Table of Contents

Preface to the second paperback edition
Note on the text
List of plates
List of maps
Introduction
1: History's cruel tricks
2: Reviving the dream
3: The drama of reform
4: Waiting for the end of the world
5: Survival and cannibalism in the rust belt
6: Democracy without liberalism?
7: Idealism and treason
Epilogue
Notes
Further reading
Index

About the Author

Stephen Kotkin is Professor of European and Asian History at Princeton University, where he also directs the Russian-Eurasian Studies Program. He is the author of nine books, including an acclaimed two-volume study of the rise and fall of Soviet socialism: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era.

Reviews

"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape."--The New Yorker
"A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pages, Kotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire--the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years--and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the 'principal restraint' of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn't result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted."--The Atlantic Monthly
"Concise and persuasive The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage."--The New York Review of Books

"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape."--The New Yorker "A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pages, Kotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire--the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years--and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the 'principal restraint' of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn't result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted."--The Atlantic Monthly "Concise and persuasive The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage."--The New York Review of Books