Reviews

This distinguished book analyzes the origins, evolution, and fragmentation of the once unified Communist world. Though the focus is still on relations between the Soviet Union and the East European countries, there is an expanded treatment of the Sino-Soviet dispute. With skill and insight, Brzezinski traces the transformation of the Soviet bloc into a more complicated alliance system, in which Moscow plays a leading, but no longer unchallenged, role. This is a masterful account of the interaction between ideology and power among the Communist states.

An original and incisive analysis of the dynamics of leadership in the Communist camp and of the national factors that condition this leadership.

Brzezinski's definitive work on the rise and dissolution of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe... is compellingly lucid, unfolds effortlessly, and remains happily unencumbered by �argon. The first edition . . . was one of the significant pioneering efforts in systematizing the analysis of Communism in Eastern Europe, yet it had all the hallmarks of authorship by a profoundly political thinker. The present Revised and Enlarged Edition, more than ever, uses a political approach toward essentially political phenomena in a part of the world which traditionally thinks in political terms... reveals an encyclopaedic grasp of contemporary developments.