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“... of the institutions of the Soviet state had their finest hour under Stalin. More than anyone else, Mikhail Gorbachev has made this clear: his efforts to force the Stalin period to act as a receptacle for much of the odium felt for Communist rule – with the Brezhnev ‘era of stagnation’ in support – have succeeded only in showing that effective ...”

“... several years before the word “perestroika” was uttered for the first time, and I shared Gorbachev’s views long before he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and made his political programme public.’ She was one of the small group of intellectuals whose critique of the Soviet economy convinced ...”

“... lived through similar conditions or worse. Zhirinovsky notes with contempt, however, that Mikhail Gorbachev, son of the chairman of a collective farm in the rich Stavropol area of southern Russia, led the life of a little ‘country lord’. They all shared in the experience of racial mixing and Russian domination, in which the problem of ...”

“... Three years after E.H. Carr’s death in 1982, Mikhail Gorbachev began the process which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, a development which at first sight renders Carr’s life’s work not only irrelevant but absurd, based as it was on a profound admiration for Soviet achievements ...”

“... domestic and foreign policies. Stalin was never rehabilitated, but his name ceased to be anathema. Gorbachev, coming to power in 1985, has done more than any Soviet leader since Khrushchev to restore the critical side to dominance in treatments of the Stalin question. New projects on Stalin, especially since the January 1987 Plenum of the Central ...”

“... determine the style of government. Marshall Goldman, in What went wrong with perestroika?, quotes Gorbachev as saying, in December 1991: ‘A General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a dictator who knew no equal in the world at that time. No one possessed more power, no one, do you understand?’ It is too soon for the system to have ...”

“... to build Communism through a third programme; and in 1986, a year after the access to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, a ‘New Edition’ was adopted at the 28th Party Congress which incorporated some new elements, including a softer international line and the idea of ‘self-financing’ for business enterprises. Otherwise, the ‘New ...”

“... bureaucrats’ like Anatoly Cherniaev, and a young Communist with a bright future, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his future wife, Raisa, both students at Moscow State University in the first half of the 1950s. Most accounts of the late Stalin period foreground the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign (both xenophobic and anti-semitic) and the ...”

“... Germany. Communism has collapsed throughout Europe. The Soviet Union has fallen and disintegrated. Mikhail Gorbachev – a figure who appeared as Brandt was leaving the stage, but who seemed for a time to incarnate everything the old Social Democrat had ever hoped for – has fallen too, and gone to that well-paid limbo in lecture-land where Brandt’s ...”

“... the national commitment to Soviet studies. The transformation of the Soviet political scene under Gorbachev has ended such bifurcation. A reversion to the traditions of the earliest Sovietology has occurred. Founding figures such as E.H. Carr and Leonard Schapiro were renowned for their ability to write as knowledgeably about 1917 as about the latest ...”

“... to at least the prospect of elimination. Few people took Reagan’s rhetoric seriously, until Mikhail Gorbachev sensed, on meeting the President for the first time in Geneva in 1985, that he might actually mean what he was saying. The new Soviet leader tested this possibility with a proposal for the outright abolition of nuclear weapons by the year ...”

“... an epilogue dealing with Soviet leaders up to and including his present employer’s arch-rival, Mikhail Gorbachev. There are some good anecdotes, but the claim that the numerous references to Lenin they contain indicate his lasting influence on his successors is highly dubious. It is curious that a former propagandist should take their formal ...”

“... parts of the business. The most famous praise for the World Service in recent times came from Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of the failed coup and from the Beirut hostages on their release. This all went down very well in Bush House with staff talking of how the battles with their bio-rhythms were at last receiving public acknowledgment. But even ...”

“... of Peace’, Pat and the children write letters, sing songs and drop in on Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Indira Gandhi. If anything, Pat gets more ridiculous – she starts talking in an earnest new voice, gives ‘a Dior nightgown to a starving child in an Ethiopian famine camp’, and decides she deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize ...”

“... carelessness: Alexander Yakovlev, whom Read correctly identifies as the most liberal member of Gorbachev’s Politburo, was not made director of State TV and Radio – that was Yegor Yakovlev, formerly editor of Moscow News. More seriously, Boris Pugo, whom Read puzzlingly if charmingly refers to as Pug, was not the Soviet prime minister but the interior ...”