Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022)

Oh, to travel back to 1987 when the cold war of the USSR and the USA was just beginning to cease, back to when superpowers were beginning to wonder how much was too much, when nuclear arms, not fully fueled commercial airliners, were considered dangerous. Do you remember a time when you thought the Berlin Wall was a permanent fixture and the Iron Curtin would be closed forever? Mikhail Gorbachev brings it all to the forefront in his book, Perestroika. He wishes to explain what perestroika show more means not only literally but figuratively and here he succeeds. The reader is left with a clearer understanding of what was hoped and proposed. Gorbachev believed that just the right amount of democracy added to socialism would clear up the problems the USSR was experiencing at the time. In hindsight, the reader is left to wonder if the introduction of democracy opened the doors to more than Gorbachev had planned. If anything, reading this book over twenty years after it was written only urges me to gain a better knowledge of what transpired afterwards. Are Gorbachev’s recollections completely accurate? How and why did the USSR once again become Russia? The impossible became reality and I wasn’t even paying attention. Questions abound and I will certainly open my mental iron curtain to more books on the subject.

Would I recommend it……………..At this point it’s an historical book and unless you ever had the slightest interest in perestroika, glasnost or détente, Reagan, Gorbachev or Thatcher, I would only recommend it to those who want a quick though one-sided refresher course. show less

A fascinating read in 2023, not least because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which helps remind us that Russia was "playing away" in Afghanistan when the book was written.

Gorbachev always came across as the reasonable one, the one trying to make changes (Thatcher's "I can do business with him" etc) but this lays open that he wasn't anything like that from a Western perspective, not "like us" at all. Leninism plays a huge part in the book and it's striking to still read about "the show more masses" from him and this late in the 20th Century - not to mention all the economic and growth plans he expounds about how they'll match the west by xx date.

And then the final section on armaments and especially nuclear arms and SDI is telling when we know how it'll all pan out - and one wonders whether he realised it too and the treaties were his way of finding a different way so that the Soviet union wouldn't lose.

It's a book partially for a domestic audience and partially for an international one and of course it's impossible to tell how much he actually wrote - it is obvious this is not the author scribbling a few notes in his study but is an official piece from the marketing department of the USSR, but overall I think a lot less of Gorbachev having read it, which I doubt was the objective. show less

This was a fascinating version of a specific historical moment. The whole thing is an important document, if not a reliable or unbiased one. I found the work very refreshing, even if rushed out in a panic, and enjoyed the read. I think anyone hoping to understand Russia should read this book as a supplement.

This is a very important book for Soviet and United States history. Here we have the new, young leader of the USSR speaking not only to Russians but Americans giving his view of both the status of his country and the relationship with its enemy. Now in late 2011 he is still alive and calling for Putin to be satisfied with his 3 terms in office and step down.

He is criticized for having the Soviet Union fall apart on his watch, but any examination of the building nationalism in the 15 show more countries so unnaturally forced together 70 years earlier indicates it was probably bound to happen anyhow. Frankly I admire Gorbachev. show less