A01=Patrick Cockburn
Author_Patrick Cockburn
Category=DNL
Category=JPFC
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780860919773
- Weight: 409g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 1989
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In 1983 Lieutenant General William Odom, then head of the US National Security Agency, forecast that the Soviet Union in the 1980s would see 'sound and fury about domestic reform accompanied by little actual change', while abroad, 'we can expect threats to end détente.' Why did so many Western specialists on the Soviet Union fail to foresee the changes taking place in Moscow after the death of Brezhnev? Why did Kremlinologists make annual predictions of the fall of Gorbachev and why were they wrong? In this timely account of life in Gorbachev's USSR, Patrick Cockburn describes the forces which are changing Soviet society. He goes on to scrutinize the ways in which the perceptions of those observing the Soviet Union - from academic Kremlinologists to casual visitors - are shaped and distorted.
'Visiting Moscow today is like visiting a hothouse where unusual flowers are growing, but outside the Russian landscape is largely unchanged, if not impervious to change', wrote Karen Elliott House, foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal, at the end of 1988. Cockburn argues that the exact opposite is true. Surveying the Soviet Union from Siberia to the Ukraine he shows how the social, economic and ethnic landscape has been transformed in the thirty years between the death of Stalin and the election of Gorbachev. In so doing he presents the Gorbachev phenomenon in a new light.
'Visiting Moscow today is like visiting a hothouse where unusual flowers are growing, but outside the Russian landscape is largely unchanged, if not impervious to change', wrote Karen Elliott House, foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal, at the end of 1988. Cockburn argues that the exact opposite is true. Surveying the Soviet Union from Siberia to the Ukraine he shows how the social, economic and ethnic landscape has been transformed in the thirty years between the death of Stalin and the election of Gorbachev. In so doing he presents the Gorbachev phenomenon in a new light.
Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent and has worked previously for the Financial Times. His work on the crisis in the Middle East include the National Book Circle Awards- shortlisted The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn), The best-selling The Rise of the Islamic State and The Age of Jihad. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. More recently he has been awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in British Journalism Award 2014, and Foreign Reporter of the Year in Press Awards 2014.
