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RECENT LITERATURE ON SOVIET HISTORY Redefining Russian society and polity. By Mary Buckley. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Pp. xviii+346. £13.50. ISBN 0-813-31580-8. A social history of twentieth-century Russia. By Vladimir Andrle. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Pp. xi+289. £14.99. ISBN 0-390-52510-0. An economic history of the USSR, 1917–1991. By Alec Nove. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. £9.99 (paperback). ISBN 0-140-15774-3. A history of the peoples of Siberia: Russia's north Asian colony, 1581–1990. By James Forsyth. London: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xx+455. £19.95. ISBN 0-521-47771-9. Stalin's Cold War: Soviet strategies in Europe, 1943 to 1956. By Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1995. £40. ISBN 0-719-04202-X.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 1998
Abstract
On 16 October 1997 at a forum at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University in Houston, Mikhail Gorbachev received the Enron Prize for Public Service. Former secretary of state James Baker credited Gorbachev for ‘setting the USSR on the irreversible path to freedom’. Because of Gorbachev's ‘tremendous political courage’, Baker claimed, millions of people enjoyed freer, more prosperous lives. But millions of Russians do not approve of what Gorbachev did, would deny him the Enron and Nobel Prizes, and mark him a villain because he caused the unravelling of the USSR and Warsaw Pact and because their lives are less prosperous in today's Russia.
To understand why a policy (like Gorbachev's glasnost) succeeded or failed, one has to look at its social impact. Rarely are policies carried out exactly as the policymaker envisioned. Although the five titles reviewed in this article vary in their focus and geographical scope, most tend to emphasize Soviet and Russian policy implementation, as opposed to the initial decision-making process.
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- © 1998 Cambridge University Press