Due to the pace of change in the USSR, monographs and textbooks in the field are quickly becoming dated. This book is the inaugural edition of a series that seeks to fill that void by presenting a biannual, systematic summary and analysis of developments in Soviet affairs. In this first volume, noted experts cover the years 1989-1990, examining the full range of political, economic, social, and ethnic changes of these two tumultuous years. Additional chapters focus on the Soviet Union's foreign relations and key developments abroad as well as at home. Scholars and students as well as general readers will find this series to be of great value as a means of staying current in an era of constant change.

Due to the pace of change in the USSR, monographs and textbooks in the field are quickly becoming dated. This book is the inaugural edition of a series that seeks to fill that void by presenting a biannual, systematic summary and analysis of developments in Soviet affairs. In this first volume, noted experts cover the years 1989-1990, examining the full range of political, economic, social, and ethnic changes of these two tumultuous years. Additional chapters focus on the Soviet Union's foreign relations and key developments abroad as well as at home. Scholars and students as well as general readers will find this series to be of great value as a means of staying current in an era of constant change.

This volume analyses the developments in Soviet Union in the years 1989-1990, examining the full range of political, economic, social, and ethnic changes of these two tumultuous years. Additional chapters focus on the Soviet Union's foreign relations and key developments abroad as well as at home.

During the 1970s, dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn dominated Western perceptions of the USSR, but were then quickly forgotten, as Gorbachev's reformers monopolised the spotlight. This book restores the dissidents to their rightful place in Russian history. Using a vast array of samizdat and published sources, it shows how ideas formulated in the dissident milieu clashed with the original programme of perestroika, and shaped the course of democratisation in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these ideas - such the dissidents' preoccupation with glasnost and legality, and their critique of revolutionary violence - became part of the agenda of Russia's democratic movement. But this book also demonstrates that dissidents played a crucial role in the rise of the new Russian radical nationalism. Both the friends and foes of Russian democracy have a dissident lineage.