The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire

New York: Henry Holt & Co. New York - Metropolitan Books, 1995. First American Edition Stated . Hard Back. Near Fine/Near Fine. 456 Pages Indexed. First Printing of the First American Edition. Red Boards with black quarter spine.Very minor wear to bottom front corner. Otherwise an As New book. Dust jacket price $30 is unclipped. The sudden and almost bloodless demise of the Soviet Union-and with it, communism caught everyone by surprise, from the KGB and the Red Army to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the dissidents at home and in the satellite states. Most of all, it surprised the experts in the West. Never in the course of history had there been such a spectacle: the empire that only a few years before had threatened to bury its ideological, political, and military adversaries was now virtually erasing itself from the map. In the first full-scale account of this mysterious transformation, historian and journalist David Pryce-Jones covers the whole Soviet empire, from East Germany to the Chinese frontier. Having met with the strongmen of the old regime as well as their successors in the new order, he is able to provide answers to the crucial questions: Why did Gorbachev not shoot his way out of the crisis in classic Soviet style, as former leaders had done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia? How did an unlikely alliance of nationalist actors, idealistic poets, and political priests unseat the ruling despots of Warsaw, Bucharest, East Berlin, and Prague? What role did the West really play in all this? And what do these remarkable events presage for Russia's future? Through deeply probing firsthand interviews and a wealth of previously unpublished information, Pryce-Jones reveals the memories and motives of all the key players, as well as the secret interactions between Moscow and the satellite states. The result is a vivid account of the Soviet empire's fall, as experienced fdrom the inside --- and at the top. A definitve account of one of history's greatest anticlimaxes.