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• Introduction: The Long Road to Violence
• The Periphery before Perestroika
• Moscow Promotes Perestroika
• The Winds of Perestroika Drift South
• 1989: The Center Cannot Hold
• The Harsh Reckoning of February 1990
• The "Calm" before the Storm: March 1990-July 1991
• Slouching towards Independence
• The Short Road to War
• Conclusion: War.

"This book describes the collapse of the Soviet Union from the perspective of Tajikistan, emphasizing the violence and economic degradation endemic in the final years of the USSR (1985-1991)"-- Provided by publisher.

• List of tables
• Introduction
• Topics in the 1980s: from Soviet hegemonism to Gorbachev's new thinking
• The 1990s changing views on Gorbachev's foreign policy and the use of Lenin after Tiananmen
• The 1980s Chinese perceptions of Lenin's Socialism and Gorbachev's Glasnost
• The misuse of Gorbachev after Tiananmen and the 1990s debate about the two Soviet leaders
• Chinese perceptions of the nationality politics of Lenin and Gorbachev
• The post-1991 learning
• Chinese Sovietology and post-Mao state policies
• Bibliography.

"The breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 had significant repercussions on Chinese politics, foreign policy, and other aspects. In this book, Jie Li examines the evolution of Chinese intellectual perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, before and after the collapse. Relying on a larger body of updated Chinese sources, Li re-evaluates many key issues in post-Mao Chinese Sovietology, arguing that the Chinese views on the Soviet Union had been influenced and shaped by the ups-and-downs of Sino-Soviet (and later Sino-Russian) relations, China's domestic political climate, and the political developments in Moscow. By researching the country of the Soviet Union, Chinese Soviet-watchers did not focus on the USSR alone, but mostly attempted to confirm and legitimize the Chinese state policies of reform and open door in both decades. By examining the Soviet past, Chinese scholars not only demonstrated concern for the survival of the CCP regime, but also attempted to envision the future direction and position of China in the post-communist world"-- Provided by publisher.

• Introduction: A puzzle
• Perestroika
• Release
• Revolutions
• Separatism
• Crossroads
• Leviathan
• Standoff
• Devolution
• Consensus
• Conspiracy
• Junta
• Demise
• Cacophony
• Independence
• Liquidation
• Conclusion

A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union-showing how Gorbachev's misguided reforms led to its demise "A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart."-Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times "[A] masterly analysis."-Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong, five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances-and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union-showing how Gorbachev's misguided reforms led to its demise "A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart."-Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times "[A] masterly analysis."-Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong, five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances-and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Part 1: Hope and hubris, 1983-90
• Perestroika
• Release
• Revolutions
• Separatism
• Crossroads
• Leviathan
• Part 2: Decline and downfall, 1991
• Standoff
• Devolution
• Consensus
• Conspiracy
• Junta
• Demise
• Cacophony
• Independence
• Liquidation

A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union-showing how Gorbachev's misguided reforms led to its demise "A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart."-Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times "[A] masterly analysis."-Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong, five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances-and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction Part I: Short course in the History of the Soviet Hippie Movement and Its Sistema
• 1: Origins
• 2: Consolidation
• 3: Maturity
• 4: Ritualization Part II: How Soviet Hippies and Late Socialism Made Each Other
• 5: Ideology
• 6: Kaif
• 7: Materiality
• 8: Madness
• 9: Gerla Epilogue.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization. Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified documents, and private archives hidden for many decades. It tells the almost forgotten story of how hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union in the late-60s, often under the tutelage of the rebellious offspring of privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. It charts how these communities linked up to create an impressive network with elaborate customs and rituals, ensuring its survival for more than two decades. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds - hippies who were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed non-conformism was a symptom of schizophrenia - but also advances a surprising argument. It suggests that the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not entirely incompatible, but in fact meshed surprisingly well. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction Part I: Short course in the History of the Soviet Hippie Movement and Its Sistema
• 1: Origins
• 2: Consolidation
• 3: Maturity
• 4: Ritualization Part II: How Soviet Hippies and Late Socialism Made Each Other
• 5: Ideology
• 6: Kaif
• 7: Materiality
• 8: Madness
• 9: Gerla Epilogue.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization. Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified documents, and private archives hidden for many decades. It tells the almost forgotten story of how hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union in the late-60s, often under the tutelage of the rebellious offspring of privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. It charts how these communities linked up to create an impressive network with elaborate customs and rituals, ensuring its survival for more than two decades. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds - hippies who were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed non-conformism was a symptom of schizophrenia - but also advances a surprising argument. It suggests that the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not entirely incompatible, but in fact meshed surprisingly well. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This film finds acclaimed director Vitaly Mansky at home with a man who helped to shape the 20th-century: Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader was acclaimed as the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, policies that gave the citizens of the Soviet Union a chance to be free. He even tore down the Berlin Wall. But at the same time, under his rule, the Chernobyl nuclear facility exploded and its destruction was concealed. Citizens demanding independence in the Baltic states died. Soldiers wielding shovels brutally suppressed protesters in Tbilisi. Soviet tanks killed peaceful demonstrators in Baku. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet empire collapsed. He is now condemned by his own people. This intimate portrait finds Gorbachev living alone in an empty house outside Moscow, still carrying the burdens of his past

