An excellent four-part documentary film about recent Russian history called Moscow's Empire.

It has been only 26 years since the Soviet Union dissolved, which is a blip in the overall timeline of history. Absent context, little can be understood with respect to what this span really means.

Conceding from the outset that this four-part documentary film is very Eurocentric -- it includes nothing about what has been happening east of the Urals and in the various -stans -- it remains a valuable overview of the past two and a half decades of Russian history.

Moscow’s Empire (Deutsche Welle)

The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire shows how the former Soviet nations faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness.

In the late 1970s the Soviet empire began to crumble. After the fall of the Iron Curtain it fell apart completely in 1991 - bankrupt, traumatized and humiliated on the world stage. The former Soviet nations then faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness.

The end of a decade of upheavals saw the rise of a ”new tsar” at the helm in Russia, determined to guide the ”old” empire” back to former global power. After becoming president in 2000, Vladimir Putin began undoing the internal chaos that had beset the country, while at the same time restricting newly won freedoms. His leadership style was authoritarian and arguably autocratic. Moscow became an increasingly confident player on the international stage, aiming to limit on western influence.

The war in Georgia, and above all the recent conflict in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea exacerbated the divide between East and West. A new Cold War appears to have emerged, returning conditions to the 1980s. The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire looks for answers to these developments, and provides a variety of perspectives on life in the former Soviet block countries - from the people who have experienced events at first hand and in some cases shaped them.

Following are the four parts.

1


2


3


4


Part four of the documentary ends with Russia's annexation of Crimea in March, 2014, and the subsequent imposition of sanctions by the USA and EU. Nothing is said about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine (presumably by Russian irregulars) on July 17, 2014.

Fighting has continued in Ukraine since then, and of course there is an ongoing investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 American election. This article from August is an update in the vein of Deutsche Welle's fine documentary film.

The punishment continues: America’s new economic sanctions may hurt Russia’s recovery (The Economist)

But whether they will change Vladimir Putin’s behaviour is another matter

 ... As Mr Putin looks towards his fourth term (he is expected to win next year’s election), Russians are more concerned with their wallets than with Crimea. Growth this year is projected to be 2% or less. For the elite, the prospect of long-term stagnation and endless standoff with the West raises questions about the country’s direction. “The sense of an historic dead-end evokes panic,” writes Vladimir Frolov, a Russian analyst. Sanctions will not cause Mr Putin to reverse course, but they do make it harder for him to drive his way out.

A new book: Gorbachev: His Life and Times, by William Taubman.

Just before the deluge.

I'll never cease to be fascinated by this era.

My European travels during the decade of the 1980s began in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power only a few months, and ended in 1989, with the Berlin Wall reduced to rubble and the Soviet satellite nations falling like dominoes. Two years later, so ended the USSR.

From an older book ...

Ronald Reagan was widely eulogized for having won the cold war, liberated Eastern Europe and pulled the plug on the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Charles Krauthammer and other notables offered variations of The Economist‘s cover headline: “The Man Who Beat Communism.”

Actually, Jack F. Matlock Jr. writes in Reagan and Gorbachev, it was “not so simple.” He should know. A veteran foreign service officer and respected expert on the Soviet Union, he reached the pinnacle of his career under Reagan, serving first as the White House’s senior coordinator of policy toward the Soviet Union, then as ambassador to Moscow. In both the title of his memoir and the story it tells, he gives co-star billing to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan himself went even farther. Asked at a press conference in Moscow in 1988, his last year in office, about the role he played in the great drama of the late 20th century, he described himself essentially as a supporting actor. “Mr. Gorbachev,” he said, “deserves most of the credit, as the leader of this country.”

... to this new one, which I'll be purchasing. Is the bookseller reading?

How Mikhail Gorbachev ended the cold war

The peasant boy turned Communist Party boss who liberated his people from 70 years of lies and buried the Soviet Union

... Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, the question of “why” has lingered in Western, Russian and Chinese minds. Why did a man at the head of a superpower undermine his own authority? Did he simply fail to understand the consequences of his actions, or did he act out of courage and vision? How did Mr Gorbachev, the peasant boy turned Communist Party boss in a fedora, become the statesman who liberated his people from 70 years of lies and fear, end the cold war and bury the Soviet Union? Was he a product of the Soviet system, as he claimed, or its “genetic error”, as Andrei Grachev, an earlier biographer described him? What made Gorbachev Gorbachev?