The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire

by David Pryce-Jones

Book Overview

The author of "The Closed Circle," the bestselling account of Arab society and politics, relates the fall of the Soviet empire as experienced from the inside. Based on firsthand accounts from party... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805041540
• ISBN13: 9780805041545
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Essential history

The commonly accepted theory for the disintegration of the USSR is that Ronald Reagan brilliantly increased American military spending, knowing that the Soviets would match the American effort, and drive themselves into bankruptcy. This book decisively rebuts that claim. The author interviewed former members of the Politburos and Central Committees of most of the Soviet Socialist Republics, to learn what happened at the top levels in the last weeks and hours of communist rule. In virtually every case, the top man asked the Red Army to put down a local, anti-communist uprising, and Gorbachev refused. While many of the SSRs were "third world" countries, and economically weak, economics had nothing to do with the downfall of even one of them.

The inside story of the end of history

Without sentiment or any sense of loss, David Pryce-Jones chronicles the fall of European communism through a journalist's eye and the eyewitness accounts of the rulers, dissidents and apparatchiks who were there. This is a powerful book, for it harbors no illusions that the Soviet Union was any kind of "workers' state" or that communism, as an ideal or a practicality, had any legitimacy as a form of government. In Pryce-Jones' analysis, if anything caused communism's downfall, it was the misplaced reasoning that a regime built on fear, terror and corruption could stand up to glasnost and perestroika. By their own admission in the book, most of the nomenklatura in Russia and its Eastern European satellites understood this. Mikhail Gorbachev, in an attempt to reform the system, exposed its basic illegitimacy and brought it crashing down. With the former Communist bloc now open to greater investigation into its history, Pryce-Jones' book provides a great deal of illumination into Kremlin and Warsaw Pact politics during the late 1980s. For instance, while Gorbachev was being courted by the West, he was being reviled as a traitor by his own cabinet and allies. One of the more tantalizing questions Pryce-Jones leaves unresolved is whether Gorbachev indeed knew the consequences of perestroika would be the break-up of the USSR and the end of its occupation of Eastern Europe. The author interviews participants in the failed August 1991 coup, which essentially ended Communist Party rule in Russia, who openly wonder if Gorbachev instigated it as a calculated risk to flush out any remaining hard-line opposition. Parts of the book read like a political thriller. As the gradual revolution in Eastern Europe and the Baltics takes hold, Pryce-Jones' sources take us into Round Table meetings and back room conferences where, quite literally, the fates of nations were being decided. The author compares the way popular resistance grew in the wake of Gorbachev's reforms and-in telling detail-shows! that Gorbachev essentially disallowed the use of Soviet forces to sustain control in any of the satellites. Only in Romania did the tanks roll, and that proved disasterous in the end as Ceaucescu became the only Communist ruler to be executed. More pointedly, we get the inside stories of how leaders aging leaders like Poland's General Jaruzelski and East Germany's Honecker. in the end, lacked the will to enforce their rule through armed repression. Some of the most exciting material concerns the last days before the Berlin Wall fell, where we see Honecker fuming over Gorbachev's refusal to order Hungary to close its border-through which thousands of East Germans were escaping, and the growing tension over the Leipzig "prayer meetings," which had become weekly mass demonstrations against the government. Throughout his reporting, Pryce-Jones is not afraid to make judgments. One of his sharpest is against the American and Western European Intellectual Left, which he views a