Chapter 1. August 1991. Dramatic scenes from Foros. Gorby comes back to Moscow and finds Yeltsin has taken over. This chapter covers August-December 1991 and
the demise of the Soviet Union. Why did it all happen? Chapter 2. Twelve Reasons Why the Soviet Union Collapsed Chapter 3. The Revolution 1917-1921 Chapter 4. The New Economic Policy 1920s Chapter 5. The 1930s
Chapter 6. The Great Fatherland War 1941-45
Chapter 7. High Stalinism 1945-53
Chapter 8 Khrushchev Era
Chapter 9 Brezhnev Era
Chapter 10 Gorbachev Era
Chapter 11. What Has Changed? Yeltsin and Putin

How did imperial Russia give way to the Soviet Union in 1917 and how did the USSR manage to collapse so quickly in 1991?

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union examines the strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions of the first Marxist state, and reassesses the role of power, authority and legitimacy in Soviet politics. Including first-person accounts, anecdotes, illustrations and diagrams to illustrate key concepts, McCauley provides a seminal history of this twentieth-century Superpower.

Martin McCauley is former Senior Lecturer in Politics at the School of Slavonicand East European Studies, University College, University of London. His previous publications include Stalin and Stalinism (2003), Bandits, Gangsters and the Mafia: Russia , the Baltic States and the CIS Since 1991 (2001) and Gorbachev (2000).