Issue № 71. December 2018

The USSR Collapse in Modern Popular Science Literature

PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of History, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Moscow, the Russian Federation.
E-mail: plytony@yandex.ru

The 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union collapse is marked by the emergence of new studies devoted to the study of destructive processes that led to the death of the world's first socialist state. The article attempts to analyze some of the modern issues devoted to the known problems. These are the monograph of S. Plokhiy «The Last Empire. The fall of the Soviet Union», the biography of the last Soviet leader, «Gorbachev`s Life», written by N. Andreev, D. Lukashevich's study «The Legal Mechanism for Destroying the USSR», the study of Ellen Carrer d'Ancos «Six Years That Changed the World; 1985–1991, the collapse of the Soviet empire», the collection of interviews with state and public soviet figures «The end of the Soviet Union. What was it?» published by D. Nesvetov, and E. Norin's book «Under the banner of democracy». The choice of these studies is based on the fact that their authors are not only historians but represent different branches of humanitarian knowledge. This allows us to take a broader look at the problem of the disintegration of the USSR, using both historical, formal, legal and psychological approaches. The article contains information about the authors of these researches, compares the issues raised in their studies, describes the tools used to fully reveal the stated topics, describes the structure and summary of these books. The article concludes that although the authors of the above-mentioned works did not submit comprehensive studies but limited themselves to studying certain aspects of the Soviet Union disintegration, such specialization makes it possible to better understand the dialectic of the USSR collapse.

Keywords

USSR, perestroika, decay, M.S. Gorbachev, S. Plokhiy, N. Andreev, D. Lukashevich, Ellen Carrer d'Ancos, D. Nesvetov, E. Norin