Moscow Germany And The West From Khrushchev To Gorbachev Michael Sodaro by Michael Sodaro 9781501737886, 1501737880 instant download after payment.

The 1990s promise a new era for Europe and for East-West relations, as the two German states, which epitomized the continent's postwar division, move rapidly toward unification. In this authoritative account of Soviet-German relations during the critical decades leading up to this revolutionary development, Michael J. Sodaro provides a comparative analysis of Soviet and East German foreign policy toward West Germany of unparalleled scope and originality.

Sodaro begins his story in 1963, with Nikita Khrushchev's abortive attempt to strengthen Moscow's ties with Bonn after years of cold war hostility. The author traces the events surrounding Brezhnev's double-edged policy of seeking a political accommodation and economic cooperation with West Germany while simultaneously building up the USSR's nuclear and conventional arsenals. He pays particular attention to such watershed developments as the Prague Spring, Brandt's Ostpolitik, the FRG's deployment of new U.S. missiles, and Gorbachev 's decision to accept a "zero-zero" solution to the Euromissile controversy. Sodaro concludes with a detailed reconstruction of the radical changes in Soviet policy brought about by Gorbachev, culminating in the dramatic opening of the Berlin wall at the end of 1989 and the sudden collapse of East German communist rule.

Drawing on a vast array of Soviet sources, the author explores the complex of perceptions and rationales underlying Soviet actions. Sodaro identifies competing tendencies in Moscow's thinking on Germany and on relations with the United States and Western Europe. He demonstrates that Soviet policy toward Germany was marked by considerable ambivalence through most of the period under investigation, reflecting internal disagreements and richly differentiated elite attitudes. Sodaro considers East German foreign policy with equal thoroughness, focusing on how the tensions that arose in the Soviet-East German relationship affected Soviet and East German policies toward Bonn.

Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev will be indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the extraordinary changes now unfolding in Soviet attitudes and Germany's national development.