On Christmas Day 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. By the next day the USSR was officially no more and the USA had emerged as the world's sole superpower. Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy presents a page-turning account of the preceding five months of drama, filled with failed coups d'etat and political intrigue. Honing in on this previously disregarded but crucial period and using recently declassified documents...

The trial of Soviet espionage agent, Rudolf Abel, that ended in his exchange for U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

The relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev and its impact on the Cold War.

Two decades ago, historian John Lewis Gaddis published The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, a pioneering work of scholarship that sought to explain how Americans found themselves, at the moment of their victory in World War II, facing a long, difficult, and dangerous struggle with an erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. That struggle has finally concluded in a manner as abrupt, and with a victory as decisive, as the one Americans celebrated...

A satire in which the U.S. president and his military advisors struggle ineptly to avert a holocaust after a psychotic Air Force general launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union because he fears that the Russians are poisoning the water supply in the United States.

Kennedy and the Berlin Wall tells the full story of the Berlin Crisis that riveted international attention and brought the world to the brink of nuclear warfare as Soviet and American tanks opposed each other on the streets of Berlin. Drawing on his own experience as an American diplomat in Germany during the period, as well as on recently opened archives, Smyser tells the story of how the fate of a city affected national politics as well as geopolitics....

Using recently declassified documents, Messer traces Byrnes's performance from the Yalta Conference through the postwar dealings with the Soviet Union. He sees the failure of the Soviet-American collaboration to continue into the postwar years as the result of several unrelated events--the struggle between Byrnes and Truman to become Roosevelt's successor in 1944, Roosevelt's use of Byrnes as his Yalta salesman, and Byrnes's distorted view of the...