The Soviet Union: A History of Power, 1945-1991

Prominent historian and former chief archivist of Russia Rudolf Pihoya offers the first major political history of the Soviet Union from 1945 to its collapse in 1991. Drawing on long-classified Politburo and Central Committee records, Russian Archive of Foreign Policy documents, and key memoirs, he reveals how power actually worked behind the formal institutions of the CPSU.In the postwar USSR, real authority rested not with the Party or the Politburo but with a hidden oligarchy of roughly three thousand senior officials. These leaders of the Central Committee apparatus, the Council of Ministers, the KGB, and the Ministry of Defense operated through personal networks, “telephone law,” and small consultative circles that routinely bypassed official procedures.Pihoya reconstructs how this elite made decisions across four decades: Stalin’s postwar consolidation and the devastating 1946-1947 famine, Khrushchev’s turbulent reforms, Brezhnev’s stagnation, the invasion of Afghanistan, Gorbachev’s perestroika, the failed August 1991 coup, and the final dissolution of the Union at Belovezhskaya Pushcha.Neither a conventional party history nor a collection of leader biographies, this is a precise anatomy of Soviet governance. It explains exactly how decisions were made, who made them, and why a system once regarded as invincible ultimately collapsed. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the inner reality of the Cold War superpower. Read more