• Introduction I. The Origin of the Political Institution of Second Secretaries The Pre-war Legacy and the Baltic Factor Institutions of the Representative of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Bureau II. The Department of Organisational Party Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU The Department The Sector Instructors of the Department 'Birds of a Feather' III. The Establishment of the Political Institution of the Second Secretary The Establishment of the Institution of Second Secretaries: Circumstances and Reasons The Contract between the Central and the Local Nomenklatura and the Birth of the institution of the Second Secretary Second Secretaries Arrive in Central Asia, Moldavia, Estonia and Armenia IV. A Collective Biography of Second Secretaries V. A Representative of the Centre in a National Republic: Behavioural Contexts and the Strategies of the Second Secretary Nationalism An Intermediary in Ethnic Conflicts 'Local Peculiarities' and Language: Nationalism for the Second Secretaries Nikolai Belukha's Understanding of Nationalism The Second Secretary's Communication with the Centre Behavioural Strategies of the Second Secretary The Perception of Time and the Behaviour of the Second Secretary The System of Second Persons The Second Secretary and Party Discourse VI. Being the Second in a Republic: Concord and Conflicts with the First Secretary The All-Union Level The First 'Chooses' the Second The Role of the Second in Appointing the First The Second's Opportunities to Eliminate the First The First Dismisses the Second The Internal Level Conflicts between the First and the Second Secretaries Family and Neighbourhood Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Second Secretary of the Central Committee of a Soviet republic does not sound a very important position, but as this book shows it was an extremely important role, one that helped hold the Soviet Union together and helped to keep it going for so long. The key was that Second Secretaries were both members of a Soviet republic's ruling body and at the same time members of the All-Union ruling elite - they were often characterised as Moscow's governor generals. This book examines how the position of Second Secretary was established by Khrushchev in the 1950s, explores how it took on increasingly important political functions representing Moscow's interests in the republics and the republics' interests in Moscow, and discusses how the conflicts, inherent in the role, developed. The book also provides biographical details of the people who held the position and argues that the role was extremely effective in managing what could otherwise have been very difficult relationships between centre and periphery.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• 1. First Steps
• 2. Graduate Studies: A Double Miracle
• 3. Immersion: Daily Life in Khrushchev's Russia
• 4. Expulsion: Cultural Trends, Literary Friends, and the Sharp Edges of the Soviet State
• 5. The Emergence of Dissent: Bringing Dissidents and the Emerging Human Rights Movement to the World's Attention
• 6. The Other
• '68: Upheaval in the Soviet Bloc and the Chronicle of Current Events
• 7. Two Early Giants of Soviet Dissent: Marchenko and Grigorenko
• 8. Confronting the Naysayers in the West
• 9. "The Mental State of Such People Is Not Normal": Exposing the Political Abuse of Psychiatry
• 10. Dignity under Persecution: Dissent among the Ethnic Minorities
• 11. Religious Persecution, Religious Dissent
• 12. Fighting on Old and New Fronts: 1968 to 1983
• 13. Publishing Samizdat in the West
• 14. Dissent and Reform under Gorbachev: Uncertain Terrain
• 15. Upending Manufactured Schizophrenia
• 16. The End: RIP USSR, 1917 to 1991 Some Conclusions Works by Peter Reddaway Cited in This Volume, by Year Notes Subject Index Names Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents. It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got 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 captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: A matter of life and death
• The Russian White House under siege
• A new Russia is born from the flames
• Cooperation with the post-socialist states
• Putting out fires in conflict zones
• Reinventing relationships with the West and East
• Shared fate : foreign policy and domestic politics
• Balkan complications
• The battle for the Kremlin
• Opportunities and anxieties
• The end of the beginning
• Epilogue: Can Russian democracy rise again?

Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin from August 1991 to January 1996. During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, he was present when tanks moved in to seize the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to address the crowd assembled. He then departed to Paris to muster international support and, if needed, to form a Russian government-in-exile. He participated in the negotiations at Brezhnev's former hunting lodge in Belazheva, Belarus where the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to secede from the Soviet Union and form a Commonwealth of Independent States. Kozyrev's pro-Western orientation made him an increasingly unpopular figure in Russia as Russia's spiraling economy and the emergence of ultra-wealthy oligarchs soured ordinary Russians on Western ideas of democracy and market capitalism. The Firebird takes the reader into the corridors of power to provide a startling eyewitness account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the struggle to create a democratic Russia in its place, and how the promise of a better future led to the tragic outcome that changed our world forever.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: A matter of life and death
• The Russian White House under siege
• A new Russia is born from the flames
• Cooperation with the post-socialist states
• Putting out fires in conflict zones
• Reinventing relationships with the West and East
• Shared fate : foreign policy and domestic politics
• Balkan complications
• The battle for the Kremlin
• Opportunities and anxieties
• The end of the beginning
• Epilogue: Can Russian democracy rise again?

Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin from August 1991 to January 1996. During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, he was present when tanks moved in to seize the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to address the crowd assembled. He then departed to Paris to muster international support and, if needed, to form a Russian government-in-exile. He participated in the negotiations at Brezhnev's former hunting lodge in Belazheva, Belarus where the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to secede from the Soviet Union and form a Commonwealth of Independent States. Kozyrev's pro-Western orientation made him an increasingly unpopular figure in Russia as Russia's spiraling economy and the emergence of ultra-wealthy oligarchs soured ordinary Russians on Western ideas of democracy and market capitalism. The Firebird takes the reader into the corridors of power to provide a startling eyewitness account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the struggle to create a democratic Russia in its place, and how the promise of a better future led to the tragic outcome that changed our world forever.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction by Mark Lipovetsky The Man Who Couldn't Die.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the chaos of early-1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union's collapse from him in order to keep him-and his pension-alive until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova's The Man Who Couldn't Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life-and the means and meaning of their own lives-by creating a world that doesn't change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled. After her stepfather's stroke, Marina hangs Brezhnev's portrait on the wall, edits the Pravda articles read to him, and uses her media connections to cobble together entire newscasts of events that never happened. Meanwhile, her mother, Nina Alexandrovna, can barely navigate the bewildering new world outside, especially in comparison to the blunt reality of her uncommunicative husband. As Marina is caught up in a local election campaign that gets out of hand, Nina discovers that her husband is conspiring as well-to kill himself and put an end to the charade. Masterfully translated by Marian Schwartz, The Man Who Couldn't Die is a darkly playful vision of the lost Soviet past and the madness of the post-Soviet world that uses Russia's modern history as a backdrop for an inquiry into larger metaphysical questions.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carre In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Operation discreditation
• The Lithuanian syndrome 25 years later
• And then they called for Ded Moroz
• The great Lithuanian witch hunt
• Romantics vs. traitors
• The Lithuanian underground
• Homeland or death?
• And if you run out of enemies
• Without a homeland
• The consequences of one event.

Through interviews with leading participants on both sides, prominent Russian journalist Galina Sapozhnikova captures the political and human dimensions of betrayal and disillusionment that led to the collapse of the USSR, the 20th century's greatest experiment in social engineering, and what happened to the men and women who struggled to destroy or save it. Termed "color" revolutions by the worldwide media as most were designated colors, these various; movements developed in several societies in the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states during the early 2000s. In reality, they were US intelligence operations which covertly instigated, supported and infiltrated protest movements with a view to triggering regime change under the banner of a pro-democracy uprising . The objective was to manipulate elections, initiate violence, foment social unrest and use the resulting protest movement to topple an existing government in order goal to install a compliant pro-US government. How has all that worked out in Lithuania? What happened to the pro-democracy forces and to those they defeated in the aftermath? What was the role of Gorbachev? Was Eugene Sharp implicated behind the scenes in this grand show of historic transformation? What happened to the Lithuanians, who didn't agree to the USSR's dissolution? How did the political shape-shifters act; the former Komsomol and Communist Party executives, who took high posts in the new "democratic" governments? This book not only exposes the tactical stages in the process of regime change, but also sheds light on how these events play out, post regime-change, when the dust in the eyes of many has cleared. It is key to grasping the template that today underlies similar events in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and likely elsewhere, going forward. To date, this book has been published in Lithuanian, Russian and Italian.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Through interviews with leading participants on both sides, prominent Russian journalist Galina Sapozhnikova captures the political and human dimensions of betrayal and disillusionment that led to the collapse of the USSR, the 20th century's greatest experiment in social engineering, and what happened to the men and women who struggled to destroy or save it. Termed "color" revolutions by the worldwide media as most were designated colors, these various; movements developed in several societies in the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states during the early 2000s. In reality, they were US intelligence operations which covertly instigated, supported and infiltrated protest movements with a view to triggering regime change under the banner of a pro-democracy uprising . The objective was to manipulate elections, initiate violence, foment social unrest and use the resulting protest movement to topple an existing government in order goal to install a compliant pro-US government. How has all that worked out in Lithuania? What happened to the pro-democracy forces and to those they defeated in the aftermath? What was the role of Gorbachev? Was Eugene Sharp implicated behind the scenes in this grand show of historic transformation? What happened to the Lithuanians, who didn't agree to the USSR's dissolution? How did the political shape-shifters act; the former Komsomol and Communist Party executives, who took high posts in the new "democratic" governments? This book not only exposes the tactical stages in the process of regime change, but also sheds light on how these events play out, post regime-change, when the dust in the eyes of many has cleared. It is key to grasping the template that today underlies similar events in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and likely elsewhere, going forward. To date, this book has been published in Lithuanian, Russian and Italian.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)