The End of the Cold War

Starred review from July 27, 2015
In this authoritative and deeply informed political and diplomatic history, Service (Trotsky), a seasoned British historian specializing in studies of Soviet Russia, delivers a masterful account of the final years of the Cold War, when a small, remarkable group of statesmen sought an end to the dangerous standoff between superpowers. Deteriorating economic conditions prompted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to introduce radical political and economic reforms and seek rapprochement with the U.S. Meanwhile, American President Ronald Reagan, consumed by the potential horror of thermonuclear holocaust and driven by a vision of global military denuclearization, proved open to the initiatives of the Kremlin reformers. Both leaders contended with domestic sectors of resistance who grumbled at moves toward reconciliation—hard-line American right-wingers skeptical of Soviet reforms and “communist-conservative critics” in the U.S.S.R. uneasy with Gorbachev’s concessions—and pushed through a series of agreements on nuclear arms reduction. Based on deep, impressive archival research and previously unpublished material, Service strays from triumphalist narratives typical in the West, adopting a bilateral analysis that gives “equal attention to the Soviet Union and America and their interaction in a churning world of transformation.” This study of the end of a cardinal episode of modern history is scholarly yet accessible: detailed, expansive, and engaging.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
In this thoughtful re-evaluation of a stunning historical watershed, British Soviet specialist Service (Emeritus, Russian History/Univ. of Oxford; Trotsky, 2009, etc.) concentrates on the political maneuvering that was Byzantine and often wrongheaded but rarely dull. In 1985, the Soviet Union's elderly leaders knew that their backward economy was incapable of maintaining its superpower status. That year, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power, vowing to change matters. His initial efforts produced deep suspicion in the United States, but Service writes that Ronald Reagan dreaded nuclear war far more than most advisers and led the way. From this point, the author offers an engrossing description of three years during which Reagan and Gorbachev led negotiations that vastly reduced the threat of war. Almost everyone approved of this course of action. Sadly, by 1988, Gorbachev's liberal reforms had not revived the Soviet Union but reawakened nationalist, anti-Russian, and often nasty ethnic feeling, and his already moribund economy continued to decline rapidly. Exhilarated at the success of the U.S., American leaders delivered free-market platitudes but little aid in response to Gorbachev's pleas. "Neither Reagan nor Bush," writes the author, "was minded to bail him out-their priority was to secure international stability and America's global primacy and they could see no benefit in subsidizing Moscow's doomed economic reform. Behind the friendly facade of successive summits there lay American toughness in laying down the terms for conciliation." Of course, in 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Service emphasizes that victory over the Soviets was a good thing, but it was not a good thing to rub their nose in it. These days, Russians dislike America more than they did under Leonid Brezhnev and mostly approve of their pugnacious autocrat, Vladimir Putin, who aims to re-establish his nation as a major power and possesses the nuclear weapons to back this up. A wholly satisfying, likely definitive, but not triumphalist account of the end of an era.

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Starred review from June 15, 2015

The catastrophic price of nuclear war threatened the world for decades and nearly threatened humankind's existence. The irony is that it was not the use of the weaponry but the cost of maintenance and upgrades that ultimately led to the dissolution of the USSR. Service (history, Oxford; Stalin: A Biography; Lenin: A Biography) thoroughly details how the Soviets were hampered by an overreliance on nuclear and military expenditures at the detriment of society and recognizes this as the catalyst for former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former minister of foreign affairs Eduard Shevardnadze reaching out to their American counterparts Ronald Reagan and George P. Shultz in an effort to reduce or eliminate nuclear weapons. Service re-creates the diplomatic gamesmanship of the encounter by using firsthand accounts. The only criticism of this absorbing study about leaders ending the Cold War through diplomacy is its lack of documentation of the devastating and lingering effects on Soviet society. To cover that discrepancy, refer to David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb. Other works that will mesh well include Sergei Plokhy's The Last Empire and James Wilson's The Triumph of Improvisation. VERDICT Recommended for political scientists, historians, Cold Warriors, and those who value diplomacy.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas-San Antonio

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