"This admirable work has contributions from an impressive group of specialists who cover the topic comprehensively. Balanced, reasonable transitions in various economic sectors are urged persuasively and in some cases even eloquently. The book has the potential for making a significant impact."
--Ralph T. Fisher, Jr.,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This book delivers an unpopular message: the West has played a pivotal role in the Russian economic disaster of the 1990s. Western advisors, including the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury, applied a narrow conception of economics that pushed Russia, after more than seventy years of communism, toward another failed utopia.
The twenty-six contributions to this book are divided into three parts: theory, evidence, and policy. Part One directly challenges orthodox economic theory for obscuring the necessary role of government in creating and sustaining a market system and features essays by three Nobel laureates in economics--Kenneth J. Arrow, Lawrence R. Klein, and James Tobin. Part Two describes the dimensions of the economic crisis in Russia and presents a Russian perspective on the failure of shock therapy. Part Three presents policy recommendations, with special attention given to improving the integrity and administrative competence of the Russian government.

Here is the whole sweep of the Soviet experiment and experience as told by its last steward. Drawing on his own experience, rich archival material, and a keen sense of history and politics, Mikhail Gorbachev speaks his mind on a range of subjects concerning Russia's past, present, and future place in the world. Here is Gorbachev on the October Revolution, Gorbachev on the Cold War, and Gorbachev on key figures such as Lenin, Stalin, and Yeltsin. The book begins with a look back at 1917. While noting that tsarist Russia was not as backward as it is often portrayed, Gorbachev argues that the Bolshevik Revolution was inevitable and that it did much to modernize Russia. He strongly argues that the Soviet Union had a positive influence on social policy in the West, while maintaining that the development of socialism was cut short by Stalinist totalitarianism. In the next section, Gorbachev considers the fall of the USSR. What were the goals of perestroika? How did such a vast superpower disintegrate so quickly? From the awakening of ethnic tensions, to the inability of democrats to unite, to his own attempts to reform but preserve the union, Gorbachev retraces those fateful days and explains the origins of Russia's present crises. But Gorbachev does not just train his critical eye on the past. He lays out a blueprint for where Russia needs to go in the twenty-first century, suggesting ways to strengthen the federation and achieve meaningful economic and political reforms. In the final section of the book, Gorbachev examines the "new thinking" in foreign policy that helped to end the Cold War and shows how such approaches could help resolve a range of crises, including NATO expansion, the role of the UN, the fate of nuclear weapons, and environmental problems. On My Country and the World reveals the unique vision of a man who was a powerful actor on the world stage and remains a keen observer of Russia's experience in the twentieth century. This anniversary edition features a new foreword by William Taubman, award-winning biographer of Khrushchev and Gorbachev.

Here is the whole sweep of the Soviet experiment and experience as told by its last steward. Drawing on his own experience, rich archival material, and a keen sense of history and politics, Mikhail Gorbachev speaks his mind on a range of subjects concerning Russia's past, present, and future place in the world. Here is Gorbachev on the October Revolution, Gorbachev on the Cold War, and Gorbachev on key figures such as Lenin, Stalin, and Yeltsin.

The book begins with a look back at 1917. While noting that tsarist Russia was not as backward as it is often portrayed, Gorbachev argues that the Bolshevik Revolution was inevitable and that it did much to modernize Russia. He strongly argues that the Soviet Union had a positive influence on social policy in the West, while maintaining that the development of socialism was cut short by Stalinist totalitarianism. In the next section, Gorbachev considers the fall of the USSR. What were the goals of perestroika? How did such a vast superpower disintegrate so quickly? From the awakening of ethnic tensions, to the inability of democrats to unite, to his own attempts to reform but preserve the union, Gorbachev retraces those fateful days and explains the origins of Russia's present crisis.

But Gorbachev does not just train his critical eye on the past. He lays out a blueprint for where Russia needs to go in the next century, suggesting ways to strengthen the federation and achieve meaningful economic and political reforms. In the final section of the book, Gorbachev examines the "new thinking" in foreign policy that helped to end the Cold War and shows how such approaches could help resolve a range of current crises, including NATO expansion, the role of the UN, the fate of nuclear weapons, and environmental problems.

"Gorbachev: On My Country and the World" reveals the unique vision of a man who was a powerful actor on the world stage and remains a keen observer of Russia's experience in the twentieth century.

