The system - Info and Reading Options

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In this absorbing political memoir, long-time Kremlin insider Georgi Arbatov gives a remarkable, full account of the intrigues of Soviet political life in the years the Communist Party was at its apogee. In his capacities as founder and director of the prestigious Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada, a member of the Central Committee and a government spokesman on the United States, Georgi Arbatov has been an advisor to the Soviet leadership since the early 1960s--and continues to play a role in today's new Russia. The System recounts with chilling accuracy how Stalinism and its campaigns of fear and repression contaminated the political, spiritual, and intellectual life of the Soviet Union throughout the postwar years. But Arbatov also shows that despite the relentless pressure of the Stalinist conservatives, the democratic-minded reformers regularly won small but significant skirmishes that helped pave the way for perestroika in the 1980s. Arbatov reveals the political ramifications of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress and the resultant thaw, and describes the coup d'etat that removed Khrushchev from power in 1964. He gives a full report on the re-Stalinization campaign of 1968-1974 and the period of stagnation that followed. It is clear that even in the depths of the Cold War, the monolithic facade that the Soviet Union presented to the world actually contained pockets of open thinking and dissent. As the party's leading expert on the United States, Arbatov offers illuminating analysis of how the Soviet Union's relationship with America evolved from the late 1960s, through the short-lived detente to the "second Cold War" and the second Russian Revolution. He frankly assesses the personalities and leadership qualities of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, with whom he worked most closely, and Gorbachev, giving us far more complex portraits of these men than we've had before. In this monumental book, Georgi Arbatov provides us with an indispensable record of how the Soviet Union worked at the height of its powers. He presents not only the most cogent analysis to date of U.S./Soviet affairs, but the most insightful projections of where this critical relationship should go as we prepare for the future of the Commonwealth.

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