Yet foreign affairs too played a major role in Khrushchev's eventual downfall. Reading Taubman's discussion of the view from the Kremlin, one is struck by the West's inability to understand the magnitude of Khrushchev's project, by the way that many US policies seemed almost designed to weaken him in his battle with Moscow hard-liners and by the wasted chances for true "peaceful coexistence." For example, through the Eisenhower years Khrushchev struggled to improve relations with the West while fending off attacks from Soviet (and Chinese) Stalinists. His bluster, mainly over Berlin, belied desperation for some diplomatic breakthrough. Yet Washington repeatedly spurned his advances. "If, as [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles concluded, America's hard line had forced the Soviets to contemplate reform, now was the time to keep up the pressure. Not the least of that pressure was the first U-2 spy flight that soared over Moscow and Leningrad on July 4, 1956, the very day Khrushchev and his colleagues graced the American Embassy's Independence Day party with their presence."

Those incursions continued up through the 1960 May Day overflight, which was finally, after many failed attempts, downed. Washington's subsequent lies (an off-course weather plane) and Eisenhower's rejection of steps that would have allowed Khrushchev to save face made the scuttling of that year's Paris summit highly likely. Relations with the Kennedy Administration began little better, with each side misunderstanding the other's intentions and overreacting to such moves as construction of the Berlin wall and the Bay of Pigs. This, together with America's mounting strategic superiority and growing pressure from Soviet hard-liners, is what apparently led to Khrushchev's 1962 decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba.

It was terribly fortunate that both leaders found the sense to step back from Armageddon and turn to serious negotiations, which produced the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first major arms agreement of the nuclear age. Yet, thanks as much to American as Soviet intransigence, the treaty fell far short of what it might have achieved, which reflects the tragedy of US-Soviet relations throughout the Khrushchev era. Would a bit more flexibility over the number of onsite inspections have been too high a price for a total, not just limited, nuclear test ban? For that matter, were Kennedy's domestic critics so much more dangerous than Khrushchev's that publicly admitting the Cuban trade-off (removal of US missiles from Turkey), and thereby permitting Moscow to claim some advantage too, was an unacceptable alternative to Washington's triumphant crowing? Would the slightest concession to Soviet interests in Germany have been so awful, particularly if it had strengthened Khrushchev and permitted early détente in Europe, and facilitated the deep military cuts that Khrushchev had begun, but that were soon halted after his 1964 ouster?

It would be nearly twenty years before Moscow would be ruled by another reformer, two decades of costly arms racing and Third World confrontation whose ruinous effects are felt to this day, from Angola to Afghanistan. And in the early 1980s, most Western observers ruled out the possibility of major reform, arguing, as they had in the 1950s, that the system simply wouldn't permit it. Yet again, they were proved wrong, this time by the rise of perestroika. Khrushchev's and Gorbachev's reforms were not just parallel epochs; without the former, the latter would have been inconceivable. This is the first lesson of Conversations With Gorbachev, an unusually candid and revealing dialogue between the author of perestroika and Zdenek Mlynar, one of the architects of the "Prague Spring" of 1968.

Longtime friends, the two became acquainted during the early thaw years at Moscow University. The Czech exchange student and medal-winning Russian farm boy learned from each other while engaging in the once-forbidden debates that swept the Soviet capital in the early post-Stalin years. Both were "children of the 20th Congress," believers in the promise of a more democratic and humane socialism; they stayed in touch over the next decade, until Mlynar's 1967 visit to Gorbachev in his native Stavropol region (so unusual that it attracted KGB attention). By then a Czechoslovakian thaw was in the works, with Mlynar playing a major role, and the former classmates discussed reform possibilities in detail. Gorbachev was intrigued and supportive. Yet for his own country he espoused not a broad transformation of the Soviet system but rather a cleansing of bureaucratic irrationality by enlisting the presumed legions of party officials who shared his frustrations and aspirations for a humane socialism.

As for foreign policy, Gorbachev admits to being little moved by the crushing of the Prague Spring; under the sway of propaganda, he believed that the Soviet invasion was a necessary counter to NATO subversion (not an entirely implausible belief, given the record of Western clandestine operations in Eastern Europe, of which Taubman also reminds us). It was only a year later, when he was traveling with a delegation to Czechoslovakia, that Gorbachev saw things with "far-reaching consequences" for his outlook:

People turned their backs on us; they didn't want to speak with us.... For me this was a shock. I suddenly understood that despite all the global, strategic, and ideological justifications, we had suppressed something that had grown up within our own society. From that time on I began to think more and more about our own situation and I came to rather unconsoling conclusions--that something wasn't right among us.

That trip planted the seeds of Gorbachev's "new thinking," which was reinforced by his subsequent travel around Europe, his study of Western social democracy and reading of dissident Soviet thinkers, and, in the early 1980s, by his growing ties with reformist and "semi-dissident" Moscow economists, scientists and intellectuals. It is notable that the availability to the Soviet elite of such heretical writings--indeed, the very existence of a strong pro-reform current among Soviet academics and policy advisers--was a product of Khrushchev's liberalization. It is also notable that none of the other contenders for party leadership in 1985 had anything approaching Gorbachev's reformist credentials.

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