Stephen Kotkin charts the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the key developments in recent history, and analyzes why it happened. He examines the internal structural, cultural and political reasons for the demise both of the Communist system and of the Union, drawing on memoirs anddocuments of the senior figures involved, including Ligachev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as on the burgeoning secondary literature. The book puts the Soviet collapse...