Sergey Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 383 pp.

Editor's Note: The academic literature on the end of the Cold War has focused predominantly on the Cold War in Europe. Few studies have appeared of Soviet policy toward Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sergey Radchenko's book Unwanted Visionaries partly redresses this imbalance by offering a detailed account of how the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried but ultimately failed to restructure Soviet relations with Asian countries. Radchenko contends that even if the USSR had not disintegrated, Gorbachev's efforts in Asia would have encountered formidable obstacles. The Cold War ended in Europe in 1989 but continued to shape Soviet ties with China, Japan, North Korea, India, and other countries.

To understand why Gorbachev's efforts in Asia proved of no avail, we asked two...

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