The Soviet Legacy

In this book, the author aims to accomplish two major goals - to provide an analytical, blow-by-blow account of the collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, and to explore the legacy left by the experiment in communism by the Soviet Union. Roy Laird concludes that the burden of that legacy is so great that for many years - probably for generations - authoritarian systems, perhaps disguised as democracies, will prevail in the newly independent republics, and that the economies of the republics will continue to deteriorate before they get better.