The system

In this absorbing political memoir, long-time Kremlin insider Georgi Arbatov gives a remarkable, full account of the intrigues of Soviet political life in the years the Communist Party was at its apogee. In his capacities as founder and director of the prestigious Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada, a member of the Central Committee and a government spokesman on the United States, Georgi Arbatov has been an advisor to the Soviet leadership since the early 1960s--and continues to play a role in today's new Russia. The System recounts with chilling accuracy how Stalinism and its campaigns of fear and repression contaminated the political, spiritual, and intellectual life of the Soviet Union throughout the postwar years. But Arbatov also shows that despite the relentless pressure of the Stalinist conservatives, the democratic-minded reformers regularly won small but significant skirmishes that helped pave the way for perestroika in the 1980s. Arbatov reveals the political ramifications of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress and the resultant thaw, and describes the coup d'etat that removed Khrushchev from power in 1964. He gives a full report on the re