Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and remains the definitive biography of the Soviet leader. Now Taubman gives an equally essential look at Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In power from 1985 to 1991, when the Party and the country were dissolved, Gorbachev has been considered a hero in the West but a traitor at home, both lauded and derided for his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Putting this polarizing figure into historical context, Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, investigates his subject as everything from a visionary to a villain to simply naïve.
Taubman will be in conversation with David Greene, host of NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First news podcast, as well as the author of Midnight in Siberia.