For 40 years after 1945, planet Earth rolled through the valley of the shadow of death, always threatened with nuclear annihilation as the two global superpowers squared up in a series of cliffhanging crises, interspersed with proxy wars in Asia and Africa between their ideological allies. Then, in 1985, something happened to lift the shadow.
That something, says Robert Service, our leading historian of the Soviet Union, was the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, a young reformer dedicated to simultaneously rescuing Russian communism from terminal decay and ending the ruinously expensive and desperately dangerous arms race with America. Service’s magisterial book shows how Gorbachev achieved the second objective – but only at the cost of destroying his own socialist system and “losing” the Cold War.
Gorbachev’s unlikely ally was the ageing President Ronald Reagan, whom none could accuse of being soft on communism. In a series of summits, the two men, along with their foreign ministers George Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze, the heroes of Service’s tale, stopped the clock as it moved towards Armageddon and unwittingly ushered in the velvet revolutions that ended a Soviet Union long past its sell-by date.
The End of the Cold War is published by Macmillan (£25). Click here to buy it for £17.50
