The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook The World, From Stalin to Yeltsin [Paperback]

Fred Coleman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 1997

For this authoritative work on the slow collapse of the Soviet Union, Fred Coleman draws on over thirty years of first-hand observations and personal experiences as a Moscow correspondent. Having interviewed at length major Soviet figures-from Sakharov to Gorbachev and Yeltsin-and having tapped the once top-secret Soviet archives, Coleman demonstrates that communism was already doomed from Stalin's death in 1953, and that the West greatly overestimated the Soviet military threat. Aided by his own unique access to the inside stories, Coleman provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the demise of one of history's great superpowers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coleman, U.S. News & World Report Paris bureau chief, reported from Moscow from 1964 to 1995, covering most major events in the Soviet Union, from the ouster of Khrushchev to Yeltsin's introduction of market reforms. He presents here an almost encyclopedic, highly readable review of Soviet history as written by a journalist who met over the years with both ordinary folk and numerous notables, including physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Arguing that Soviet communism was doomed by its own internal weaknesses, Coleman asserts that the empire was never as powerful as the West thought, and that the U.S. could have hastened its demise had we been more astute in watching for cracks in the armor. He also warns against the resurgence of a revitalized KGB, if not now, then under a future authoritarian regime. Although at times readers may unavoidably sense that Coleman is writing with the advantage of hindsight, he marshals his evidence to make a convincing case. The subtitle is a takeoff of John Reed's classic account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is a rapid-fire, superficial review of the high and low moments of Soviet life and politics during the 40 years that followed Stalin's death, as seen by a veteran U.S. journalist in several trips to the USSR. He divides his book into unequal sections according to the Party chief of the time: most attention goes to Gorbachev. The account has few surprises and confirms the dismal verdict on Soviet realities evident in other comparable accounts, notably David Pryce-Jones's recent The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire (LJ 7/95), which is the better-written, more useful account of these momentous developments. One is forced again to wonder just how it was that this system lasted so long and was taken so seriously by Western leaders and, above all, academics. For comprehensive collections.
Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (August 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312168160
• ISBN-13: 978-0312168162
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,009,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A mile wide and an inch deep, November 27, 1997

By 

James Ashley (Tokyo Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook the World, from Stalin to Yeltsin (Hardcover)

Coleman sets himself up in the opening paragraphs of this book. Its title, "The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire" is matched by the equally forthright subtitle "Forty Years that Shook the World". One might have suspected Coleman of having a developed sense of self-parody were it not for the fact that by the end of the introduction the author has drawn explicit parallels between himself and John Reid and has laid claim to having written the definitive tract on modern soviet history to be studied by future generations of American statesmen seeking to avoid the myriad pitfalls of their predecessors. To be sure, Coleman is well qualified to write about his subject. He has spent extended periods over the last thirty years in the Soviet Union both before and after its collapse. He was in Moscow for the fall of Khruschev, in Prague for the Prague Spring and hitched a lift on one of the last soviet tanks to leave Afghanistan. He has interviewed Sakharov and Gorbachev. These years have clearly left him with a wealth of personal anecdote which could well have formed the basis of a better book. Unfortunately, Coleman's desire to lecture his reader on the failures of the soviet system and America's perceived foreign policy failures leads him astray. This book suffers a great deal as a result. It is not that Coleman's scholarship is mistaken. The fact is that it is never seriously attempted. At various points in his book Coleman talks of Communism collapsing of its own "internal contradictions" without once elaborating his point. To be sure there are examples galore of the futility of life under Communism. However, only the evident fact that the author has lived through this period and speaks with the benefit of first-hand experience raises these observations above the commonplace. Serious analysis is wholly absent. Rather Coleman makes liberal use of the device of using anecdote to validate his chosen point of view which is taken to be self-evident. For example, Coleman only mentions the role of oil in the Soviet economy once and then in passing to claim, somewhat improbably, that the US could safely have used the oil weapon as early as the nineteen sixties to force the collapse of communism. The effect of the twin oil shocks of the nineteen seventies and the oil price collapse of the mid nineteen eighties is entirely ignored. The author does manage, however, to devote a whole chapter to an early soviet Jazz festival with little obvious relationship to the rest of the book. If Coleman's point is that, with the benefit of hindsight, communism was a nasty, inefficient system doomed to fail, it would be difficult to fault him. Given his long connection with the Soviet Union and its successors, the author is clearly qualified to comment on its nastiness and inefficiency. However, Coleman's attempts to manipulate his personal experiences into the definitive tract on the Soviet Union and America's foreign policy response misses the point so completely as to be almost comic. This book is also uneven. On the whole, the later chapters are better than the earlier ones which are marked by a conspicuous lack of detail and erratic time scale. The chapters on Khruschev and, to a lesser extent, on Brezhnev are marked by a conspicuous lack of detail and erratic time line. Khruschev, for example, only seems to make a cameo appearance in the first chapter of the book which is named for him. In summary, Coleman would have been well advised to eschew the grandiose aims he sets himself and to have written a simpler book drawing on his wealth of personal experience. He would still not have written the definitive book on his subject but he might well have earned himself a footnote.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars At times tedious, but excellent eyewitness history, policy, March 27, 2001

