to withdraw from another occupied Arab land, that of Kuwait—felt able to dismiss the darkness of history. “It’s not my intention to go back to years of differences,” was what Bush said.84 For the Americans, the present was the future; for the Arabs and Israelis, the present was also the past.

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

Professor Stephen Shalom, analyzing this incident, writes (Imperial Alibis): “If terrorism is defined as politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets, then one of the most serious incidents of international terrorism of the year was precisely this U.S. raid on Libya.” Early in the presidency of George Bush, there came the most dramatic developments on the international scene since the end of World War II. In the year 1989, with a dynamic new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the head of the Soviet Union, the long suppressed dissatisfaction with “dictatorships of the proletariat” which had turned out to be dictatorships over the proletariat erupted all through the Soviet bloc. There were mass demonstrations in the Soviet Union and in the countries of Eastern Europe which had been long dominated by the Soviet Union.

Central Europe Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

In 1971 a change to the more flexible leadership of Erich Honecker in the East, combined with the Ostpolitik (East Politics) of FRG chancellor Willy Brandt, allowed an easier political relationship between the two Germanys. In the same year the four occupying powers formally accepted the division of Berlin. Honecker’s policies produced higher living standards in the GDR, yet East Germany barely managed to achieve a level of prosperity half that of the FRG. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in March 1985, the East German communists gradually lost Soviet backing. Events in 1989 rapidly overtook the GDR government, which resisted pressure to introduce reforms. When Hungary relaxed its border controls in May 1989, East Germans began crossing to the West.

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas
Published 28 Feb 2012

But the description accurately captures Nitze: he is an actor in the Achesonian tradition; he solves problems, regardless of political consequences. Rarely was the triumph of ideology over pragmatism, of political posturing over serious statesmanship, so vividly demonstrated as during the weeks preceding the summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November of 1985. While Reagan’s aides squabbled with each other, leaking documents and nearly paralyzing White House decision making, Nitze quietly kept searching for a formula that the Soviets and Ronald Reagan could accept. Against the backdrop of incessant propagandizing and infighting, Nitze’s selfless pursuit of real diplomacy seemed noble, if almost forlorn.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

Thus, even in a society desperately short of creature comforts, hungry for almost any form of solace under tyranny, and unfazed by health fears about smoking when severe environmental contaminants of every kind were rampant, the Soviet system could not sustain cigarette production at its rated 400 billion units a year. Output had fallen to about half that figure in the last years of the Red empire, causing a cigarette shortage so severe that Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to stave off rioting by emergency bulk purchases from foreign manufacturers—20 billion units from Philip Morris was the largest single order—paid for with Russian oil, gold, and diamonds. As the Iron Curtain disintegrated, no outside tobacco manufacturer was better positioned to exploit the event than Philip Morris, which had tirelessly pursued licensing arrangements throughout the Soviet bloc, if only to show its flag and win good will.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Published 31 Oct 1994

The Ministry of Health was forced in 1991 to offer higher salaries to doctors and nurses who worked with HIV/ AIDS patients as compensation for the perceived risks involved. But Soviet leaders were preoccupied with far more pressing issues than supplies of syringes. The country was literally falling apart. Food shortages, riots, separatist uprisings, political instability, and a face-off between the hero of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev, and upstart leader Boris Yeltsin monopolized national attention. By 1991 the Soviet Union no longer existed. By 1993 two major coup attempts had threatened the stability of the Russian Republic, and insurrections had occurred inside most of the former Soviet socialist states. AIDS was overshadowed by history.

Fodor's California 2014
by Fodor's
Published 5 Nov 2013

Fodor’s Choice | Iron Horse Vineyards. A meandering one-lane road leads to this winery known for its sparkling wines—from the bright and austere to the rich and toasty—as well as estate Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. The sparklers have made history: Ronald Reagan served them at his summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, George Herbert Walker Bush took some along to Moscow for treaty talks, and Barack Obama has included them at official state dinners. Despite the winery’s frequent brushes with fame, a casual rusticity prevails at Iron Horse’s outdoor tasting area (large heaters keep things comfortable on chilly days), which gazes out on acres of rolling, vine-covered hills.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

“This is not the same firm,” said Maughan, “but we must keep aspects of the old culture while we bring in a new one.”96 Some of the traders stirred uneasily. What did that mean, a new culture? But at least Salomon had gotten one lucky break. Overnight, news had flashed over the wire that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had been ousted in a coup. The stock market immediately dropped 107 points. Business coverage, which had been drilling on Salomon all day Friday, suddenly shifted focus as the world turned its attention toward Gorbachev, held under house arrest by eight of his own military and state officials.

Germany Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

One slight disadvantage is the lack of English. Parking is €10 a night. Hotel Wilder Mann HOTEL €€ (350 71; www.wilder-mann.com; Am Rathausplatz 1; s €50-70, d €80-200; ) Sharing space with the glass museum, this historic hotel boasts former guests ranging from Empress Elizabeth (Sisi) of Austria to Mikhail Gorbachev and Yoko Ono. In the rooms, folksy painted furniture sits incongrously with 20th-century telephones and 21st-century TVs. The building is a warren of staircases, passageways and linking doors, so make sure you remember where your room is. Guests receive a miserly discount to the glass museum.

Germany
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 17 Oct 2010

Pension Rössner ( 931 350; www.pension-roessner.de; Bräugasse 19; s/d €35/60; ) The price-to-quality ratio is high at this immaculate Pension in a restored mansion on the eastern tip of the Altstadt. Each room is uniquely decorated and many also have fortress views. Breakfast is a silly €7 extra. Hotel Wilder Mann ( 350 71; www.wilder-mann.com; Am Rathausplatz; s €50-60, d €80-140; ) Royalty and celebrities, from Empress Elizabeth of Austria to Mikhail Gorbachev and Henry Kissinger, have stayed at this historic inn. Rooms seek to recapture a lost grandeur, and some of the carved bedsteads are very grand indeed. The glorious Ludwig II and Empress Elizabeth suites cost from €200 a night if you’re feeling flush. Hotel König ( 3850; www.hotel-koenig.de; Untere Donaulände 1; s €65-100, d €89-140; ) Spacious modern rooms, great views over the river and a good central location make this riverside property an excellent choice.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

Opened in 1991, the National Civil Rights Museum established the nation’s first comprehensive exhibit chronicling America’s civil rights movement. In the spirit of King’s legacy, each fall the museum’s Annual Freedom Awards honor distinguished individuals who have fought for justice, peace, and human rights. Among past honorees are Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, Bono, and Oprah Winfrey. A series of lectures and special programs are planned each year in conjunction with the awards ceremonies, with some of these star-studded events free and open to the public. WHERE: 450 Mulberry St. Tel 901-521-9699; www.civilrightsmuseum.org.