Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
This book details the Iranian-Russian relationship in all its complexity and is utterly timely, given the deep U.S. concern over the prospect of a nuclear Iran and the grief this generates in U.S.-Russian relations at a time when Moscow seems more a part of the problem than a part of any solution.
In this book, Feifer adds remarkable and wrenching texture to the account of how the Soviet war in Afghanistan played a pivotal role both in the Cold War's endgame and in the Soviet Union's last gasps of life.
Few histories of this ancient region more deftly cut through the archaeology of layered civilizations -- Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Slavic, European -- that have left their imprints but not their full forms on the peoples of this area.
There cannot be a better measure of the lavish and murky wheeling and dealing that characterized Russia's coarse path from public to private property than what happened in the oil sector.
Gregory here argues that Joseph Stalin, as other tyrants before him, rationally calculated both the utility and the limits of terror as a means of buttressing his and his regime's power and furthering its agenda.