By 

Wes Ulm (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook The World, From Stalin to Yeltsin (Paperback)

Fred Coleman was a journalist who spent decades behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union, and this book collects his various observations and his policy interpretations on that experience and his concerns about the nation's future. It's rousing eyewitness history; Coleman's insights on the long-term damage done by Stalinism, and the immeasurable psychological harm it wrought in family after family, are rendered poignantly. His account on the transfer of power from Stalin to Brezhnev-- nearly involving a shootout-- was extraordinary and little-appreciated in the West. Coleman gives a Soviet perspective for what it was like to live under Khruschchev and Brezhnev, and indicates that the citizens of the country were often quite cynical and unhappy about their leadership, a perspective not often obtained. He notes that the USSR's economic quagmire was evident to Andropov in the early 80's but hidden from most other policymakers (and from the U.S.), and he expounds in wonderful detail on the Afghan War and Chernobyl, including interviews with Soviet citizens that convey the trauma of those fiascoes and how important they were in precipitating the USSR's fall in 1991. Finally, Coleman's discourse on USSR-China relations is outstanding. It was little appreciated in the West how sour relations were between these two nations, despite both being led by Communist apparatchiks. Coleman unveils the ancient conflict between the two countries, the border disputes, the bitter cultural and economic altercations and the competition for leadership of the Communist party. This was rarely appreciated in the U.S.

My main cavil pertains to the way the author proclaims and supports his book's primary argument: that lack of U.S. perception of the USSR's weakness led to many missed opportunities in weakening the country. It's drummed in numerous times throughout the book's pages, but the way it's presented here seems to my mind to neglect the palpable fear of nuclear war during the 1960s and 1970s; indeed, in the examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it seems fortunate indeed that we did not try to strongarm the Soviet Union, else we'd be in post-Apocalyptic Mad Max land by now! Furthermore, one less-emphasized but fascinating point made in the book is that a mistake in the Carter administration actually led to a bigger blunder by Brezhnev. That is, there had been some saber-rattling by Brezhnev in the late 1970s toward the Baltics and some neighboring regions, to which Carter did not respond. Brezhnev took a cue and assumed that the U.S. would allow the USSR to aggrandize itself territorially with relatively little objection-- leading to the Afghanistan intervention, and its kneecapping of the Soviet economy and support system. If this is the case, then if anything it was precisely that overestimation of Soviet capabilities by Carter (not a recognition of its weakness) that was so responsible, albeit indirectly, for the later Soviet collapse. A quite fascinating concept! In any case, I heartily recommend this book, b/c it's written by someone who saw events from the inside, and as a policy primer and an account of little-known details it's an immensely valuable read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars All in all, relatively poor, August 31, 2001

By 

John Telford "Professional Project Manger" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook The World, From Stalin to Yeltsin (Paperback)

All in all, I was pretty disappointed by this book. The author's role as a journalist provided some unique insights into Soviet like and culture, but his writing ability appeared to be somewhat limited.
As stated in other reviews, the author constantly repeats the same points in every chapter. Also, I think the author is placing too much blame on the actions of Western nation in not doing more to contain the Soviet Union. In hindsight, they should have definitely have done more, but I when you are threatened with nuclear war, it is understandable to "walk on eggshells" with your foreign policy.
This book contains many interesting points and anecdotes, but is a tedious read.