Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000
"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