The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 Kindle Edition

Robert Service is one of the best writers on Communism and their leaders. This book is about the Communist leaders ending with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It is also about the principal American leaders, mostly Reagan and his advisors. It is also about the British, French and German leaders. The detail is terrific. This is the best summary I have seen on the end of the Cold War, and I have read a lot of them. I am very familiar with the history of the Cold War. For example, I was in Berlin in 1961 when the Wall went up. I have travelled to Russia in 1972 and 2000. I travelled through East Europe in 1972. The Poles just hated the Russians. I have travelled through the Baltic States, and they detest the Russians also.Service did an awesome amount of research. He presents the various factions in the US and USSR that were fighting for positions on disarmament and other key issues vs. just stating a monolithic US position and monolithic USSR position.This book is primarily a political history although it does touch on some economic issues and some military issues. For a more in depth treatment of the military issues, I recommend "The Collapse of the Soviet Military" by General Odom. I have yet to find a good summary on the decline of the USSR economy.In summary, if you are interested in the end of the Cold War, this is the definitive book. Well done Mr. Service.

Robert Service has written the history from credible sources of the last decade of the Cold War. It is organized by major participant and arrayed chronologically. I served as an Intelligence Director in Strategic Air Command during the last decade of the Cold War but was working at the operational level. I have been looking for a credible history of events occurring at the national strategic level. This book meets that requirement in spades. It answered many questions I had about what exactly happened in the USSR and Warsaw Pact that led to their demise. The book is so comprehensive that it is not an easy casual read. But if you want to know how the world avoided nuclear holocaust as an empire collapsed on itself this book will tell you

This book examines its topic in a very academic and dry manner but considering that its author is a Professor of History who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union and the publisher is Public Affairs this should not come as a surprise. The book is written for this type of audience. It is academic and meticulously researched. The author, knowledgeable in a number of languages (including Russian), has made extensive use of archives and primarily research sources in those languages. This is the book’s most positive aspect.However, the book also has serious weaknesses. The most important of these, by far, is that the book lacks the requisite in-depth discussion and analysis of WHY things happened. The book’s emphasis is primarily a narrative of WHAT happened. The analysis of important factors contributing to what happened is touched upon, just touching the surface, but there is not the in-depth analysis that should have been included. For example, there is a too short mention of the fact that the Soviet Union’s deteriorating economic condition played a role in what happened during the 1985-1991 period but there is neither an analysis of this economic deterioration nor the implications on the resulting impacts. With respect to the US’s excluding grain from exports to the US the only too short explanation is that it was needed for political reasons (i.e., to support the GOP’s electoral prospects). However, the realty was that the grain exporting states were facing serious economic conditions themselves. There was massive out migration of people from these states at the time for example as well as de-industrialization. Etc., etc., etc.The book also has a few other problems. One is that the book presents both Gorbachev and Reagan in an hagiographical manner. Another is that too much of the book (a good fifth to quarter of the book’s text) is dedicated to arms-control talks. This would be of interest to a specialist in that field but not to anyone outside of it. A third weakness, another serious one, is that the book lacks a serious and in-depth analysis on the internal dynamics that lead to the collapse of the Eastern European regimes. Again, the book discusses WHAT happened but not WHY it happened (or at least in the depth that should have been provided).In short, the book is worthy of a 3.5-star rating.

The End of the Cold War by Robert Service showcases the final six years or so of the Cold War 1985-1991. Much of the first part of the book covers how we got to Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR and The Cold War broadly. Then he takes this panoramic view throughout the big players of Europe and the Soviet Satellite countries. This pattern actually occurs throughout the book as one chapter will cover some element of US-Soviet relations under Reagan and Gorbachev and their surrogates mostly Shultz and Shevardnadze, which a few other faces sprinkled in. Then the next chapter will cover Europe or Communism outside of Moscow. This snapshot format can make it hard for readers to get their barring because once one is into a section, boom it changes.Service has clearly dug through the archives and for that I praise him, but the problem is that at times it reads like somebody dug through the archives and spewed what they learned onto the page. This is my long winded way of saying some context and exposition would be nice, otherwise you just spend your time getting run over by an interesting two pound academic door stop.Yet, if you have a lover of Russian and Eastern European History to shop for, they will love this.