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Archie Brown authored The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, April 2020.) In this analysis of the role of political leadership in the Cold War’s ending, Brown shows why the popular view that Western economic and military strength left the Soviet Union with no alternative but to admit defeat is wrong. To understand the significance of the parts played by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in East-West relations in the second half of the 1980s, Brown addresses several specific questions: What were the values and assumptions of these leaders, and how did their perceptionsRead More →

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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990, by Peter Reddaway, was published in February 2020 by Brookings Institute Press. In the last decades before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, dissidents within the country worked to expose the tyranny and weakness of the Soviet state. Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and came to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he tells their stories and also captures the human costs of the repression that marked the SovietRead More →

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Angelo Segrillo’s two books The Decline of the Soviet Union: An Analysis of the Causes and Russia: Europe or Asia? The Question of Russia’s Identity in the Discussions Between Westernizers, Slavophiles and Eurasianists and an Analysis of the Consequences in Present-Day Russia were recently released by the University of São Paulo.Read More →