Laqueur offers an authoritative assessment of the Soviet era--from the triumph of Lenin to the fall of Gorbachev. In the last three years, decades of conventional wisdom about the U. S. S. R. have been swept away, while a flood of evidence from Russian archives demands new thinking about old assumptions. Includes an Index.

(Key Words: Political Science, History, Soviet Union, Communism, Totalitarianism, Sovietology ).