Ágætis yfirlit yfir pólitíska sögu Sovétríkjanna á tímum Kalda stríðsins. Megin þemað er utanríkispólitíkin og reynt er að rekja röksemdir, stefnumið og ótta ráðamanna í Kremlin. Raunar nauðsynleg lesning til að bera saman við sjónarmið andstæðinga þeirra í Washington. ( )

The history of the Cold war, as seen from the Soviet leadership. Interesting to see the perspective from traditional accounts of the Cold war by Western historians reversed. ( )

While not quite as groundbreaking as I had hoped (it might have helped if I had read it closer to the date of publication) this is still a very good survey of how the Soviet Union's leadership saw their place in the world post-1945 and the stresses induced by retaining a commitment to Communist ideology while at the same time embracing the mentality "...that the Soviet Union should and could be a global empire." Perhaps the single biggest problem in all this is that Stalin's purges reduced the Soviet elite to a collection of men that had been trained to be assistants to the "boss," not supple strategists capable of adaptability. With a little more flexibility over time perhaps by the time you got those sorts of thinkers (Gorbachev and the people around him) there might still be a Soviet Union, instead of a debased Russia with no mission beyond disruption of the international system on the cheap. I personally found the sections involving Brezhnev to be most interesting, as even if he remained mostly locked in the confines of the Soviet official conventional wisdom you can legitimately call him a statesman. ( )

Zukor is professor of international relations at LSE. I enjoyed learning some more about the Soviet Union and Russia, although I guess much, though not all, of the material is well known for people who are knowledgeable about the subject. Zubok writes about the general secretaries of the post WWII period, and claims that the Soviet leaders were often less scheming and more influenced by both ideology and domestic concerns than Western observers often assumed.

The first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, said in 1949 that the purpose of NATO was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." I would not bet on the incoming secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg making similar remarks.

I found the last part, about the Gorbachev period, most interesting because I found it easier to relate to this newer material. Zubok writes sees Gorbachev as inconsistent, without a plan and no big statesman, but that he was nevertheless profoundly important. He writes of Gorbachev that: "His first priority [...] was the construction of a global world order on the basis of cooperation and nonviolence. This places Gorbachev, at least in his image of himself, in the ranks of such figures of the twentieth century as Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi, and other prophets of universal principles (p. 315)." The way these somewhat idiosyncratic beliefs influenced the general secretary made him have profound historical importance. ( )

This contemporary Russian perspective on Cold War history includes at least a few scenes that are BEGGING for a dramatic depiction on television.
ESPECIALLY: A drunken, sedative-drugged Brezhnev insisted on taking Kissinger on a bat-out-of-hell high-speed car ride in the USSR. Later, Brezhnev did the same thing with Nixon on a trip to California.
Read this book after watching the movie, "Planes, Trains & Automobiles". ( )