Gorbachev: The Path To Power, by Schmidt-Hauer, Christian
Inventory #: 01301
Price: $6.00

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Gorbachev: The Path To Power, by Schmidt-Hauer, Christian. Salem House: Topsfield, Massachusetts, 1986. Edition: First American edition. ISBN: 088162215X. Hardcover, 8vo, 5.75 by 8.75 inches, 218 pages. Gray cloth with gilt lettering on spine; red end papers. With an appendix on the Soviet Economy by Maria Huber. Translated by Ewald Osers and Chris Rombert.

Condition: Very Good in a Very Good jacket. Lower spine end and upper rear corner bumped. Jacket is rubbed with light scratches to the laminate (but not to the paper) in back and rumpled at lower spine end.

Contents: Published in 1986, on the verge of the fall of the Soviet Union, this book offers a contemporaneous look at what many in the baby-boomer generation might now call the good old days, when it began to look as if the decades-long cold-war relations between two superpowers might finally be thawing.

Publisher's Note:

When Mikhail Gorbachev attained supreme power in the Soviet Union, few in the West knew much about this 54-year-old technocrat. Gorbachev's charm and wit, not to mention his relative youth ,suddenly gave the Soviet Union a human face.

But to what extent does Gorbachev represent real change? What is his background and how does he relate to his colleagues? Can he reform the hidebound Soviet system? What is this man really like?

Christian Schmidt-Hauer, one of Europe's most respected observers of Soviet affairs, we among the first to spot Gorbachev's potental when the provincial party leader arrived in Moscow in 1978. He now examines Gorbachev's career from his youth in the Caucasus, his student days and his rise to power, supported by two of the Soviet Union's most powerful figures -- Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov. The author also assesses Gorbachev's performance at the Geneva Summit in November 1985 and reveals the real purpose behind the new leader's anxiousness to meet President Reagan.

This intimate portrait of Gorbahev shows him consciously projecting himself as a new Lenin and examines the influence on him of his wife Raisa, an unorthodox and innovatory political thinker in her own right.

Far more than just a study of the man, this book paints a fascinating picture of the factions and personalities in the Kremlin, of the tense power truggle that led to Gorbahev's rise, and of the fresh crop of non-ideological technocrats from the provinces who are the new power behnd Gorbachev.