Table of Contents

1. The October Revolution, Its Meaning and Significance 1. A Blunder of History, Accident or Necessity? 2. Was Socialism Built in the Soviet Union? 3. Let's Not Oversimplify! A Balance Sheet of the Soviet Years 4. October and the World 5. One More Balance Sheet: Something Worth Thinking About 6. October and Perestroika 7. Does Socialism Have Future? 8. Summing Up 2. The Union Could Have Been Preserved 1. A Tragic Turn of Events 2. Tbilisi... Baku... Vilinius 3. Toward a New Union Treaty 4. Referendum on the Union 5. The Coup-A Stab in the Back-and the Intrigues of Yeltsin 6. The Belovezh Accord: Dissolution of the USSR 7. What Lies Ahead 3. The New Thinking: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 1. The Very First Steps 2. The Conception (1985-1991) 3. Overcoming the Cold War 4. The Transitional World Order 5. The New Thinking in the Post Confrontational World 6. The Challenge of Globalization 7. The Challenge of Diversity 8. The Challenge of Global Problems 9. The Challenge of Power Politics 10. The Challenge of Democracy 11. The Challenge of Universal Human Values 12. The Beginning of History?

Promotional Information

Here is the whole sweep of the Soviet experiment and experience, as told by its last steward. Drawing on his own experience as well as rich archival material, Gorbachev ponders Russia's past, present, and future place in the world-including the October Revolution, the Cold War, and key figures such as Lenin, Stalin, and Yeltsin.

About the Author

Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991, and President of the Soviet Union, 1988-1991, currently heads the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow and lectures widely. He is also the author of Perestroika and Soviet-American Relations, The Search for a New Beginning: Developing a New Civilization, and The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons.George Shriver has translated and edited many books, including Nikolai Bukharin's How It All Began: The Prison Novel and Roy Medvedev's On Soviet Dissent, The October Revolution, Let History Judge, and Post-Soviet Russia (all published by Columbia).

Reviews

We find passages of perceptive analysis that we should not ignore. Foreign Affairs Gorbachev's authorship alone makes this book an important text... [His] take on history and his analysis of global issues are unique and provocative no matter where one stands in the political spectrum. Booklist (starred review)

We find passages of perceptive analysis that we should not ignore. Foreign Affairs Gorbachev's authorship alone makes this book an important text... [His] take on history and his analysis of global issues are unique and provocative no matter where one stands in the political spectrum. Booklist (starred review)

Gorbachev, who currently heads a Moscow think tank (the Gorbachev Foundation), takes a hard look at world affairs in a memoir that showcases both the former Soviet premier's intelligence and his self-defeating idealism. He sharply warns that Russia is slipping back toward authoritarian rule with a paralyzed parliament and mass media firmly controlled by big government and oligarchs. Downplaying the role of nationalist movements in hastening the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, he acrimoniously blames its disintegration on Boris Yeltsin, whom he accuses of an irresponsible quest for power. In issuing vigorous calls for the peaceful, democratic co-development of all nations, for nuclear disarmament and for a strengthened U.N., he tries to present himself as a democratic humanist. But too often he still sounds like a die-hard Marxist-Leninist. While he condemns Bolshevik one-party rule as a colossal disaster, he assigns nearly all of the blame to Stalin and clings to the fantasy that under Lenin the Party still maintained strong democratic traditions. He upholds the idea of socialism, arguing that genuine socialism has never been triedÄnot in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or elsewhere. His support of a stronger U.N., furthermore, is based at least as much on his distrust of the U.S. (he has harsh words for the NATO war on Yugoslavia) as it is on any faith in the international organization. In the end, this is the memoir of a humane man who appears never to have been able to appreciate the difference between abstraction and real life or, as a socialist might say, between theory and practice. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.