About The Book

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'The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire' is a lucid, firsthand account of the collapse of Russia’s communist regime by the only living American correspondent to report from Moscow during each of the last four decades – under the rule of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Fred Coleman, a former Newsweek bureau chief in Moscow, spent 30 years gathering material to produce this in-depth, up-close, definitive examination of he fall of the Soviet Union and the people and events that contributed to its creation -- from Khrushchev ending Stalin’s terror, to the invasion of Czechslovakia and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement during Brezhnev’s rule, to 

Gorbachev’s ill-fated, reforms, and finally, to Yeltsin’s  failure to turn

post-communist  Russia into a law-based state and a genuine democracy.

Having interviewed major players from Gorbachev and Yeltsin to Sakharov, and tapped the once top-secret Soviet archives, Coleman makes startling revelations about the weaknesses of the Soviet system. In examining essential inter-locking factors – among them the unworkable economy, unrest in Eastern Europe, the Kremlin power struggle, and minority nationality unrest – he demonstrates that communism was doomed  in Russia after Stalin’s death in 1953.  He also draws damning conclusions about U.S. policy mistakes which

often allowed the relatively weaker Soviet Union to out-manoeuvre the stronger Western allies during the long Cold War.

Available from Amazon.com