Retreating from the Cold War: Germany, Russia and the Withdrawal of the Western Group of Forces

In this book, David Cox argues that the initial disagreements that led to the Cold War largely centered around Central/Eastern Europe, and Germany in particular. The end of the Cold War, according to Cox, can best be understood in the context of the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the disintegration of Soviet hegemony in these areas. In this insightful and original book, Cox examines the circumstances surrounding the Soviet Union's military retreat from Germany and Eastern Europe as a microcosm of the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Using Soviet, and later Russian press reports, as well as German accounts, Cox traces the origins on the Western Group of Forces (WGF) within the Soviet alliance system up to the beginning of Gorbachev's reforms and the consequences of these reforms on the Soviet position in Eastern Europe. He also examines Gorbachev's new political thinking in Soviet foreign policy, the East German Revolution, Moscow's relations with Germany, domestic Soviet politics and the WGF, and ultimately the end of the Cold War.

About the Author :
David Cox teaches political science at The George Washington University.

Review :
"Fleischner offers intricate, multilayered readings of nineteenth-century women's writings about the institution of slavery. In treatments of autobiographical accounts by former slaves, Fleischner traces narrative paths of great personal loss and mourning for family, for home, for memory, and shows how these intriguing texts manifest their authors' negotations with identity and family, race and gender. Mastering Slaveryopens further the many difficult questions that women's texts about slavery raise concerning the relations of gender and race to social networks of power."-Minrose C. Gwin, author of "Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature", Professor of English, University of New Mexico "Mastering Slavery casts new light on the psychological dynamics of the slave narrative. Especially welcome is the way Jennifer Fleischner restores such writers as Elizabeth Keckley, Kate Drumgoold, and Julia A. J. Foote to their rightful place alongside Harriet Jacobs as founding mothers of a literary/historical/psychological tradition that reaches down to the present time."-James Olney, Voorhies Professor of English, Louisiana State University "Mastering Slavery is a stunning achievement, an instance in which a heretofore marginal literature is revealed in its astonishing complexity by a critical method not before applied to those very texts. The result is a study that will be heralded, I venture to say, both as one of the very best critical studies of African American literature and one of the best explorations of race and psychoanalysis. . . . Professor Fleischner is destined to emerge as a central figure in American literary studies, and in race and psychoanalytic studies."-Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair, Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University "Though Nathan Huggins, Nell Painter, Gerald Early, and Deborah McDowell have called for psychological readings of the slavery experience, Jennifer Fleischner is the first literary critic to fully engage with the literature of the peculiar institution in this way. In her readings of Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs and her little-known brother John, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Foote, and Kate Drumgoold, Fleischner shows remarkable literary and psychological sensitivity that makes her novel interpretations compelling and at times moving. Mastering Slavery is an accomplishment of the first order."-Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies