Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

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AuthorVladislav M Zubok
PublisherTantor Audio
PublishedMay 31 2022
Book FormatAudio
ISBN-139798212100281
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CategoriesHistory > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union--showing how Gorbachev's misguided reforms led to its demise In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong, five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances--and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

Author Bio

Vladislav Zubok is professor of international history, with expertise on the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Stalinism, and Russia’s intellectual history in the 20th century. His most recent books are The Idea of Russia: The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev (2017), Dmitry Likhachev. The Life and the Century (in Russian, 2016) A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007) and Zhivago’s Children: the Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009).

Professor Zubok was born and educated in Moscow. He studied for his undergraduate degree at the Moscow State University and studied for his PhD at the Institute for the USA and Canada in Moscow.

In 1994 he became a fellow at the National Security Archive, non-government organization at the University of George Washington. He continued his academic career in the United States as a visiting professor at Amherst College, Ohio University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan, and in 2004 became a tenured professor at Temple University.

His books earned the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Marshall Shulman Prize of the American Association for Advancement of Slavic Studies. Professor Zubok received numerous grants from the McArthur Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, and from the Yeltsin foundation and the Russkii Mir foundation. Aside from academic work, Professor Zubok organized a number of international archival and educational projects in Russia, Ukraine, and South Caucasus. He held numerous fellowships, including the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Wilson Center in Washington DC, Collegium Budapest, the Free University for Liberal Studies in Rome, the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

Professor Zubok also consulted a number of documentary films, most importantly Sir Jeremy Isaac’s twenty-four series “Cold War” on CNN.

He is currently finishing the book Collapse: The End of the Soviet Union, a study of Soviet collapse within the context of globalization, economics, and nationalism.

Source: The London School of Economics and Political Science and wilsoncenter.org