DEATH AGONIES OF THE SOVIET UNION

There is a fascinating long piece in Der Spiegel here (in English) on the internal politics of the Soviet leadership in the Gorbachev era drawing on two books of extracts of Politburo minutes recently published in Russia (in Russian). The extracts are particularly revealing on Germany and Afghanistan — and on the extent to which Gorbachev's reform programme was resisted at the highest level of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.