History is always full of surprises as it unfolds before us. The Soviet Union, for decades a seemingly frozen monolith of totalitarian rigidity and paranoid bellicosity, suddenly finds itself under a leader in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev who calls for "radical restructuring," openness," and even a "revolution." Outsiders justly wonder if this means a new era of reform, or whether the nature of the Soviet system and its historical roots makes real change impossible. This book is based on a series of articles that the author wrote during the first two years after Gorbachev assumed the Soviet leadership in March 1985.

ROBERT V. DANIELS is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Vermont and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. His most recent books are The End of the Communist Revolution (1993) and Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism (1991).