These essays, presented at a November 1990 conference, were written when there still was a Soviet Union and when some analysts were still arguing that Mikhail Gorbachev's "new thinking" was a tactical respite and Soviet formulations concerning the end of world revolution but a ruse. Although developments since then have made some of the volume anachronistic and its arguments somewhat moot, the essays remain important in showing that there was never as much of a Soviet presence, influence or "threat" in the Western hemisphere as Washington policymakers said and probably genuinely believed.