The End of the Cold War

Resumen del libro

The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the spread of Perestroika throughout the former Soviet bloc was a sea change in world history and two years later resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In The End of the Cold War, acclaimed Russian historian Robert Service examines precisely how that change came about. Drawing on a vast and largely untapped range of sources, he builds a picture of the two men who spearheaded the breakthrough: Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev, last General Secretary of the Soviet Union and first and last President of the USSR.

He also analyses the role of influential players not only in America and the USSR, but throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and focuses especially on Pope John Paul II, Lech Watesa and Vaclav Havel.

Biografía del autor

Robert Service es un historiador británico especializado en Rusia y profesor en el St Antony's College de Oxford. Sus últimas obras publicadas son Lenin: una biografía (2001), Rusia, experimento con un pueblo: de 1991 a la actualidad (2005), Stalin: una biografía (2006), Camaradas: breve historia del comunismo (2009), Trotski (2010), Spies and Commissars (2011) The End of the Cold War, 1985-1991 (2015), The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (2017) y Russia and Its Islamic World, From the Mongol Conquest to the Syrian Intervention (2017).