Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders

Features | Reviews | About the Author

Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders examines the strategies employed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to build leadership authority. Political leaders often use a combination of coercion, material reward, and persuasion, but Professor Breslauer focuses on the power of ideas, as leaders use them to mobilize support and to craft an image as effective problem solvers, indispensable consensus builders, and symbols of national unity. All chapters compare Gorbachev and Yeltsin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev, mostly analyzing the changes in policy, the strategies, and the political dilemmas that are common to all four administrations. The book discusses the ways in which authority building was affected by political constraints unique to each of the stages.

Features

• Employs a wealth of new material now becoming available in the former Soviet Union
• Both the only book to compare Gorbachev and Yeltsin as leaders, and the only book to sustain that comparison to their major predecessors as well

Reviews

'George Breslauer has provided an exceptionally clear-headed analysis of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as transformational leaders. He brings to this interpretation and evaluation of their historic roles both impressive insight and deep understanding of the Soviet and post-Soviet political context'.
Professor Archie Brown, Oxford University

'George Breslauer's Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders is the most insightful analysis of recent Russian statecraft yet to appear. Unlike many scholars who treat Gorbachev and Yeltsin as either heroes or failures, Breslauer carefully balances their successes and their shortcomings, examines conflicting interpretations of events, and offers a fascinating comparison of their respective styles of leadership. The book is a landmark in the study of political leadership and of Russian politics. It cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in present-day Russia'.
Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Princeton University (Former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union)

'This is the first book that puts Boris Yeltsin's leadership of Russia solidly into a historical perspective, and it's likely to be the best for a long time to come. George Breslauer has performed a service to scholarship, statesmanship and the challenge facing everyone who recognizes the importance of the drama underway in the heart of Eurasia.'
Strobe Talbot, Yale University (Former Deputy Secretary of State)

About the Author

George W. Breslauer is ChancellorÌs Professor of Political Science, and Dean of Social Sciences, at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1971. He is an author or editor of twelve books on Soviet and Russian politics and foreign relations, including the acclaimed "Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders" (1982). He has served as vice-chairman of the executive committee of the board of trustees of the National Council for Soviet and East European Research. He has also served on the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is editor-in-chief of the scholarly quarterly, Post-Soviet Affairs. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1997, he won the distinguished teaching award of the social science division of UC Berkeley.