Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 123

REVIEWS

it to counter. By March 1985 the Soviet economy was in such a
crisis that the Communist Party named a new secretary, Mikhail
Gorbachev, to undertake drastic reforms.
We already know how the story ended. Gorbachev tried to
restructure the bureaucratized economy (perestroika) and encourage criticism of the Party and State (glasnost). But, the authors
observe, he "was never able to anticipate the inevitable outcome
of the powerful forces he was unleashing." He underestimated
the strength of nationalist feelings among the Eastern European
satellites and even among some components of the USSR, such
as the Baltic republics and Ukraine. He also underestimated
how cynical Russians had become about the utopian promises
of communism and how far Western ideas about freedom and
democracy had spread. In 1989, which Edwards and Spalding
call "The Year of Miracles," Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, and Romania rejected their communist governments
while Gorbachev did nothing. In the following year, as Germany
reunified, the Soviet Union began to break up. Boris Yeltsin
became president of the Russian component of the crumbling
USSR, promising to dismantle the Union and abolish the Communist Party. Later that year he rescued Gorbachev from a coup
by the Stalinist hardliners in the Party. Nonetheless, on Christmas
Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union
and formally declared an end to the Cold War.
In his resignation speech Gorbachev admitted that MarxismLeninism had failed. The authors relate that "when Gorbachev
reached for the pen to sign the document officially terminating
the USSR, he discovered it had no ink. He had to borrow a pen
from the CNN television crew covering the event." It was a fitting end for the "Evil Empire," as Ronald Reagan called it. And
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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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