The Last Empire

On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to celebrate what he described as a historic American victory: Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation as Soviet prime minister and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse and has persisted for decades--with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. Bush, in fact, was firmly committed to supporting Gorbachev as he attempted to hold together the USSR in the face of growing independence movements in its republics.