The decline and fall of the Soviet Empire

by Fred Coleman

Red Coleman, A Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, has spent over thirty years gathering observations and experiences to produce this in-depth, up-close, definitive examination of the fall of the Soviet Union and the people and events that contributed essentially to its demise. From the Kremlin Palace coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, to the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin's troubled presidency through 1995, Coleman was the man on the scene for virtually every defining event of Russian history in the postwar era. Having interviewed at length major Soviet figures from Sakharov to Gorbachev and Yeltsin and tapped the once top-secret Soviet archives; Coleman makes startling revelations about the fatal weaknesses of the Soviet system. In examining essential interlocking factors - among them the ec