Richard Pipes

Critics decry Vladimir Putin for turning Russia into a one-party state. But polls suggest that Russians actually approve of his actions by sizable majorities, caring little for core Western principles such as democratic liberties and civil rights.

Despite its seemingly thorough approach, Raymond Garthoff's apologetic treatment of Soviet Cold War policies fails to explain why communism collapsed.

"Although the most visible manifestations of the Soviet crisis are economic, the root problem is political", the political authority having assumed responsibilities vastly beyond its competence to discharge. Gorbachev's attempts to reform merely exposed more rotten wood, the further they were pressed, and seriously under-estimated the intensity of the nationalities question. The Union is likely to disintegrate, as the federalists will run out of time, although the Soviet military and the KGB, plus reactionary political elements, retain latent power to resist disintegration or stage a crack-down. The USSR is now "in the throes of accelerating anarchy", and is part of a larger global slide into instability.

American-Soviet relations can be approached in two ways. One approach avails itself of the techniques of meteorology, in that it concentrates on taking regular readings of the East-West climate as manifested in the level of rhetoric emanating from Washington and Moscow, the prevalence or absence of dialogues and negotiations, and the intensity of their competition in regions outside their immediate control. This approach is favored by journalists because it focuses on concrete events which they can report as news and subject to instant analysis. It also prevails in liberal circles whose adherents believe that there exist no genuine differences of either values or interests among nations and that such conflicts as do occur derive from mutual misunderstanding or lack of conciliatory spirit, mainly on the part of U.S. administrations.