Author Description

The Collapse of the Soviet Union is an edited volume emerging from the yearly seminar series sponsored by the Davis Center of Russian Research at Harvard. The book is designed as a comprehensive survey of the reasons for the Soviet collapse, reassessed in light of new documentary materials, memoirs, and personal interviews. It explores causal factors such as the weakening of the Soviet Communist Party, political liberalization, ethnic pressures, social trends, the confrontation between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Russia's financial floundering, and the influence of the international strategic environment. Several chapters also examine the experiences of other rapidly democratizing, ethnically divided states so as to shed greater light, comparatively, on the demise of the Soviet Union.