The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 - Tapa dura

...what makes Service's book special is its scholarship. His terrier-like persistence in digging into previously unexcavated archives in Russia, across America and around the internet gives his view of this slice of our recent past a firm documentary foundation... A magisterial account of a turning point in modern history, whose intellectual rigour and robustness make it unlikely to be bettered. -- Sherard Cowper-Coles * Spectator * Masterful chronicle about personalities and ideas...The Cold War ended with the demise of the USSR in December 1991. The great biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trostsky here offers a superb account of how and why this unexpected denouement came about. -- Vladimir Tismaneanu * Times Higher Education Supplement * Well-written and thought-provoking -- Christopher Andrew * Literary Review * An abundance of superbly organized material -- Mary Dejevsky * Independent * Detailed and clear ... his main strength is his forensic challenge to the cliches and myths on which western triumphalism about the Cold War is based ... Service is an authoritative voice offering a more nuanced view. -- Victor Sebestyen * Sunday Times * Our leading historian of the Soviet Union ... magisterial * Observer *

The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the spread of Perestroika throughout the former Soviet bloc was a sea change in world history and two years later resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In The End of the Cold War, acclaimed Russian historian Robert Service examines precisely how that change came about. Drawing on a vast and largely untapped range of sources, he builds a picture of the two men who spearheaded the breakthrough: Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev, last General Secretary of the Soviet Union and first and last President of the USSR. He also analyses the role of influential players not only in America and the USSR, but throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and focuses especially on Pope John Paul II, Lech Watesa and Vaclav Havel. Authoritative, compelling and meticulously researched, this is political history at its best.