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For Francis Fukuyama and others, the collapse of the Soviet Union was evidence for "the end of history" and the almost Hegelian triumph of capitalist liberalism. For the authors of this work, however, it instead represented the disappearance of a counterweight to colonialism and imperialism. They ask whether the Soviet demise was indeed inevitable, as the triumphalist right has claimed, suggesting that without the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s the answer is "no." They examine the policies of Gorbachev as the product of ideological debates that had been continuing in the Communist Party since Lenin's time and as a response to the development of a second private economy within the overall socialist framework. Gorbachev's reforms of 1987, seen as comparable to policies pushed by Kruschev during 1954-1963 and advocated by Bukharin in the 1920s, discarded central tenets of Marxism-Leninism and prompted the collapse of the Soviet order.
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Reviews
"A fresh multi-faceted look at the overthrow of the Soviet State, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the campaign to introduce capitalism from above. Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny have given us a clear and powerful Marxist analysis of the momentous events which most directly shaped world politics today, the destruction of the USSR, the 'Superpower' of socialism."
Norman Markowitz, author of The Rise and Fall of the People's Century
"I have not read anything else with such detailed and intimate knowledge of what took place. This manuscript is the most important contribution I have read."
Phillip Bonosky, author of Afghanistan-Washington's Secret War
"A well-researched work containing a great deal of useful historical information. Everyone will benefit greatly from the mass of historical data and the thought-provoking arguments contained in the book."
Bahman Azad, author of Heroic Struggle Bitter Defeat