Название: Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet EmpireАвтор: Bret Baier, Catherine Whitney
Издательство: William Morrow
Год: 2018
ISBN: 006274836X; 9780062748362
Формат: epub
Страниц: 416
Размер: 10,7 mb
Язык: English
In his acclaimed bestseller Three Days in January, Bret Baier illuminated the extraordinary leadership of President Dwight Eisenhower at the dawn of the Cold War. Now in his highly anticipated new book, Three Days in Moscow, Baier explores the gripping endgame of America’s long struggle with the Soviet Union, and President Ronald Reagan’s central role in shaping today’s world.
On May 31, 1988, Reagan addressed a packed audience at Moscow State University with a remarkable—yet now largely forgotten—speech that capped his first visit to the Soviet capital. This fourth in a series of summits between Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, was a dramatic coda to their tireless efforts to reduce the nuclear threat. More than that, Reagan viewed it as “a grand historical moment”: an opportunity to light a path for the Soviet people—toward freedom, human rights, and a future he told them they could embrace if they so chose. It was the first time an American president gave a speech about freedom and human rights on Russian soil. Reagan had once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” but now, saying that depiction was from “another time,” he beckoned the Soviets to join him in a new vision of the future. The importance of Reagan’s Moscow speech was largely overlooked at the time, but the new world he spoke of was fast approaching; the following year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, leaving the United States the sole superpower on the world stage.
Today, the end of the Cold War is perhaps the defining historical moment of the past half century, and must be understood if we are to make sense of America’s current place in the world, amid the reemergence of US-Russian tensions during Vladimir Putin’s tenure. Using Reagan’s three days in Moscow to tell the larger story of the president’s critical and often misunderstood role in orchestrating a successful, peaceful ending to the Cold War, Baier illuminates the character of one of our nation’s most venerated leaders—and reveals the unique qualities that allowed Reagan to succeed in forming an alliance for peace with the Soviet Union, even when his predecessors had fallen short.