Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?
Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.
"Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]."--New York Times Book Review
About the Author :
William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor emeritus of political science at Amherst College. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Henry Strozier is an actor with a forty-year career in numerous movies and television series. Also a voice-over artist, he has worked extensively in video games and audiobook narration, earning several AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Review :
"[Taubman] applies a Tolstoyan lens to Russia's recent history and displays particular sensitivity in his assessment of a life that would prove richer than politics."
-- "Economist (London)"
"A meticulously researched, clear-eyed volume that will undoubtedly stand for years as the definitive account of the Soviet Union's last ruler."
-- "Wall Street Journal"
"A superbly researched story of a politician of such decency as to seem, in our more pessimistic, darker moment, almost beyond imagining."
-- "New Yorker"
"Masterly...[A] richly layered portrait...of this most intriguing figure."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"Taubman's extraordinary new biography, Gorbachev: His Life and Times, is fly-on-the-wall history...A riveting page-turner...Gripping."
-- "NPR"
