Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
92% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 4 to 5 days.
100% positive
+ $4.99 shipping
99% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the Author
OK
From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia Hardcover – May 8, 2018
| Michael McFaul (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
Preloaded Digital Audio Player, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $84.79 | — |
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Enhance your purchase
In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today’s most contentious and consequential international relationships.
As President Barack Obama’s adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States’ policy known as “reset” that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries. And then, as US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency.
This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of US-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president. From the first days of McFaul’s ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family.
From Cold War to Hot Peace is an essential account of the most consequential global confrontation of our time.
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateMay 8, 2018
- Dimensions6 x 1.57 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100544716248
- ISBN-13978-0544716247
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
"McFaul succeeds, shedding needed light on the most geopolitically competitive relationship of the last 75 years and attempting to explain the 'why and what' of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election." -- The Guardian
"Careful about providing evidence for his hard-earned opinions, [McFaul] is always clear and successfully assesses the level of complexity we lay-readers need to understand academic theories about revolutions and economics." -- Christian Science Monitor
"An invaluable memoir." -- David Remnick
"Vigorously argued." -- Washington Post
"An expert political chronicle that often reads like a fast-paced thriller." -- Booklist (starred review)
"Mike McFaul has lived history. In this terrific book, he recounts a pivotal time in U.S.-Russian relations, bringing the perspective of a central participant and one of America's finest scholars of Russian politics. This book will be valued by students, experts, historians and diplomats for years to come. It is a good read and an invaluable contribution at a crucial time." -- Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State under George W. Bush (2005-2009)
"[McFaul] provides useful insights into the changing relationship between America and Russia in this smart, personable mix of memoir and political analysis... an essential volume for those trying to understand one of the U.S.’s most significant current rivals." -- Publishers Weekly
"Of interest to observers of the unfolding constitutional crisis as well as of Russia's place in the international order." -- Kirkus Reviews
“As both a first-hand observer and a key participant in many of the recent events that have shaped US-Russia relations, Ambassador McFaul has an important story to tell. From Cold War to Hot Peace is a gripping and intensely personal account of one of the most complex and consequential geopolitical developments of our time.” -- Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton (1997-2001)
About the Author
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books (May 8, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544716248
- ISBN-13 : 978-0544716247
- Item Weight : 1.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.57 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #56,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Michael McFaul is Professor of Political Science, Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. He is also an analyst for NBC News and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. Dr. McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). Dr. McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991.
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Michael McFaul’s love is ‘Liberal Democracy’ a somewhat fey item immersed in mythology sometimes reducible as in Russia and elsewhere to “electoral” democracy with uncertain outcomes.*
The book is a loose treatment of Russia in the post Soviet period centering on McFaul’s experiences as a participant and witness of the Washington foreign-policy establishment up close. His self congratulatory style muddling sometimes the topic at hand, but rich in revealing what policy makers were attempting to accomplish; the discrepancy between intent and outcome glaring and reveling.
Many readers will enjoy seeing the policy construction process as it unfolded in the Obama administration chasing “Reset” as it was called, from McFaul’s experiences.
An attempt to draw Russia closer, more democratic, and accepting international standards while facilitating desirably Obama administration goals.
What the story reveals to me is in the 90’s how trusting Boris Yeltsin and associates where in allowing the masters of the Washington consensus to impose their notions of a post-Soviet Market Economy, polished up by Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard economics professor, Lawrence Summers, a colleague and implemented by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais to delivered, as ‘shock therapy,’ privatization and market determined prices without thought of the institutional issues of laws and governmental practices in place, as Joseph Stiglitz chief economist of the World Bank and others were later to heavily attack. A tragic mistake.
The result of America’s desire to remake Russia was to create a broken economy of Crony-Capitalism with Chubais becoming one of the richest men in Russia, joined by other oligarchs grabbing what they could. They live on, those who have not crossed Putin. **
It was not Communism not Socialism but Capitalism to the delight of Washington. Michael McFaul’s telling of that story is that it is democratic; there are elections, a parliament and so far term limitations but not (yet?) ‘Liberal Democracy.’
Looking at results independent of overlaying ideology I see little too cheer regarding Reset. Russia may have pursued the same events that excited McFaul independent of his and President Obama’s efforts prior to Putin return as president.
For me the story suffers from centering heavily on McFaul’s time in and out of government and less about Russia, the ensuing high crime rates and low quality of life that was to befall the general post-Soviet population, but it is a memoir.
America achieved little.*** But Michael is likeable and optimistic, see his concluding hopes for Reset.
Trumps fondness for Russia fits where? An unfair question I know.
3 1\2 Stars
*A liberal democracy is simply a political system that is both liberal and democratic—one that both protects individual rights and translates popular views into public policy.
** Without American insistence on Market and privatization Russia could have stayed with the original plan of enterprises going to workers and managers modeled on Yugoslavia decentralized Workers Management economy – one that functioned until the country destroyed but that is another story.
*** “—Democracy! That’s a funny word in Russia. “Putin the Democrat” is our shortest joke.”(p. 292) Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
The book is a reminder that seven years ago, the US enjoyed good and productive relations with Russia under Medvedev. McFaul is able to walk the reader through the long series of events that took us from that relationship to the contentious and difficult one we have now.
The book is also a fascinating inside look at how foreign policy is made and how an ambassador does his job.
Dr. McFaul, a Professor of Political Science at Stanford and Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies there, is also a Senior Fellow of the notoriously conservative Hoover Institution. This latter honorific is important to bear in mind in a discussion of this new book, a bestseller that he is promoting assiduously.
This abbreviated autobiography is really focused on his time in the White House and as our Ambassador to Russia, 2012-2014. While his appointment was a political one – he was not a career diplomat – his credentials fit well for this post that has (with some exceptions – eg Huntsman or Strauss) historically been reserved for specialists in Russia (eg Vershbow, Matlock, Hartman, Kennan). As he makes abundantly clear, he has been fascinated with this country from his youth.
While not explicitly stated in this book, a principal reason for its composition must surely have been to try to set the record straight, to correct the perception from some on both sides of the political spectrum that his ambassadorship was a failure, that he somehow both needlessly antagonized Putin and was too much of a Russophile. His success in this endeavor is debatable. What is unequivocally clear, however, is the unfairness of his treatment by Putin’s regime: the petty harassment (e.g. overt tailing of not only him but his wife, Carol Norton, and children, his two sons Cole and Luke); the constant drumbeat of anti-American denunciations on State TV; the ugly name-calling, including that of pedophile (tho I believe he probably has mistakenly taken the Russian “pederast” as “pedophile”, when it is commonly used in Russia as a pejorative for gays); and finally being banned from returning to Russia (an ‘honor’ previously reserved by Stalin for George Kennan) – a litany that hardly comports with the dignity one expects from a great power. McFaul faults Putin personally for this, and thus is able to preserve his love of the country.
Russians, on the contrary, have faulted McFaul, and in particular his meeting with the liberal opposition only two days into his ambassadorship. In this book McFaul presents two counter-arguments: Leontiev’s vile personal attack on State TV even before this meeting (p.252), and that the meeting itself was not his idea but was a requirement from his boss, William Burns, who was coming to Moscow (pp.249,254). Here McFaul is pretty convincing.
But this hardly exhausts the explanation for Putin’s personal animus against McFaul, if it in fact exists. At the outset I need to clarify that Putin is by no means blameless in the poor relations between our two countries: that he is a cold-blooded killer can hardly be doubted (no one else could possibly have supplied the Polonium 210 used on Litvinenko, and the same can be said of the Novichok used on the Skripals), and the election meddling is now beyond reasonable doubt.
On the other hand, the US, and this definitely includes McFaul himself, has undertaken a series of blunders, not the least of which has been NATO expansion (pp. 66,75,80,177,414 among others) which McFaul fully supports – a very touchy and complex subject involving broken promises from our side, the failure to recognize Russian spheres of influence surely in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, but also in Georgia and Ukraine (though this again is a very complex topic with historical sensitivities nearly without parallel), the ignoring of Russia in its transition for Communism when it was ‘too weak to count’ (which McFaul, to his credit, also dislikes pp. 29,61,413), etc.
Most importantly, McFaul is a firm believer in “democracy” and its promotion, chiefly because he is under the mistaken notion that democracies do not fight each other (at one point he makes the incredible assertion that the US has only gone to war with autocracies (p.428) – apparently equating all non-democratic states with autocracies, a rather fantastic statement from a lettered political scientist – and apparently forgetting the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, any number of our armed incursions into Latin America), which, while this was widely believed some decades ago (see his note 6 on page 453), can be easily refuted with a casual Google search. Moreover, I put “democracy” into quotes above for a reason: we have most recently seen how even our own has been (probably irretrievably) distorted and perverted into an oligarchy, so that it is now difficult to point to those pure, undefiled states that are not threatening to become something other than democratic. Putin, on the other hand, does not view democracy as a ‘be all end all’ political form. For him what is important is stability and personal safety, both of which can be jeopardized by a too rapid transition to democratic forms. He is quite sure of this, as he has seen it with his own eyes in his own country. McFaul characterizes himself as a conservative, hard on Russia (pp.140,182) – he is after all, as stated above, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution – and it is this, together with his irrational, blind faith in democracy that Putin despises. In short, Putin lumps McFaul together with Hillary Clinton (whom he is convinced, admittedly largely irrationally, is his personal nemesis).
McFaul regards all this, this animus, as emanating from Putin’s own peculiar personality, and not from anything intrinsic in Russia or Russian culture. It is Putin’s personal choices that have produced this state of affairs. He cites Putin’s “original instincts about the United States” (p. 240: as tho he knew what they were, and that they did not develop with time, in response to our mistakes, or even provocations), surprisingly inserts the tired old habitual gloss for dictators that “Putin does not respect weakness” (p.281), asserts categorically that “while Putin ruled Russia, strategic partnership was impossible” (p. 317), and seeks above all to make it clear that Putin made poor choices (p.424) in his anti-Americanism, his response to demonstrations, his annexation of Crimea, ending with the simplistic truism that “different leaders in the Kremlin at the time might have made different choices” – without addressing the really important questions: whether these choices were popular, if so to what extent, and, critically, why.
Yet as shown above there is a great deal in this animus that Russians and the country share – as proven, if by nothing else, in Putin’s extraordinary popularity. For example, Putin’s anti-NATO stance, while not specifically imitated earlier by Medvedev or Yeltsin, was definitely shared by them in one degree or another. The feeling that Crimea belongs to Russia, that it is difficult to reconcile oneself to Ukraine being an independent foreign country, is broadly shared among Russians, ie it is a very deep cultural issue and not personally Putin’s. Betrayal over Iran sanctions (p. 173) and over Libya again showed our basic disregard for Russia, something that irritated the common Russian as much as it did Putin personally.
In this, McFaul is simply profoundly mistaken (which he partly admits on p. 426). I say this more in sorrow than with satisfaction, as Professor McFaul’s love of Russia is doubtless real, and he has sacrificed much for his own country.
Focusing more narrowly, there are other oddities in this work:
a) Citing George Shultz as a mentor (pp 88, 282), a man who knows no Russian, and, when he was dealing with Russia, hardly any of its history or culture, puts into question my own admiration for McFaul’s knowledge;
b) To call Browder knowledgeable about Russia (p.365) – another Russian language illiterate, a man whom we Russia traders regarded as simply either crazy, or as corrupt as the other Russian oligarchs, or lucky, or some combination of these, as he did, almost incredibly and against all odds, emerge from Russia alive – again betrays a surprising superficiality;
c) Not to know that “yob” in Russian is a root swear word meaning ‘f..k’ (p.301) is to admit that you do not know the language very well, as it is used, among the working class at least, as commonly as this same imprecation and its derivatives are in English; this is further illustrated in his reliance on translators to tell him that Putin’s Russian is ‘rough’ (p.132) – if you know the language, all you need to do is listen;
d) Waiting 1 hour for ice cream (p.2) – no one, at least none with any sense, did that. If he wanted to illustrate Russian ‘deficity’ [shortages], which were endemic, he could, and should, have chosen another example;
e) ‘brave believers’ (p.3) were common especially in the late Soviet period (so there was very little that was ‘brave’ about them), as it was a recognized, and unpunished, form of protest;
f) ‘there was no halfway between socialism and capitalism’ (p. 5) – try France, especially in the 70s, when nearly 50% of its economy was publicly owned;
g) To express incredulity that a passport would be required to enter Spasso House (his, the American ambassador’s, residence, p. 265) implies he is unaware that passports in Russia are personal IDs, more ubiquitous than drivers’ licenses;
h) Viktor, and his ‘blue siren’ (p.43): he means a flashing blue emergency light, but seems unaware that these things were for sale in Moscow in the 90s, it was that chaotic and anarchic. If he had known, he should have been totally unimpressed;
i) While stating that Victoria Nuland was in Ukraine in 2014 (p.397) – which the Russians have difficulty forgiving, as an American incursion into their own backyard – he ‘forgets’ that James Clapper, our Director of National Intelligence, was also there! You don’t need to be an expert on Russia to understand how they might interpret all of that as a conspiracy against their most important historical heritage, the holy grail of their sphere of influence, the country that actually gave birth to Russia;
j) Russia is our ‘top enemy’ (p.204) betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, a failure to appreciate the salience of the disappearance of millenarian Communism, and with it the real source of ‘top enemy’ (he needs to read Yuri Slezkine’s monumental “The House of Government”);
k) He (and Sechin) speak Portuguese (p.18). ?! Really? Why, and of what relevance is this?
l) His listing of the trivialities he had to attend to for a visit to Vladivostok (p.360) is rather off-putting, and it is unclear if he himself recognizes these as real trivia!
For all of this, however, this is an important book. It provides real insights into his thinking, and why things turned out as they did, even if for somewhat different reasons than McFaul himself believes.






