Book Discussion with Vladislav Zubok: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

About the Book:
Vladislav Zubok’s new work, released by Yale University Press on the day of this discussion, offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances—and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

About the Panelists:
Vladislav Zubok is Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. His books include The Idea of Russia: The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev; Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia; A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, which won the Marshall Shulman Book Prize; and Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize.

Angela Stent is Professor Emerita and Senior Adviser to CERES and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the State Department's Office of Policy Planning and at the National Intelligence Council. Her latest book is Putin's World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.

Serhii Plokhii is Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. He is author of ten books, including The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union; The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine; and Yalta: The Price of Peace.

Michael David-Fox is Director of CERES and Professor in SFS and History at Georgetown. He also serves as Executive Editor of Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian Studies and Scholarly Advisor at the Centre for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the Higher School of Economics. His most recent book is Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, which won the Historia Nova Prize.

This event is sponsored by Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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