Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991

Although it once issued a radical challenge that shook the existing world order, the USSR was soon thrown back to seek security within its own confines. Black Earth, Red Star vividly chronicles the Soviet experience from Lenin's 1917 revolution to the disintegration of the union in December 1991. R. Craig Nation provides the first post-Cold War history of the Soviets' seventy-four-year struggle to maintain an effective national security policy in a hostile world without altogether abandoning the commitment to their original internationalist ideals. Drawing on an unprecedented body of primary and secondary sources, Nation presents a nuanced overview of Soviet history from the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution to the emergence of Stalin, the shattering victory over Hitler, Khrushchev's frustrated efforts at reform during the Cold War, the degeneration of Soviet power under Brezhnev, and the convulsive changes since 1985. Shaped by a dynamic conflict between often contradictory aims - the promotion of Communist internationalism and the defense of national self-interest - Soviet security policy was far from static, he shows. Nation reconstructs the military, political, and economic strategies behind the succession of security policies with which the Kremlin responded to the rapid changes in the international environment and in Soviet society itself. While the red star that shines above the Kremlin no longer symbolizes a commitment to world revolution, the rich black earth of the Slavic east remains of lasting importance in international affairs. This book will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of the former Soviet republics, including historians of the USSR and political scientists working in international relations and security studies.