The process has left enormous turmoil in this wake. Political power has dissipated in all the new states emerging from the fragmented former USSR, and all are struggling to establish some constitutional order. They do so under conditions of severe austerity as they seed to reconstruct their once integrated, highly concentrated, internationally isolated economy into independent instruments of national viability. With no detailed blueprint available, and with only fractured mechanisms of policy control at their disposal, these new nations are being carried along by the inertia of state enterprises and by a spontaneous process or regeneration at the grass-roots level.
This book, which analyzes Gorbachev's foreign economic strategy, provides a window for understanding the disintegrative forces that stymied his reforms and eventually defeated him, undermining the country he sought to preserve. Gorbachev was committed to ending Soviet isolation from the world economy and at the same time saving Soviet socialism. Ironically, it is the destruction of Soviet socialism and the emergence of new post-Soviet states, that has begun to break down the isolationist barriers erected over the last seven decades. This book documents the incredibly complex legacies that Russia and the other new post-Soviet states face as t