Preface
The end of the Cold War can now be explored in countless American
personal papers, printed collections and online sources. Many are just
beginning to be investigated. Soviet material from the Russian vaults is
also plentiful even though a lot of it is accessible only in foreign librar-
ies. Diaries and transcripts of meetings and conversations sharpen our
picture of a momentous period in world politics. It has become possi-
ble, for instance, to trace exactly how Ronald Reagan’s 1987 ‘Berlin
Wall’ speech underwent its successive revisions or how Soviet leaders
amended their words before finalizing the Party Central Committee
minutes.^1 The records have to be handled with some caution, not least
because politicians filtered what they allowed to be recorded. But it is
better to have more archives than fewer. The insights they afford are
the foundation stone for this book.
For the Soviet side, Party Politburo minutes are found in the
‘working notes’ filed by the General Department of the Secretariat.
Many of these notes are conserved at the Hoover Institution in its
RGASPI Fond 89 and in the papers of Dmitri Volkogonov, who made
copies from the Presidential Archive in the early 1990s. Furthermore,
several of Gorbachëv’s associates – Anatoli Chernyaev, Georgi Shakh-
nazarov and Vadim Medvedev – ignored the ban on keeping a record
of what they witnessed. Their work has appeared in printed form, and
in Chernyaev’s case I have consulted his papers in the Russian Library
at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Also of importance is Stanford Univer-
sity’s collection of the Party Central Committee minutes, which
include successive drafts of the proceedings – and even speeches that
were prepared but not delivered.
The Hoover Institution’s collections on leading Soviet figures are
among the most informative for the last years of the Cold War. Three
are truly outstanding. Foreign Affairs Minister Eduard Shevardnadze
asked his aide Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze to take regular notes on
his meetings and conversations. The result is an incomparable record