Nikolai Ryzhkov, right, with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989: two years later, he steered Gorbachev away from a too-radical transformation to a market economy, but the compromise proved disastrous - Wojtek ...

Characterizations of Gorbachev as a “quintessential apparatchik” or a blood-stained “totalitarian” who hadn’t sought “to end tyranny” and could only imagine Russia as “an empire” are truly bizarre—and ...

The assault on the television centre in January 1991 definitively ruined the plans for perestroika, also giving Gorbachev the ...

“Imagine a country that launches Sputnik and it can’t solve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap, not the basic necessities of life. It was humiliating to work in such a ...

This is an opinion column. Overnight, Moscow city officials removed the flowers from the Wall of Grief, a monument to the victims of political persecution by Joseph Stalin during the country’s Soviet ...

About two years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the words glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) into the world’s vocabulary. These words have become symbols of hope for a fundamental ...

Alexander Yakovlev, who advised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on glasnost and perestroika, was buried this week. After the Soviet Union collapsed he devoted himself to documenting Soviet repression.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev deserves substantial credit for the reductions in U.S./Soviet tensions during the late 1980s, for the perestroika and glasnost “reforms” — simultaneously too little and ...

Blog posts represent the views of CFR fellows and staff and not those of CFR, which takes no institutional positions. Mikhail Gorbachev, the late Soviet leader who passed on last week aged 91, is ...

Editor’s Note: Jill Dougherty is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN. But ...