Here is the whole sweep of the Soviet experiment and experience as told by its last steward. Drawing on his own experience, rich archival material, and a keen sense of history and politics, Mikhail Gorbachev speaks his mind on a range of subjects concerning Russia's past, present, and future place in the world. Here is Gorbachev on the October Revolution, Gorbachev on the Cold War, and Gorbachev on key figures such as Lenin, Stalin, and Yeltsin. The book begins with a look back at 1917. While noting that tsarist Russia was not as backward as it is often portrayed, Gorbachev argues that the Bolshevik Revolution was inevitable and that it did much to modernize Russia. He strongly argues that the Soviet Union had a positive influence on social policy in the West, while maintaining that the development of socialism was cut short by Stalinist totalitarianism. In the next section, Gorbachev considers the fall of the USSR. What were the goals of perestroika? How did such a vast superpower disintegrate so quickly? From the awakening of ethnic tensions, to the inability of democrats to unite, to his own attempts to reform but preserve the union, Gorbachev retraces those fateful days and explains the origins of Russia's present crises. But Gorbachev does not just train his critical eye on the past. He lays out a blueprint for where Russia needs to go in the twenty-first century, suggesting ways to strengthen the federation and achieve meaningful economic and political reforms. In the final section of the book, Gorbachev examines the "new thinking" in foreign policy that helped to end the Cold War and shows how such approaches could help resolve a range of crises, including NATO expansion, the role of the UN, the fate of nuclear weapons, and environmental problems. On My Country and the World reveals the unique vision of a man who was a powerful actor on the world stage and remains a keen observer of Russia's experience in the twentieth century. This anniversary edition features a new foreword by William Taubman, award-winning biographer of Khrushchev and Gorbachev.

"This admirable work has contributions from an impressive group of specialists who cover the topic comprehensively. Balanced, reasonable transitions in various economic sectors are urged persuasively and in some cases even eloquently. The book has the potential for making a significant impact."
--Ralph T. Fisher, Jr.,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This book delivers an unpopular message: the West has played a pivotal role in the Russian economic disaster of the 1990s. Western advisors, including the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury, applied a narrow conception of economics that pushed Russia, after more than seventy years of communism, toward another failed utopia.
The twenty-six contributions to this book are divided into three parts: theory, evidence, and policy. Part One directly challenges orthodox economic theory for obscuring the necessary role of government in creating and sustaining a market system and features essays by three Nobel laureates in economics--Kenneth J. Arrow, Lawrence R. Klein, and James Tobin. Part Two describes the dimensions of the economic crisis in Russia and presents a Russian perspective on the failure of shock therapy. Part Three presents policy recommendations, with special attention given to improving the integrity and administrative competence of the Russian government.

Mikhail Gorbachev is the man who changed everything. It was Gorbachev's initiative that raised the Iron Curtain; his actions that resulted in one of the era's most symbolic events, the demolition on the Berlin Wall; his reforms that set in train events leading to the fall of Communism. Twelve years ago, when Gorbachev came to power, the globe was still divided into two armed camps, one for each superpower - as it had been ever since 1945. The Cold War dominated international politics, from Angola to Afghanistan. The man who became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 was much younger than his predecessors, yet there was little else to distinguish him from the stony-faced apparatchiks waving from the Kremlin. He seemed a model Communist, ideologically committed to socialism, raised wholly within the confines of the Party. Yet Gorbachev realized that the system could not continue. What was it about this man which enabled him to see so much more clearly than his colleagues? Like most who start a revolution, Gorbachev has been left behind. No longer in power, he has been forced to endure criticism from those wise after the event - most notably Boris Yeltsin, who became undisputed leader after the failed military coup that finally displaced Gorbachev from office. In these memoirs Gorbachev reveals his feelings about the sad state of his country today. He tells us of his childhood in the North Caucasus during the Second World War, of coming to Moscow as a student and meeting Raisa Maksimovna, of his glittering career as a Party functionary, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the world. This is a historical document of the first importance. It is also a fascinating human story, an insider's account of the events that we never dared believe could happen.

ContentsWho will control Iraq's Oil? Ken Coates - EditorialAntonia Juhasz - Oil and the Bush Agenda Alexis Lykiard - Defining Terms Paul Rogers - Tony Blair's Long War Mairead Corrigan Maguire - Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Mikhail Gorbachev - We Still Need Disarmament Robert Fisk - Armenia: The First Holocaust

Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar were friends for half a century, since they first crossed paths as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet world politics.

In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. This book is the product of that "thinking out loud" process. It is an absorbing record of two friends trying to explain to one another their views on the problems and events that determined their destinies. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to "save socialism" to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.