Strobe talbott biography sample
Famous People Who Studied Russian
Studying Russian and finding it a bit challenging? You are not alone. Check out our list of famous people who have studied Russian, and find some fellow-sufferers...
Our database is by no means comprehensive, but it is the most complete list we have seen anywhere, and we will be constantly supplementing and adding to it. Know of other students and former students who have made it big? Send us your additions and updates.
{Click on the individual's profession or avocation to read short bio.}
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Some of Our Books
Murder at the Dacha
Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.
Tolstoy Bilingual
This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious.
A Taste of Chekhov
This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Murder and the Muse
KGB Chief Andropov has tapped Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso’s wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead.
Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka
In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex,
Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev
Prologue
For a long time now my comrades have been asking me whether I was going to write my memoirs (and not just asking, but urging me to). Because I, and my generation in general, lived in very interesting times: the revolution, the Civil War, and everything connected with the transition from capitalism to socialism, as well as the developing and strengthening of socialism. It was an entire epoch. It fell to my lot to take an active part in the political struggle from the very first days after I joined the party [in 1918]. The whole time I held elected positions of one kind or another. The Civil War and the Great Patriotic War, and domestic developments in our country, have been treated extensively in the press. But there are “blank spots” that are incomprehensible to many. For a long time they were incomprehensible to me as well. After Stalin’s death, when we had the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with archival material that had previously been unknown to us, we began to see many things in a different light. Previously there had been only the blind confidence that we had in Stalin, and therefore everything that was done under his leadership was treated as necessary, as the only correct thing that could have been done. But when we ourselves began thinking in a somewhat critical way, we began checking the facts, to the extent possible, against archival data.
Many people who meet and talk with me ask if I am going to write my memoirs about the period in which I lived. They all argue, and I myself understand this, that it was a time filled with great responsibilities, a very important period in history, and that therefore people would want to know about it from a man who was right there, who lived in those times and held a high position, as happened with me. I would like future generations to have the opportunity to judge for themselves the things that transpired in the period when I was alive. This period was
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was fraught with turmoil and political peril. That it did not end in disaster was due in no small measure to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, for all his flaws--and, insists former administration insider Strobe Talbott, to Yeltsin's partner in reform, President Bill Clinton. Before Clinton took office in 1992, he imagined that he would devote most of his energies to domestic matters, in keeping with the "It's the economy, stupid" slogan of his campaign war room. But, writes fellow Rhodes Scholar Talbott, his adviser on Russian affairs, "It became apparent that being president meant ... doing the heavy lifting in the management of relations with a giant nation that was reinventing itself and, in doing so, reinventing international politics and requiring us to reinvent American foreign policy." Though the Clinton administration took a few missteps early on, by Talbott's account the president soon rose to the historic occasion, tirelessly helping Yeltsin negotiate the difficult task of democratizing the former Communist power while contending with Yeltsin's troublesome penchant for drink and self-destruction--to say nothing of a committed political resistance on the part of disaffected members of the old guard. That things turned out reasonably well may seem amazing, given some of the incidents Talbott relates. His book offers an instructive, lively view of international diplomacy, personal politics, and the odd turns involved in changing the world. --Gregory McNamee
“A dexterous . . . engrossing account.”—The New York Times
“The best sort of political memoir.”—Foreign Affairs
“A unique document, by turns racy, scholarly, personal, and always of our time. We shall not read its like for a long while.”—John le Carré
“Excellent.”—Time
“Fascinating and compelling reading—this book is at once a serious political-science text and a work of high comedy. Strobe Talbott has given us a marvelous window on a rare moment o
In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush. They met off the coast of Malta, aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. Gorbachev was very much looking forward to the summit, as he looked forward to all his summits; things at home were spiralling out of control, but his international standing was undimmed. He was in the process of ending the decades-long Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear holocaust. When he appeared in foreign capitals, crowds went wild.
Bush was less eager. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had blown a huge hole in the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending; then he had somewhat rashly decided to go along with Gorbachev’s project to rearrange the world system. Bush’s national-security team, which included the realist defense intellectual Brent Scowcroft, had taken a pause to review the nation’s Soviet policy. The big debate within the U.S. government was whether Gorbachev was in earnest; once it was concluded that he was, the debate was about whether he’d survive.
On the summit’s first day, Gorbachev lamented the sad state of his economy and praised Bush’s restraint and thoughtfulness with regard to the revolutionary events in the Eastern Bloc—he did not, as Bush himself put it, jump “up and down on the Berlin Wall.” Bush responded by praising Gorbachev’s boldness and stressing that he had economic problems of his own. Then Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”
As the historian Vladislav Zubok explains in his recent book “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale), “This was a fundamental stat