Armageddon Averted : The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 - 01 edition

Kotkin, Stephen : Princeton University

Stephen Kotkin is Director of Russian Studies at Princeton University has written an acclaimed two-volume case study on the rise and fall of Soviet socialism: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era.

"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape. Kotkin effectively describes how what was called 'reform' was actually a continuing freefall collapse; he also expertly depicts the lingering networks and habits of the Soviet era, and how they have formed a post-imperial world in all its corrupt splendor. "

--The New Yorker

"This briskly written, elegantly argued book is a triumph of the art of contemporary history.... Eschewing the fashionable academic focus on social movements, and the related notion that the Soviet downfall was owing to an uncontrollable wave of popular support for democracy--and also countering the self-congratulatory idea that unrelenting ideological and military pressure from the West led to the USSR's demise, Kotkin concentrates instead on Soviet elites, persuasively arguing that the collapse was the outcome of Mikhail Gorbachev's 'pursuit of a romantic dream' of socialist reform."

--Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly

"Among the quantities of chaff produced about Russia over the past decade, there was after all some wheat, especially memoir literature, and Kotkin has gathered it together in what is now our most comprehensive analysis of the Leninist endgame."

--Martin Malia, The Washington Post Book World

"Concise and persuasive.... The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage."

--Robert Cottrell, The New York Review of Books

Oxford University Press Web Site, October, 2003