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Not So Special

Richard J. Evans: Imitating Germany, 7 March 2024

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000 
by David Blackbourn.
Liveright, 774 pp., £40, July 2023, 978 1 63149 183 2
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... ones, principally the relative economic decline of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations. Mikhail Gorbachev was far more popular in Germany than he was in Russia. Once more, events in Germany had turned out to be closely linked to what was happening elsewhere: Reagan’s appeal (‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this ...

Littoral

Misha Glenny, 9 May 1996

Black Sea 
by Neal Ascherson.
Cape, 306 pp., £17.99, July 1995, 0 224 04102 9
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... had taken power in Moscow. Ascherson immediately understood that he had witnessed the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was spending his summer vacation in his Crimean dacha. Back in Moscow, he followed the heroic defence of the White House by Yeltsin’s supporters and the consequent defeat of the coup. This is not a history of the Black Sea, as ...

Diary

Paul Barker: Bellamy’s Dream, 19 May 1988

... of socialism. Julian West’s journey into the future had momentous practical consequences. Mikhail Gorbachev is currently struggling with some of them. So are Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, in their attempt to shift the British Labour Party towards ‘market socialism’. Directly or indirectly, Bellamy created in socialist imaginations the real ...

I don’t understand it at all

Mike Jay: Chernobyl, 6 December 2018

Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 404 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 0 241 34902 1
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... time. The Ukrainian government told Moscow that an accident had occurred but was under control. Mikhail Gorbachev was told there had been an explosion and a fire at Chernobyl but that the reactor was intact. When Maiorets and his expert colleagues arrived at the scene, they inherited the burden of responsibility from Briukhanov and Diatlov. In impotent ...

October!

John Lloyd, 21 October 1993

... the army of the state. Others were from the OMON units which had operated in Riga in 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev took a turn to authoritarianism and decided to belt the Balts. Others again were members of the fascist Russian National Unity organisation. Rutskoi was brought up in an army family and had spent all of his adult life in the military. He ...

Getting it wrong

Misha Glenny, 24 February 1994

In Europe’s Name 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Cape, 680 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 224 02054 4
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... and intra-German relations. Garton Ash seems to have interviewed everyone (apart from Mikhail Gorbachev) who played a main role in the byzantine diplomatic triangle between Bonn, Moscow and Berlin. In the English-speaking world, this book will be the starting point for any discussion of German foreign policy in the post-war period. It has ...

Doing Well out of War

Jonathan Steele: Chechnya, 21 October 2004

... with moderate elements in the resistance movement, and isolate them from hardline extremists,’ Mikhail Gorbachev told a Moscow paper. Even Umar Djabrailov, Chechnya’s Kremlin-approved representative in the Federation Council, the Russian parliament’s upper house, was quoted as saying after Beslan: ‘If the way we took to solve the situation ...
... were no arrests; no closure of offices; scarcely any crowd control; not even much censorship. Gorbachev was sequestered, but never treated like Dubcek. Unable to disguise the originating illegality of the coup, this approach, designed to propitiate, looked merely nerveless. On the one hand, the forces of political opposition – the Russian President and ...

William Rodgers reads the papers

William Rodgers, 19 February 1987

The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the 20th Century 
by Simon Jenkins.
Faber, 247 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 571 14627 9
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The End of the Street 
by Linda Melvern.
Methuen, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 413 14640 5
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... Anyone wishing to unravel the course and outcome of the meeting of President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev at Reykjavik need have looked no further than its pages. It has no sport and its ‘Men and Matters’ column shows that business gossip is a lot less indiscreet and infinitely more boring than its social and political counterpart. As an all-round ...

Diary

Thomas Jones: The Bomb in My Head, 5 April 2018

... United States first put them there in 1983, and started taking them away again after Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. The USAF gave the base back to the RAF in 1992. It’s now a business park. The bomb shelters at Greenham Common, under several metres of clay, concrete, sand and titanium, were designed to ...

The Atlantic Gap

Neal Ascherson: Europe since the War, 17 November 2005

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 
by Tony Judt.
Heinemann, 878 pp., £25, October 2005, 0 434 00749 8
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... words, not in Gda´nsk but in Moscow. Judt awards the credit for the ‘downfalls’ of 1989 to Gorbachev. ‘If Eastern Europe’s crowds and intellectuals and trade-union leaders “won the third world war”, it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.’ Again, it’s not so simple. The posters put ...

New World

George Ball, 22 June 1989

... we are now witnessing are reflected in the coincidence of a more realistic Soviet policy under Mikhail Gorbachev and a remarkable political convulsion in China. The common causal element in these phenomena is the conclusion by the people in the major Communist powers that their system has failed. In addition to this seminal shift, there are two other ...

Endism

Paul Hirst, 23 November 1989

... reform had become inevitable, nothing guaranteed it would take the radical form inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev. Glasnost has liquidated a regime based on illusion and lies. Almost nobody in the Eastern bloc now believes that Soviet-style socialism can compete with the West in terms of economic performance. Almost nobody now believes that Marxism is ...

Andropov was right

Tariq Ali: The Russians in Afghanistan, 16 June 2011

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 
by Rodric Braithwaite.
Profile, 417 pp., £25, March 2011, 978 1 84668 054 0
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A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan 
by Artemy Kalinovsky.
Harvard, 304 pp., £20.95, May 2011, 978 0 674 05866 8
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... aware that the government in Kabul was useless. They began to discuss an exit strategy. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took power, but as Kalinovsky points out, it was three years before he felt able to admit the scale of the disaster. ‘By the beginning of May 1988,’ he wrote to party members, ‘we lost 13,310 troops in Afghanistan; 35,478 Soviet ...

Mysterian

Jackson Lears: On Chomsky, 4 May 2017

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution 
by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky.
MIT, 215 pp., £18.95, February 2016, 978 0 262 03424 1
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Because We Say So 
by Noam Chomsky.
Penguin, 199 pp., £9.99, August 2016, 978 0 241 97248 9
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What Kind of Creatures Are We? 
by Noam Chomsky.
Columbia, 167 pp., £17, January 2016, 978 0 231 17596 8
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Who Rules the World? 
by Noam Chomsky.
Hamish Hamilton, 307 pp., £18.99, May 2016, 978 0 241 18943 6
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Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals 
by Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott.
Cambridge, 461 pp., £18.99, January 2016, 978 1 107 44267 2
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... with China close behind. As Chomsky details, the problems began at the end of the Cold War, when Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to German unification in exchange for Nato’s undertaking not to move ‘one inch to the east’ – as James Baker, the US secretary of state, put it at the time. Yet within just a few years, Bill Clinton began the expansion of ...

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