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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ear with the argument that Kosygin’s reforms would dilute their power base. Aganbegyan, Gorbachev’s economic adviser, who was associated with Kosygin’s reforms, says in Moving the Mountain that ‘by the early Seventies the authorities had slipped into a kind of administrative hysteria which affected both industry and agriculture.’ Investment ...”

“... regime in Eastern Europe. This was greatly facilitated by a generational change at the top. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came from the KGB, is the first Soviet leader without adult experience of foreign military invasion. His attitude to the West was bound to be less suspicious. For the élites, whose access to Party stores stocked with Western goods was ...”

“... but even then there’s a range: retired Duma deputies apparently get around £700 a month, while Mikhail Gorbachev gets £3600. But the pension most Russian pensioners get doesn’t cover their day to day needs. It provides a minimal income which people have to supplement by turning to relatives or somehow getting extra money by other means – which is ...”

“... is that Remnick is continually tugging at our sleeve to remind us that he was there in person: ‘Gorbachev told me’; ‘Zhirinovsky once told me’; ‘Back in the kitchen, Solzhenitsyn himself reminded me.’ In itself this is no more than mildly irritating, but since the writer principally interviews other writers, politicians and the occasional gangster ...”

“... their independence, when virtually all Western diplomacy was still devoted to shoring up Gorbachev and Yugoslavia, a pervasive sense of doom already lurked in the North Atlantic mind. It was summed up in a Guardian leader of the same vintage: ‘Don’t Put Out More Flags!’ This editorial did become famous enough to endure mild mockery, but only ...”

“... who show triumphant confidence that no one with any sense can still be called a socialist. Before Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985, there was already broad agreement among socialists and anti-socialists who read and wrote for papers like this one that the Soviet Union had utterly failed to achieve a classless, or even a decent, society. And there ...”

“... There are moments in this book when Schattenberg seems to imply that Brezhnev was a premature Mikhail Gorbachev, sharing the same hopes but working before the time was ripe. That he certainly wasn’t, lacking both Gorbachev’s intelligence and his desperate courage. All the same, the outlines of the great arms ...”

“... Europe and the end of the Cold War?’ Even though the demise of the Soviet Union owes more to Mikhail Gorbachev than to Afghanistan’s partisans, Brzezinski certainly helped produce ‘agitated Muslims’, and the consequences have been obvious. Carter, Brzezinski and their successors in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including ...”

“... and national electoral politics. The authorities have reason to fear the aftermath of disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev regards the mishandling of the Chernobyl meltdown as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Japan’s disaster will come to seem like an integral part of an extraordinary year of upheaval – from Tunisia, Egypt and the Arab ...”

“... Yeltsin’s press secretary, was given a grand office once occupied by the first Soviet President, Mikhail Kalinin. Both men were alter egos of the Russian President, but it was Korzhakov, his darker other half who hatched dirty plots to keep him in power and was spectacularly sacked when the plotting got out of hand, who in his time wielded the ...”

“... political party and the bureaucracy set one up: the Pakistan Muslim League. With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 it became obvious that the Soviet Union would accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw its troops. It wanted some guarantees for the Afghans it was leaving behind and the United States – its mission successful – was ...”

“... the contradictions. They are much more readable and interesting than those the notables of the Gorbachev era wrote, but that isn’t saying much. The book is an expanded version of Yeltsin’s diaries of the last five years, written up by Valentin Yumashev, the talented deputy editor of the weekly magazine Ogonyok. It preserves the intimacy – and ...”

“... outlook most resembles that of two Russian historians. Both sought a balanced assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev, who in character and career was quite unlike Zhou, but who was another communist with ideals visibly higher than the exercise of hard power, whose end was tragic too. Dmitri Furman, who came to admire him, could see his weaknesses, but ...”