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By (author) Serhii Plokhy; By (author) Plokhy, Serhii
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“A stirring account of an extraordinary moment.”-Wall Street Journal
On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took centre stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush”s speech and has persisted for decades,with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world.As Prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals inThe Last Empire , the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. On the contrary, American leaders dreaded the possibility that the Soviet Union,weakened by infighting and economic turmoil,might suddenly crumble, throwing all of Eurasia into chaos. Bush was firmly committed to supporting his ally and personal friend Gorbachev, and remained wary of nationalist or radical leaders such as recently elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin.Fearing what might happen to the large Soviet nuclear arsenal in the event of the union”s collapse, Bush stood by Gorbachev as he resisted the growing independence movements in Ukraine, mouldova, and the Caucasus. Plokhy”s detailed, authoritative account shows that it was only after the movement for independence of the republics had gained undeniable momentum on the eve of the Ukrainian vote for independence that fall that Bush finally abandoned Gorbachev to his fate.Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union”s final months and argues that the key to the Soviet collapse was the inability of the two largest Soviet republics, Russia and Ukraine, to agree on the continuing existence of a unified state. By attributing the Soviet collapse to the impact of American actions, US policy makers overrated their own capacities in toppling and rebuilding foreign regimes. Not only was the key American role in the demise of the Soviet Union a myth, but this misplaced belief has guided,and haunted,American foreign policy ever since.
Table of contents
“Empire Strikes Back:” A Foreword to the Paperback Edition Maps IntroductionI. The Last Summit 1. Meeting in Moscow 2. The Party Crasher 3. Chicken KievII. The Tanks of August 4. The Prisoner of the Crimea 5. The Russian Rebel 6. Freedom”s VictoryIII. A Countercoup 7. The Resurgence of Russia 8. Independent Ukraine 9. Saving the EmpireIV. Soviet Disunion 10. Washington”s Dilemma 11. The Russian Ark 12. The SurvivorV. Vox Populi 13. Anticipation 14. The Ukrainian Referendum 15. The Slavic TrinityVI. Farewell to the Empire 16. Out of the Woods 17. The Birth of Eurasia 18. Christmas in MoscowEpilogueAcknowledgments Notes Index
Review quote
Winner of the 2015 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Wall Street Journal “A stirring account of an extraordinary moment…what elevates The Last Empire from solid history to the must-read shelf is its relevance to the current crisis.” Financial Times “A fine-grained, closely reported, highly readable account of the upheavals of 1991.” Slate “Serhii Plokhy”s extraordinarily well-timed new book…makes a convincing case that contrary to the triumphalist American narrative of Cold War victory, or the more recent paranoid Russian narrative of Cold War defeat, the U.S. never anticipated the breakup of the Soviet Union–in fact, the U.S. tried to use what little influence it had over the situation to prevent it… Plokhy makes a convincing case that the misplaced triumphalism of the senior Bush”s administration led to the disastrous hubris of his
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