'Washington D.C., August 30, 2022 –  The National Security Archive mourns the passing today of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, 1931-2022, first and last president of the Soviet Union, who ended the Cold War and enabled through his "glasnost" our work to open archives around the world.'

'Few people remember Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows stumbling across the international scene, jovial but almost incoherent under the weight of tranquillisers, vodka and oncoming dementia. At worst, he is the man who unleashed the Warsaw Pact armies to overthrow the Prague Spring in 1968, who destabilised half the world by sending Russian forces into Afghanistan in 1979, who devised the Brezhnev Doctrine licensing communist states to use armed force against any nation threatening to leave the ‘socialist camp’. Susanne Schattenberg sets out to correct and sometimes reverse these impressions. ‘I expected to be working on a Stalinist, a hardliner, an architect of domestic and foreign policies of repression,’ she writes in the introduction to this book. But ‘instead of a Cold Warrior, I was faced with a man who passionately fought for peace and ruined his health in the process. Instead of a dogmatic ideologue, a heart-throb who loved fast cars and liked to crack jokes.’ A heart-throb? She adds, disarmingly: ‘I will not escape accusations of being something of a Brezhnev apologist.’'

'Nikita Khrushchev was a statesman and reformer who brought Russia and the world to the brink of catastrophe. Stalin’s Great Terror, de-Stalinization and the worst crises of the Cold War are closely linked with his name. Learn about the life and legacy of leadership of Nikita Khrushchev through interviews with his children.'

Leonid Brezhnev's rise to power and rule in the USSR.

'For half a century the Soviet economy was inefficient but stable. In the late 1980s, to the surprise of nearly everyone, it suddenly collapsed. Why did this happen? And what role did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms play?'

New York Times film: 'The former Polish president Lech Walesa explains how he defied Communist rule to help bring down the Iron Curtain.'