The decline and fall of the Soviet Empire

Red Coleman, A Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, has spent over thirty years gathering observations and experiences to produce this in-depth, up-close, definitive examination of the fall of the Soviet Union and the people and events that contributed essentially to its demise. From the Kremlin Palace coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, to the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin's troubled presidency through 1995, Coleman was the man on the scene for virtually every defining event of Russian history in the postwar era. Having interviewed at length major Soviet figures from Sakharov to Gorbachev and Yeltsin and tapped the once top-secret Soviet archives; Coleman makes startling revelations about the fatal weaknesses of the Soviet system. In examining essential interlocking factors - among them the economy, the Kremlin power struggle, minority nationality unrest, and foreign affairs - he demonstrates that communism was doomed to failure after Stalin's death in 1953. He also draws damning conclusions about the long-term strategies of the United States government and suggests that the Soviet military threat was greatly overestimated by the Western powers. Again and again, Coleman exposes ways in which the United States missed opportunities to end the nuclear nightmare and to halt Communist repression decades earlier.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.