Armageddon Averted, 2nd Edition

“The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape.”–The New Yorker”A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pages, Kotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire–the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years–and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the ‘principal restraint’ of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn’t result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted.“–The Atlantic Monthly”Concise and persuasive The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage.“–The New York Review of Books

Stephen Kotkin is Professor of European and Asian History at Princeton University, where he also directs the Russian-Eurasian Studies Program. He is the author of nine books, including an acclaimed two-volume study of the rise and fall of Soviet socialism: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era.