The End of the Outer Empire: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition, 1985-90

It is remarkably easy to take revolutionary changes for granted after the event. Yet, as this fascinating account shows, the disappearance of communist rule in Eastern Europe was the result of a conjunction of long-term decay and collapse from within with a fundamental shift in the second half of the 1980s in the policy of the Soviet Union.

This study sheds light on the dynamics of the decline of an empire, on the complex interaction of economic, political and security factors in both domest...