Word: gorbachev
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Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott describe in unprecedented detail, replete with private conversations and secret memoranda, three years of negotiations between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev -- talks that climaxed in the end of the cold war. No one has ever given as complete and compelling an account of the higher reaches of foreign policy -- particularly only a year after the events themselves have concluded...
Their book does suffer, however, from the other disability of this genre. Whether out of caution or out of deference to their sources, Beschloss and % Talbott stand on the sidelines as the narrative unfolds, interjecting their assessment of Bush and Gorbachev's diplomacy only in a brief epilogue...
Bush was initially distrustful of Gorbachev and critical of Ronald Reagan's "sentimental" attachment to him, but ended up by clinging irrationally to Gorbachev to the exclusion of his rival, Boris Yeltsin, whom he dismissed as an unruly boor. From the authors' account, Bush got no help at all from his top advisers Scowcroft and Robert Gates, who offered him unremittingly bad advice about what was happening in the Soviet Union. In Bush's first year, Scowcroft warned that in Gorbachev, the U.S. faced the "clever bear syndrome." Then two years later he portrayed Gorbachev as a Soviet Lincoln standing...
...warned by his barristers in England that the novel was certain to offend several people, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Queen Elizabeth, Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan. Barnes is perhaps the only novelist writing today who could plausibly insert a reference to the torrid geriatric sex, in which the last two allegedly indulged, in a novel about post-communist Eastern Europe...
...Yeltsin team has been toying with other options to break the deadlock between the rival branches of power. One would be to turn directly to the people, as Gorbachev did in March 1991 when he held a national referendum on a new Soviet Union. Radical democratic groups have long been prodding Yeltsin to put the parliament-or-Pres ident question to a similar vote. Another referendum topic that some economists believe to be absolutely crucial to the success of Yeltsin's reforms is whether land ought to be bought and sold: without private property laws, capitalism cannot flourish. The President...