The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation

By Moshe Lewin

FROM THE PREFACE:” The manuscript of this book was completed in February 1987. Naturally, events in the Soviet Union have continued to unfold, and phenomena barely visible in early 1987 are by now routinely covered in the world press. But historians are not in the business of chasing after each day's events, a domain rightly reserved for journalists and commentators. Nonetheless, current events need not be off-limits to scholars. There is a genre, attempted in this book, that can be called "the history of the present." What distinguishes such an account from a mere inventory of episodes and incidents--what makes it history-is that the events are observed as belonging to a process, a continuity that has some direction, passes through stages, and crosses some thresholds….”

Berkeley. University Of California Press. 1988. 186p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP