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.